March 10, 2009

DON’T NUMB YOURSELF TO YOUR NUMBNESS

Numbness is a partial or total absence of feeling or sensation. When we register it, we only “feel” it in the sense of noting its presence and whatever sensations — or echoes of sensation — might characterize it. Though we may feel something — sadness, anger, fear, and so on — in association with our numbness, and may, to whatever degree, make such emotional qualities all but synonymous with our numbness, we are not really sensing our numbness as an actual feeling, but rather as an absence or near-absence of feeling.

There is physical numbness — the absence of sensation due to nerve damage or shock; there is psychic/mental numbness — the absence of felt significance or healthy perspective regarding overwhelming or very difficult circumstances; there is spiritual numbness — the absence of palpable connection with anything beyond the personal or the strategy of  rising above anything painful (as in spiritual bypassing); and there is emotional numbness — the absence or blunting of feeling in situations that normally would elicit strong emotional responses from us.

Numbness is a survival strategy, whether adaptive or maladaptive. If we have just cut ourselves badly while slicing vegetables, the numbness that forms around our wound makes our pain more manageable, so that we can properly tend to it; this clearly serves us. If we suffered severe trauma as a child, the likely emotional numbness that arose then — taking shape as dissociation, excessive superficiality, amnesia, and so on — clearly served us at a survival level, allowing us to keep on functioning at least to some degree, but that very same numbness does not serve us as adults, other than to remind us that that there is much encased in and below it, namely the very wounding that generated our numbness, the hurt of which calls to us through all that we do, no matter how long we ignore or try to ignore it.

Numbness is not a feeling per se — although we could arguably call it a kind of frozen feelingness — but rather both a suppression and container of feeling. It is a coping strategy, a kind of disembodiment, an endogenous flight from and flattening of pain. It must be approached with great care, given the extreme vulnerability that it so often blankets or encases — but approach it we must, if we are to truly live.

Do whatever you can not to numb yourself to your numbness.

Do whatever you can not to reject, disown, look down upon, or otherwise bypass it. Listen closely to it, attuning more than your ear to what is within and below it. Acknowledge the presence of numbness without shaming yourself for having it; turn toward it, entering it with undivided attention and great care, noting its characteristics: its shape, color, texture, density, directionality, temperature. Get as intimate with it as you can. Look inside it deeply enough, and you will meet your own gaze.

Feel into your numbness, feel for it, feel as it, feel through it. There is so, so much contained in our numbness. Make your way through it, however slowly, until you reach its heart, which is far from numb. There you will encounter, among other things, the originating factors of your numbness; do this fully, thoroughly, openly, caringly, and you will find yourself more alive, more loving, more here, more you.

Thus does frozen then become fluid now.

March 14, 2009

DON’T TAKE IT PERSONALLY?

The personal has been taking quite a beating in spiritual circles for some time, mostly because of its close association with ego and thick-as-a-brick dualism.

Like the body, the personal is the repository of a lot of things — like anger, fear, greed, shame, and lust — that are not held in esteem by the high priests and priestesses of spiritual correctness. There are still plenty of spiritual paths, especially ones which overvalue and cling to transcendence, that pathologize ego, viewing it as a something that has to be overcome or eradicated — and so the personal, by proxy, doesn’t have much status in such spiritual settings and teachings, as if it is no more than just an incarnational tagalong of a decidedly lower vibration, at best adding a bit of color and flair to the proceedings.

Depersonalized spirituality is a seriously anemic creature — a ghost that won’t give up the ghost — confusing hollowness with transparency, ungroundedness with altitude, flimsy boundaries with openness, and emotional flatness with equanimity. It doesn’t seem to recognize the difference between egoity and individuality. It keeps itself busy fueling and marketing the Oneness Express, crisscrossing the land preaching the gospel of non-separation, even as it advocates separating from ego (which it refers to as transcending the ego).

Such a demoting of — and disengaging from — the personal, especially the passionate, full-blooded personal, is central to spiritual bypassing, constituting not freedom from selfing, but rather a refusal to develop and embody self. Yes, our self-sense (and the generating of our self-sense) can itself be observed, showing that our true identity lies beyond it, but such observation is not of much use if all we do with it is withdraw from or marginalize the personal.

But no matter how we treat it, the personal persists. Some of it evolves, and some of it doesn’t, successfully resisting every remedial program, spiritual and otherwise, that is aimed at it. Once we are on our way to cutting through our spiritual ambition, we realize that though there is no need to transform all of the personal, there is a need to learn to relate to it rather than just to identify with it.

This does not mean, however, that we have to distance ourselves from the personal, but rather that we have to cultivate just enough separation from it to bring it into clear focus, at which point we can develop an intimacy with it. In this we become very close, consciously close, to the personal, but not so close that we fuse with it.

In such radical subjectivity, we can allow the personal to show up in all of its colors, so that it exists as a nonbinding, deeply idiosyncratic expression of who and what we truly are. The more at home and more intimate we are with the personal — knowing it and its origins very well — the more skillfully we’ll be able to navigate the interpersonal and transpersonal, giving each its due, allowing all to fruitfully coexist, without letting any one of them assume the throne of self.

We are more than the personal, more than the interpersonal, more than the transpersonal, and yet at the same time we are them, appearing as them even as we shine through them.

So ought we to take anything personally?

We are advised by many spiritual authorities not to take things personally, and many of us have bought into this without really looking into it. It is an attractive notion, simple and commonsensical, implying as it does a certain detachment, even immunity, from what is happening, which allows us to keep our cool and not spin off into reactivity. Reminding ourselves that whatever is coming our way from another is not really about us, but rather about them, helps us not to get knocked off center (the fact that it sometimes is about us — to whatever degree — is not a relevant factor for those who are busy believing in not taking anything personally).

When we don’t take it personally, we don’t lose face. When we don’t take it personally, we don’t get emotionally involved. Whew! Yes, there is much to be said for healthy detachment, but plenty of what passes for healthy detachment is not necessarily so healthy, reflecting an attachment or even addiction to being detached, to keeping separate enough from what’s happening so as to not have to really feel it.

Spiritual bypassing is a huge fan of not taking things personally. It is, after all, much easier to take things impersonally! We may, as spiritual bypassers, be psyched about the notion that it’s all One, but when it comes down to being at one with our “lower” qualities, like our anger or greed, we much prefer keeping our distance from them, even as we pay lip service to their being one with everything else.

Not taking things personally can be a very deep and practical practice, allowing us to respond sanely to difficult circumstances, but it carries a hefty shadow, which is further enlarged through the lack of quality attention it commonly gets. And what is that shadow? Dissociation, depersonalization, disembodied relatedness. There may be a premature leap — with regard to various qualities in us — from “my” to “the” when we have done very little in-depth work on a particular quality or trait.

For example, we may have considerable fear, fear that we are far from intimate with, but we go ahead and refer to it as “the” fear rather than “my” fear; in this, we have not not embodied or genuinely arrived at the Big Picture view of reality, but rather have simply disowned our fear. Once we have become intimate with our fear, however, knowing it from the deep inside, we can legitimately relate to it not just as “my” fear, but also as “the” fear. No dissociation here — just an expansion of our boundaries to include collective fear, and to see and work with fear primarily as a psychoenergetic phenomenon.

If our beloved partner suddenly dies, and others advise us not to take it personally, what does this do to us? Being immune to what others say to us can be very helpful under certain conditions, but at other times being thus immune strands us from feeling things we need to feel. If others advise us not to take our partner’s sudden death personally, we’d do best not to take what they are saying personally, but to go ahead and take our partner’s demise personally — very personally — letting the bare reality of it go right to our heart, cutting through our shock and denial, allowing our hurt to stream as wildly and deeply as it needs to, with zero apology for how profoundly personal this is for us. We are taking it personally, but in doing this so fully, so totally, we are also opening ourselves to the Grand Scheme and Essential Mystery of things without trying to prematurely establish ourselves there. That is, we are taking it personally, and also interpersonally and transpersonally.

Don’t take it personally can be good advice under all sorts of conditions, but it ought not to be applied to everything! A discerning eye is necessary. Some situations call for us to take them personally, to let them touch us deeply. Some situations call not for our immunity to them, but rather for our fully felt openness, our rawness. This does not mean, though, that we should just go ahead and fall into reactivity. If a particular situation calls for us to take it personally, this does not mean to overpersonalize or get lost in it, but to let it impact us without taking us over. It is possible to take something personally without getting reactive about it!

And this is made more likely when we have already developed the capacity to not take things personally. In this, we are much like parents, good parents, who are tending their just-injured child; yes, they feel, deeply feel, for their child, with no doubt as to their empathy and concern, but at the very same time they are cultivating just enough distance from what is happening to be functional enough to take wise care of their child.

Beyond the rigidity of making a virtue out of not taking anything personally is the possiblity of responding intuitively and discerningly to whatever comes our way, sometimes letting it in, sometimes not, without any kind of spiritual correctness standing over us. No spiritual bypassing, no unnecessary separation, no clinging to detachment, no identification with the personal or the impersonal, no immunizing against pain, no turning away from the personal, interpersonal, or transpersonal — just sentient openness, at once boundaried and boundless, drawing us not away from our humanness but into its heartland.

MARCH 30, 2009

GOD AS THE ULTIMATE YOU

You are forever, forever here
This is how You must now appear
In You I rise and fall Pulsing with Your Call
Ever dying into You am I
Like clouds into endless sky
O Guide me, guide me on, guide me free
Guide me, guide me on, guide me into
Thee O May all things awaken me
Until there is only Thee

With regard to how God (I’ll get to God a little later) is related to in contemporary culture, there often is more emphasis on first-person — God as the Ultimate “I” — and third-person — God as the Ultimate “It” — approaches than there is on second-person approaches — God as the Ultimate “You.”

And why? In part, because first-person  and third-person approaches do not demand relationship; the former is a matter of radical subjectivity — God as “something” to identify with — the latter a matter of radical objectivity — God as “something” to witness. They both can certainly include heart, but for second-person approaches — God as the Ultimate “You” — there has to be heart, there has to be intimacy, there has to be a felt-to-the-marrow connection.

Just as in any truly intimate relationship, there more often than not needs to be a loss of face, a willingness to lay everything bare, which is far from easy for many of us. The I-Thou relationship is more vulnerable, more overtly human, more obviously personal, than are first-person and third-person approaches, which tend to be primarily transpersonal/impersonal

There’s no substitute for having an I-Thou relationship with God. In its beginning stages, such a relationship is basically a spiritualized child-parent “interaction” — in which God is little more than Santa Claus in holy drag — but in its mature stages, such a relationship is profoundly intimate, unplagued by parent/child transference issues, fundamentalism, egoic agendas, and other souvenirs of unresolved wounds. We go from me-centered (what’s in it for me?) to we-centered codependent (overrelying on or addicting ourselves to our interactions with God) to we-centered coindependent (keeping ourselves overly intact in our interactions with God) to being-centered (thoroughly committed to deepening our intimacy with God, while simultaneously deepening and honoring our individuality).

So we proceed from self-gratifying need to neediness to need-at-a-distance to pure need. Put another way, we go from narcissism to unhealthy connection to relatively-healthy-but-distant connection to intimacy.

And is it any surprise that our I-Thou relationship with God mirrors and is mirrored by our other relationships?

Intimacy with God strips us of our masks and layerings, eventually leaving us nakedly present with What-Really-Matters, at home with what we never really left but only dreamt that we did, both rooted and wholeheartedly participating in an Embrace/Openness in which Love and Awareness are inseparable.

And what is God? More than we can imagine. And much, much more than that, in the felt presence of which we are brought to our knees in awe, gratitude, untranslatable reverence, and a self-illuminating nakedness of being that empties us of all that we took ourselves to be, leaving only what we truly are.

Many of us prefer not to use the word “God,” often because of what is commonly associated with it, or because it’s embarrassing to us to directly and unguardedly say it (it’s easier to talk about “Energy” or “Suchness” or “Spirit”). But I have grown to like it, because of what I have come to associate it with: Absolute Mystery in the ever-evolving, unsurpassably sentient raw, the Breath of the breath, the hyperbole-transcending Reality of Infinite, always-already present Being, simultaneously nothing and everything, forever making an appearance as all that is, in the face of which I bow in wonder and gratitude and speechless recognition, until there is only bowing, only Grace, without any dilution or diminishing of my me-ness.

This is God, the Eternal I-Thou-It, the One unimaginably beyond our human understanding, forever here on every scale and dimension possible, and with Which/Whom we can, miraculously and paradoxically, cultivate a relationship.

In first-person approaches to God, we relate AS God (through the filter of our individuality, however transparent that might be). In second-person approaches, we relate WITH God. In third-person approaches, we relate TO God.

As, with, too. I am, I love, I see. Identification, intimacy, recognition. The three faces of God, simultaneously separate and inseparable. Let us honor and embrace all three.

Let us make sure that our prayers — our Divine personals — touch, honor, and resonate with all three. May our prayers become so intimate with what they are reaching for that they become but articulations of gratitude, sanctuaries of sacred conversation that nourish us right to our core, regardless of our circumstances. May our prayers be dynamic vessels and launching pads for Grace. And in our prayers, may we hold nothing back from God, nothing!

When I was a young child, God simply was an all-pervading Radiance, felt mainly through my wide-eyed immersion in Nature, at least up until I began attending Sunday School; I simply could not swallow the dogma and buttoned-up piety being served there, eventually asking all kinds of questions (where did Cain’s wife come from?) that my beleaguered Sunday School teachers could not satisfactorily answer. By the time I was 11, I was an atheist, and proud of it. My first entheogenic experience (mescaline at 22), featuring ecstatic hours of gazing at springtime flowers, effortlessly obliterated my atheism; a few years later, I began meditating, entering into a first-person and third-person relationship with God, with a particular fascination with altered states. It took me quite a while to realize that God was not an alternative reality!

In the late 1970s and early 1980s I did a lot of Vipassana (Buddhist mindfulness meditation), which reinforced my orientation to God as the Ultimate It (and, to a lesser degree, as the Ultimate I); I also did some heart-centered/devotional practices then, but still mostly kept God at a distance, feeling more comfortable with a Supreme It or a Supreme I than with a Supreme You. My prayers were mostly along the lines of “May all beings be free from suffering” or “May I make as wise as possible use of all that happens to me” — very helpful to me, but still not relating with God in any significantly personal sense. I did feel love for certain spiritual figures, through whom I felt the Divine quite strongly, and I did now and then feel a profound I-Thou link with God, but it had not taken root in me; I mostly preferred relating to “Suchness” or “Mystery” or “Being” than to “God.”

This changed in 1994. I had a horrendous near-death-experience early that year (chronicled in my book Darkness Shining Wild), at the end of which my very first words were: “God, I love You so, so much — I understand, I completely understand, why there has to be fear and doubt and pain and despair, for without them, without facing and passing through them, our love for You falls short of what it needs to be.” I said this without any self-consciousness, feeling utterly vulnerable.

After that, I still continued my Buddhist-like prayers (“May...”), but now began adding, however slightly, something more overtly second-person in my prayers, eventually recognizing and defining prayer as a Divine personal. Being with Diane has only deepened all this; the I-Thou dimensions of our intimacy naturally flow into and resonate with the Ultimate I-Thou communion. And this is reinforced all the more by the palpable Grace (I define Grace in part as a serendipitous infusion of not-by-us engineered guidance — for more, see my February2009 Newsletter) we are together experiencing more and more deeply, especially since I was diagnosed with prostate cancer last October.

The I-Thou relationship goes both ways, and needs to be voiced and felt as such. We need to speak to God, and we also need to let God speak to us (which doesn’t have to come through language!). In my poetry, I can say/sing, as “myself” speaking to God, things like:

“O Father of my soul, O Breath of my breath
Taking me through death after death
O May I be a vessel for Your Light
As I sail through the night”
or
“O Mother of my soul, O Cradle of my every birth
O Green, green heartbeat of my earth
O May I make room for Your Embrace
As I awaken to You in every place”

and I can also say/sing, as “God” speaking to me, things like:

“Love me now, love me full
Love me bright, love me day and night
I cannot be found because I cannot be lost
Love me whatever the cost”

and I can also speak/sing as something in-between:

“Look for me
   where the land is wild with naked wonder
Look for me
   where jagged shores moan with white thunder
Look for me
   where the sea is ablaze with dawn
Look for me
   where everything’s already gone
Look, look for me
   where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain
Look for me
   where we must dance and die
Look for me
   where forehead is an infinity of sky
Look for me
   where you awaken in the night
Look for me
   where there’s nothing but unbroken light
Look, look for me
   where joy and pain disappear into sun and rain”

Is all this just me speaking to myself? Yes and no — yes, because the me doing the speaking and hearing is much more than my everyday self, being expressive of and infused to whatever degree with what I truly am; and no, because as I speak thus, I make room for and am “occupied” by more than myself. Put another way, when I am emptied of my usual self (or when that self/selfing process is “relocated” to the periphery of my being), I truly have room for an intimate relationship with God, which paradoxically allows me to be even more myself.

Here, the personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal all seamlessly coexist, coevolve, cocreate. Here, Grace is not a concept, but an utterly tangible reality, too real to be denied. Just like God. And just like you and me, both in our uniqueness and our unity of Being. We’re all literally dying to be with God, to fully realize God, to be fully present as God-in-the-flesh...

May Thy Will and my will be as one; may my will and Thy Will be as one. Amen.