The Spiritual Understanding - Rather Than Grasping - is Itself Grasped by Wisdom

 

"By the natural understanding the soul grasps the object which it penetrates; but by the spiritual understanding, instead of grasping, it is itself grasped."

William of St. Thierry, 12th century Cistercian monk

Photo: Last light penetrates a hillside in the Medicine Bow Mountains, CO, January 6, 2012

To Know God is Actually to Know Ourselves Penetrated with His Knowledge of Us

 

"To think of God is not to find Him as an object of our minds, but to find ourselves in Him, a perception of our being perceived.  The task is not to know the unknown but to be penetrated by it; not to know but to be known to Him, to expose ourselves to Him rather than Him to us."

Rabbi Abraham Heschel

"We know God insofar as we become aware of ourselves as known through and through by him. We 'possess' him in proportion as we realize ourselves to be possessed by him in the inmost depths of our being.  The aim of meditation is not to arrive at an objective and apparently 'scientific' knowledge about God, but to come to know him through the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us."

Thomas Merton

Photo: Nokhu Crags in last light, Never Summer Range, January 6, 2012

Glowing with Wild Joy

 

"I glowed with wild joy."

John Muir

Sierra Nevada

Photo: This morning's alpenglow, just outside my door, Fort Collins, CO, January 3, 2012

The Mystical Meaning of Christmas

For the contemplative, Christmas is an embodiment of a spiritual reality that is happening all the time.   The nighttime imagery allows us to put to bed the rational mind with all of its clear-cut distinctions, and to awaken the unitive mind instead.  Nighttime also elicits a sense of intimacy with God, just as night is the time for love-making.  The silence of the night enables us to rest in the peace of divine bliss.  The snow that we all fantasize about brings an experience of stillness and simplicity to the landscape of our hearts, the necessary condition for us to know the Divine. The vast sky of this silent night is an embodiment of the majestic expanse of divine awareness, a spaciousness with no boundaries, a sort of Backdrop against which all of the particular events of our lives appear.  The "star of the East" and the newborn Christ and all of the candles and Christmas lights appearing suddenly within that spacious night are the birth of divine self-awareness - God's formlessless suddenly seeing itself within the mirror of form and energy.  In Buddhist terminology, it's the Nirmanakaya (form-body) and Sambhogakaya (energy- and enjoyment-body) appearing spontaneously out of the Dharmakaya (Truth- or Spaciousness-body). The fact that Christ is a child speaks to the awareness that this process of divine self-knowledge is one that is continually new.  For fresh forms and energies appear at each and every moment out of God's spaciousness, each mirroring back formless love in surprisingly new ways!

Photo: Nokhu Crags glowing in golden light, Never Summer Range, CO, December 9, 2011

Christmas is the Birth of God's Silent Fullness Becoming Aware of Itself

 

"Christ's birth as man is nothing less than the visible expression of his eternal birth as the Word of God in the eternal silence of the Father. Of course, in the Father, silence is the fullness of everything.  This silence - fullness becoming aware of itself - is the Word, God's Son.  Christmas is the celebration of the grace of this eternal birth in us."

Thomas Keating

Photo: Alpenglow on the La Sal Mountains, Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 25, 2011

The Interior Desert is an Empty Expanse of Immense Beauty

 

"There is a physical desert, inhabited by a few exceptional men and women who are called to live there; but more importantly, there is an inner desert, into which each one of us must one day venture.  It is a void; an empty space for solitude and testing."

Frere Ivan

"For you, the desert is not a setting, it is a state of soul."

An anonymous monk

The inner desert is a place of spiritual thirst, an endless expanse that seems devoid of any meaning.  When we first encounter this void, we feel afraid and try to fill it with a multitude of distractions. But the loveliness of the redrock desert of the American Southwest teaches us to look for a similar beauty within our own inner desert.  Suddenly, our thirst for meaning becomes a participation in God's thirst for us. Emptiness of any passively-received spiritual consolation allows our own creativity to become that consolation instead.  And the arid inner expanse turns out to be an echochamber in which the never-spoken love-word of God can be heard in all of its glory.

Photo: Sunset in Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 27, 2011

Desert Spirituality Discovers Silence as a Word of God

"A desert spirituality is a spirituality of waiting upon God.  There is an element of timelessness, of eternity, about the desert.  The characteristic prayer of the desert is a prayer of simply waiting."

David Prail

"The true contemplative waits on the Word of God in silence, and when he is 'answered,' it is not so much by a word that bursts into his silence.  It is by his silence itself suddenly, inexplicably revealing itself to him as a word of great power, full of the voice of God."

Thomas Merton

Photo: Sunset in Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 27, 2011

All Things Arise Out of the Spacious Desert of God's Simple Nature

 

"God's desert is God's simple nature . . . The soul takes God in his oneness and in his solitary wilderness, in his vast wasteland, and in his own ground . . . It is an amazing thing that something flows forth from God and nonetheless remains within . . . All creatures flow outward and nonetheless remain within – that is extremely amazing.” 

Meister Eckhart, 13th century Germany

"As we become more aware of the spacious awareness that is the essence of who we are, we come closer to God. Faith now looks more like a trust in the empty, spacious awareness that belongs to God and is God.  So instead of trusting in ourselves, in the story of I, to decide our next action, we can now have faith in God's spaciousness.  Here everything appears, here everything is loved . . . We have faith in no-thing . . . In fact, Life is love flowing out of emptiness . . . We are each a space of awareness which is also the infinite space of God's awareness.  It is out of the empty space of God that literally everything comes and to which it goes.
As each event arises in our clear, spacious awareness, it stands before us as an awareness of sound, movement, color, and so on.  Then it disappears back into clear awareness . . ."

Wesley Lachman, Eugene, Oregon

Photo: Alpenglow in the desert, Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 25, 2011.  This glow lasted for only several minutes.

Beauty Simultaneously Pushes Us Away and Draws Us to Itself

 

"The sublime is that which by its mightiness shocks us and fills us with pain at our own smallness, but then fills us with a feeling of the exaltation of the greatness of our own nature."

Immanuel Kant

If our nose is pressed flat against a mirror, we see nothing. However, if we push it away from us, we are then able to enjoy the reflection.  Similarly, beauty is an explosion that at first pushes us away, like a firework that stuns us with its centrifugal glory.  But this very action empowers our amazement to act as a mirror in which the beautiful object can admire its own greatness. And in serving this noble function, we in turn recognize the reality of our own greatness.

Photo: Alpenglow, Canyonlands National Park, UT, November 26, 2011

The Mountains Will Only Have a Voice if We Ask Them to Speak to Us

 

"It is very important that we be connected to the elements as a human race.  As a Native person, I am connected to these elements, because I can hear their voices.  I hear all their songs and everything else.  I'm asking each thing to continue on in a good way.  I have to do something so that all of the elements continue on . . .  For example, I bless the mountain . . . I ask the Mountain to continue to have a voice, to have songs . . . If the mountain doesn't have a voice, then we as a people are not going to have a voice pretty quick.  All the living things are not going to have any voice, because the mountain is where the voice comes from.  The mountain is where the people are, the little people up there, the mountain people, as we call them, or the rock people - they're up there listening to us.  They're the ones we have to pray to; they're the ones who take care of the mountain . . . We have to ask what's out there, the rocks, the land, the living things, to unite together; everything has to work together.  Long ago, the land, the mountains, used to have more voice, a clearer voice, clearer than what it is today.  The land, the rocks, they used to continue to tell us over and over again to take care of them and to ask us to do those things.  But today, we're lost, and I think it's the reason we're not concerned with anything; we just look at a mountain as if it's just there, nothing more.  But the mountain's got a life to it.  Everything's got a spirit; the mountain's got a spirit, and all the living things on the mountain have got a spirit . . . One of the reasons why their voice is not clear and loud anymore is because we haven't been taking care of them."

Corbin Harney, Western Shoshone Elder

Photo:  Medicine Bow Peak at sunrise, Snowy Range, WY, August 28, 2011

The Dissolving of a Hundred Thousand Aspects of Ego is Needed to Fully Know Enlightenment

Let us away . . .

                                                                        You and I.

You should wish to have a hundred thousand sets

of moth wings,

So you could burn them away

one set a night

Rumi

For Rumi, moth wings represent ego,  the sense that we are each a separate self, full of unmet needs. The candle flame is symbolic of God, the All, the Ultimate Reality of which each of us is a unique mirror.  Night represents the intimacy of divine union, when the individual ego merges with the All through love. Whenever ego burns up and unites with God, there is enlightenment, the sense of non-duality, a realization that we are simply a mirror in which the Divine knows Itself. Many people think that the goal of spiritual transformation is to get rid of  ego, once and for all.  But Rumi understands that we can only know the All by having something to contrast It with; that is, the individual ego.  Without the continual dissolving of our false sense of separation into the Ultimate Reality of union, how could we ever truly know that union? And without the flaming of ego, how could we ever know the gorgeous radiance of enlightenment?  Therefore, the great Sufi mystic prays that a different aspect of ego might manifest itself and burn up each night, thereby guaranteeing a continually fresh experience of enlightenment.

Photo:  Long's Peak flames in alpenglow light, Bear Lake, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, November 18, 2011

God Feeds the Mountains with Alpenglow Light

"God tends his mountains and feeds them with light, feeds them like a flock.  Strange we regard them as dead."

John Muir

Photo: Alpenglow on the Nokhu Crags, Never Summer Range, CO, October 21, 2011 

Divine Love is Radically Humble - Like Alpenglow Light!

 

"Alpenglow is the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God and suggests the spiritual Love-light in which the flesh-walls of earthy tabernacles are dissolved and everything puts on immortality."

John Muir

People in our time are weary of the self-referential quality of religion, where the "true believers" of each faith are constantly pointing to the superiority of their own religious founder.  In the Christian tradition, this takes the form of a Christ who - through his "followers" - is continually talking about his own uniqueness and holiness.  However, from a contemplative perspective, this is definitely not the true Christ - the one who is radically humble and eternally self-emptying.  For this, the image of alpenglow is the perfect metaphor. 

From the perspective of the observer standing on the ground just before sunrise, the alpenglow sun suddenly fires the peaks in shades of pink, orange or purple, while yet remaining hidden below the horizon.  Similarly - through the human embodiments of his love, whether Christian or not - Christ delights in shining the light of his love on all of reality, clearing away the clutter of the constricted ego-self and making each thing glow in its own radiant divinity.  Radically humble, he disappears - like the alpenglow sun - below the horizon of Being, not caring to be known as an object of devotion.  

However, unlike the physical sun - which we could indeed encounter if we traveled far enough to the east, the essence of Christ from which this alpenglow love-light issues could never be found, no matter how far we traveled along the Horizon of Being.  Nevertheless, the light of his love - surprise! - still appears within each creature, making it glow in its own innate divinity.  Such is the mysterious, self-emptying humility of Jesus - and indeed, of all true spiritual teachers, no matter what their faith!

Photo: Alpenglow on Beckwith Mountain with golden aspens, near Crested Butte, CO, October 2, 2011

A Mountain is Never "Conquered"

 

"When a mountain is climbed, it is said to be conquered – as well say a man is conquered when a fly lights on his head.  Blue jays have trodden the [Half] Dome many a day; so have beetles and chipmunks, and Tissiack [Half Dome] will hardly be more conquered, now that man is added to her list of visitors.  His louder scream and heavier scrambling will not stir a line of her countenance . . ."

John Muir

Photo: Sunrise alpenglow on Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, CA, July 28, 2011