“I said: what about my eyes?
He said: Keep them on the road.
I said: What about my passion?
He said: Keep it burning.
I said: What about my heart?
He said: Tell me what you hold inside it?
I said: Pain and sorrow.
He said: Stay with it. The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”
Rumi, 13th Century Sufi mystic, Islamic scholar, Persian poet, Maturidi theologian
Category: Uncategorized
The Reversal Is Real: Wait Without Hope
How has the “reversal” shown up in your life?
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
T. S. Eliot, East Coker
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
God’s presence is there in front of me, a fire on the left, a lovely stream on the right. One group walks toward the fire, into the fire, another toward the sweet flowing water. No one knows which are blessed and which not.
Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream. A head goes under on the water surface, that head pokes out of the fire.
Most people guard against going into the fire, and so end up in it. Those who love the water of pleasure and make it their devotion are cheated with this reversal.
The trickery goes further.
The voice of the fire tells the truth saying, I am not fire. I am fountainhead. Come into me and don’t mind the sparks.
If you are a friend of God, fire is your water. You should wish to have a hundred thousand sets of mothwings, so you could burn them away, ONE SET A NIGHT.
The moth sees light and goes into fire. You should see fire and go toward light.
Fire is what of God is world-consuming.
Water, world-protecting.
Somehow, each gives the appearance of the other. To these eyes you have now, what looks like water burns. What looks like fire is a great relief to be inside.
You’ve seen a magician make a bowl of rice seem a dish full of tiny, live worms. Before an assembly with one breath he made the floor swarm with scorpions that weren’t there.
How much more amazing God’s tricks!
Generation after generation lies down, defeated, they think, but they’re like a woman underneath a lover, circling.
One molecule-mote-second thinking of God’s reversal of comfort and pain is better than any attending ritual.
That splinter of intelligence is substance.
The Question, by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne in The Essential Rumi
The fire and water themselves: accidental, done with mirrors.
Life Saving Wells Come In Many Forms: Waltzing to Unexpected Tunes
Are you prepared to waltz to unexpected tunes? or still setting fires to landscapes?
“If your pain is great enough and your longing for it to end great enough, a response will come. We need to listen hard, and to watch carefully. Life-saving wells can come in many forms, and we might need to try waltzing to unexpected tunes.”
Rabbi Richard N. Levy, Commentary for Psalm 30 from Songs Ascending, The Book of Psalms
Whether we understand or not, we are guided to express our need outwardly to our Creator, who is pointed to with many names but in truth is beyond naming. Rumi’s poetic storytelling mirrors for us the invisible dance of crying out, seeking the living well. In his story of The King and the Handmaiden and the Doctor he brings in sage advice, echoed throughout time in the scriptures of all religions, as I understand them, to include an explicit declaration that the knowledge lies beyond your reach, the tune beyond your comprehension. It is through our trembling awe and sorrow that we open the portal to Mystery where we can absorb the reality that we are lying in a “bed that is too small to stretch out in and the blanket is too small to wrap [us].” (Isaiah 28). The King, in Rumi’s story cries out to Allah saying:
“You know what’s hidden here. I don’t know what to do. You have said, ‘Even though I know all secrets, still declare it outwardly with an action.'”
He cried out loud for help, and the ocean of grace surged over him. He slept in the midst of his weeping on the prayer rug.
In his dream an old man appeared.
“Good king, I have news. Tomorrow a stranger will come. I have sent him. He is a physician you can trust. Listen to him.”
As dawn came, the king was sitting up in the belvedere on his roof. He saw someone coming, a person like the dawn. He ran to meet this guest.
Like two swimmers who love the water, their souls knit together without being seen, no seam.
Like two swimmers who love the water, their souls knit together without being seen, no seam.
The king said, “You are my beloved, not the girl! But actions spring from actions in this reality. What should I do?”
We should always ask for discipline. One who has no self-control cannot receive grace. And it’s not just himself he hurts. Undisciplined people set fire to the landscape!
At last, I have found what patience can bring. This one whose face answers any question, who simply by looking can loosen the knot of intellectual discussion.
You translate what is inside us. If you were to vanish, this vast meeting room would shrink to a closet. Protect us.”
Rumi, The King and the Handmaiden and the Doctor, from The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks with John Moyne.
“Like a Moth to a Flame”
In the age of innocence, from infancy to 100, there is a moth within that is drawn to the flame, sometimes setting our whole house on fire! Such is the way. In spiritual practice we “learn to see fire and go toward light,” to recognize ourselves when we are “like a woman underneath a lover, circling,” to understand the paradox that Rumi calls “God’s reversal of comfort and pain” that is “the splinter of intelligence” that is “substance,” and “better than any attending ritual.” Is ritual not just a mirror reflection of the way leading us to awaken to this paradoxical Truth? this beautiful splinter?
A verse from The QUESTION by Rumi:
If you are a friend of God, fire is your water.
You should wish to have a hundred thousand sets of mothwings,
so you could burn them away, ONE SET A NIGHT.
Of course, the statement “if you are a friend of God” can make all of us, at some point in our life, wobble for a variety of reasons. One reason may be that we have internalized and memorialized messages that run opposite to the truth that God is our friend, that God is, that God is merciful, that God is beyond our understanding, always pulling us through the labyrinth of our heart to know love and forgiveness, to realize freedom and beauty.
Reaching Out
Where might I go to find You, Exalted, Hidden One?
Yet where would I not go to find You, Everpresent, Eternal One?
My heart cries out to You: Please draw near to me.
The moment I reach out for You,
I find You reaching in for me.
-Mishkan T’filah, A Reform Siddur
Wisdom Revealed Through the Wound
I said: “What about my eyes?”
He said: “Keep them on the road.”
I said: “What about my passion?”
He said: “Keep it burning.”
I said: “What about my heart?”
He said: “Tell me what you hold inside it?”
I said: “Pain and sorrow.”
He said: “Stay with it. The wound is where the Light enters you.”
― Rumi
Is Russia Our Karmic Reflection?
“This world is a mountain. What we do is a shout. The echo comes back to us.”
Rumi, The King And The Handmaiden And The Doctor , from Essential Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks with John Moyne
Nadja Auermann
Spiritual practice and Karmic practice are intertwined as faith and doubt are intertwined. In a previous blog I wrote:
“Karmic practice is made up of frozen habits that bind and resist change. Its agenda is to protect self (ego), and only self, from the natural pains that come with spiritual growth into Self. It is the essence of selfishness (one-sidedness) which produce seeds of violence and injustice. Its masquerades appear heroic, loving, and kind to the innocent, naive, grieving, sick, and desperate, setting up betrayal, exploitation, and devastation. It does not move with Truth that serves Love, that is creative flux with all its demanding trainings in surrender and sacrifice. Rather, it resists creative labor, and aborts life over and over and over again. It produces “strange fruit.”
https://kairoscenter4change.com/2022/02/22/a-reflection-on-karma/
On this 10th day of the Russian invasion on Ukraine, following the State of the Union Address and President Zelensky’s warning about the uncertainty of Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant exploding, the second year anniversary of COVID, we receive more disheartening news about global warming and threats on our coral reef, the Beijing Paralympic games commence, newscasters process the release of former Attorney General Barr’s book, and reports stream in this morning about the NATO summit meeting held yesterday where President Zelensky stated in his clear and poignant voice:
“You had to think about people, about humanity itself, and what did you think about at that summit?” he said. “All the people who will die starting from this day will also die because of you. Because of your weakness. Because of your disunity.
President Zelensky
I pause into lamenting silence, into the words of Psalm 26 read this morning, and continue my reflection on karma, collective karma.
Karmic practice is hidden and maintained by narratives that hide a particular coldness and closed quality that sends chills through the spine. As only the Great Physician knows, a mustard size karmic seed in our eye can hold us in bondage with karma, leaving us spiritually afflicted and tormented in her funhouse of mirrors where everything is personal, power and freedom are delusional kings, futility is a color, complacency satisfies like cotton candy and birthday cake, and destruction is righteously claimed as a “right”. This seed is in all of us, all the time. Until the cold chill breaks through consciously it continues with insatiable appetite. Once aware of this seed meets the heart, spiritual practice becomes non-negotiable. Absence of awareness defensively dismisses any and all evidence that it exists while building highly addictive idealistic narratives, one on top of the other, that keep karmic practice well fed, stronger and more destructive than ever, constantly reversing the meaning of things.
So how is this war on Ukraine reflecting long periods of karmic practice, absence of real consequence, drunk on Creator’s gifts and driving without a license, unable to comprehend Reality and discern from fantasy, unable to comprehend Love and discern from sentimentality, unable to comprehend Justice and discern from greed and vengeance? Are we living in a time similar to that of Kohelet or Noah, lawless and reckless spoiled children with no moral compass, no regard for consequence, no real protectors of truth, and no faith in and fear of a higher power, consequences of natural law….. Reality? Are we surrounded by oligarch monsters worshiping money who profit on the marginalized, the righteous, the poor, the infirm, the children, the orphans, the widow….because they can? Martin Luther King, Jr wrote in his Birmingham letter, “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God.” What laws remain unjust, continuing to fatten oligarchs and tyrants, threatening the children, threatening the world’s very existence? How did and how do we create these monsters? What parts of ourselves did we sell and what for? Were Nancy Pelosi’s incongruent hand gestures and grin at the State of the Union address as President Biden spoke of burn pits emblematic of OUR collective shadow of greed living in the super power executive branch of the world, disconnected from the value of life, grotesquely heavy in power? I emphasize OUR to deter any sick satisfaction one may have in hating her or “them”, externalizing the enemy rather than acknowledging her gesture as a dissociated part of OURselves reflecting back in our collective mirror.
We stop “playing life” and start living life when we begin reverently engaging the movement of turning inward toward Creator with gratitude, toward understanding life as a series of purification trials waking us out of unconscious karmic practices or rocks of ignorance, waking us to where we are being unconsciously irreverent to life through blessings of affliction that bring uninvited and unceasing dry spells and/or full body affective bursts designed to shake things up at the root of “strange fruit” baring trees mistaken for trees of life. When they are shown to you in yourself, pull those trees! Immediately. Now. Any hesitation in response to this Holy call is undeniably lethal. Any discontinuation of spiritual practice is fool hearty and reckless. In the imagery painted by Robert Frost, winter is here and we have “miles and miles to go before [we] sleep.”
The medicine of Mystery exists in the invisible realm, in the private subtle bodies or attitudes that lie in the spiritual emptiness or poverty of the heart. We are privileged to now see, from the standpoint of the still point, the spiral glimmer of millions of years of spiritual emptiness in the eyes of the Ukrainian people as they access our Creator and resist the world’s karmic practices alone, the world’s evil, receiving the secrets of Mystery firsthand on the cross. They are the innocent body of Christ.
Are we being called to world redemption? To collectively realize our deep dependence on Source? for Ukraine to rise up from the ashes and become the World Phoenix, Christ resurrected in this time of Lent?
The world is being held at nuclear gunpoint while having to watch Ukrainian warriors and children ceaselessly fighting on the front lines of battle. Afraid of escalating the mad man’s violence on Ukraine, do we have any of that Ukrainian insight coming out of the chill in our spines that this is a war on all of humanity? Do we have any of that Ukrainian resolve to get involved in the resistance and impose a no-fly zone? to stop receiving their oil at any cost to our economy? As Ukraine receives the beat down, the rape, the pillaging, the destruction, she knows that unless we get involved in some particular and deliberate way that is sourced by Source, acknowledging our part in this human play, the violence inevitably meets us all … intimately and sideways. What are we willing to give up? Are we willing to go into an economic depression to save humanity?
President Volodymyr Zelensky is showing the world, daily, how to face reality while holding the sorrow of millions in his heart and persist in rational, unperturbable upright engagement through Source. He is exemplifying the poet in Psalm 26. He and the people of Ukraine are exemplifying the absolute best of humanity that only lives outside of karmic practice. So I ask now, where are we living….now? And, for what? How are we sleeping?
Ukraine Amplifying Spiritual Truth
“The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed influences that keep us apart.”
~Dr. Kwame Nkrumah
“The King Will Never Leave”
Beyond the safety and security of ideology and membership rests….
In 1938 Queen Elizabeth was invited to evacuate North America to Canada. Her famous reply: “The children won’t go without me. I won’t leave the King. And the King will never leave.”
The King, Our Creator, “never leaves” and His union with the Queen – Life and Justice itself – is Holy inseparable. We are called to know what this means in our very solar plexus, traversing beyond infinite intoxicatingly naive reveries and attachments, and become…. human. This call’s invitation is amplified loudly and strongly from the hearts of the beloved Ukrainians now, from that place where there is “no choice,” there are no reveries, the one and only place we find….Freedom.
Story of the Taoist Farmer, told by Alan Watts
There was once a farmer in ancient China who owned a horse. “You are so lucky!” his neighbours told him, “to have a horse to pull the cart for you.” “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
One day he didn’t latch the gate properly and the horse ran off. “Oh no! This is terrible news!” his neighbours cried. “Such terrible misfortune!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
A few days later the horse returned, bringing with it six wild horses. “How fantastic! You are so lucky,” his neighbours told him. “Now you are rich!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The following week the farmer’s son was breaking-in one of the wild horses when it kicked out and broke his leg. “Oh no!” the neighbours cried, “such bad luck, all over again!” “Maybe,” the farmer replied.
The next day soldiers came and took away all the young men to fight in the war. The farmer’s son was left behind. “You are so lucky!” his neighbours cried. “Maybe,” the farmer replied.