Masculine and Feminine Versions of Divine Union

In an earlier post, I talked about the "three ways" of knowing the Ultimate. In actuality, I was speaking of only ONE aspect of the Ultimate - the transcendent / God / masculine dimension of the divine Source. According to Wilderness Mysticism, just as most species in Nature are the result of a mother and father - or at least of one principle that is weighted more heavily toward the masculine and another weighted mostly in the direction of the feminine - so the Ultimate is composed of TWO major aspects, roughly corresponding to "God" on the one hand and "Goddess" on the other. What I described earlier was more masculine / transcendent / Singular in orientation, what we might call the "vertical" aspect of Divine union.

However, there is also a more feminine / immanent / web-like or "horizontal" dimension, one that has in fact been sorely neglected by many of the world's great religious traditions. In the experience of vertical union, Form and Emptiness (or images and the Imageless) trade back and forth. Or, more accurately, between Absolute Emptiness, and forms as relative expressions of Emptiness. in the experience of horizontal union, different forms trade back and forth. Here, each creature is actually a version of every other creature. As Muskogee poet Joy Harjo says, "the grizzly bear is one version of a human being, and a human being is one version of the grizzly." In Ralph Waldo Emerson's "principle of correspondence" (which, oddly enough, is called "transcendentalist"), Nature mirrors humanity and humanity mirrors Nature.

Here again, the three ways of knowing apply. In the kataphatic way (with verbal image), we might say, for example, that a still lake incarnates human tranquility in lake-form, and the human soul incarnates lake-ness in human form. Here, the conceptual SIMILARITY between the two - which can, to a degree, be expressed verbally - is the key feature. However, the apophatic way (without verbal image) then comes along and reminds us that the essence of each of the two forms is essentially unsayable. Zen Buddhism specializes in this realization. Speaking personally, I experience the essential apophatic mystery of a thing - what might be called a "still point" or a "flash" of "suchness" - when another creature GRASPS my awareness and empties itself into my own sense of being-embraced and held by it. In other words, I experience the creature's essential mystery in the MOVEMENT or self-emptying of the other into my perception. I love this moment, for it is essentially mysterious, or what Meister Eckhart called "the silent desert into which no distinction ever peeped." Then, of course, there is a corresponding self-emptying of my own human self into the other creature in my act of loving it for itself. This again is a part of the apophatic way.

Then the third way - that of supereminence - comes along and says; "I have an idea - let's become poets and use paradoxical images to describe one another!" Zen poets - who, of course, use words as a part of their craft - are especially skilled at this. For example, Dogen Zenji can say: "The green mountains are always walking. You should examine in detail this quality of the mountains' walking. Do not doubt mountains' walking even though it does not look the same as human walking . . . They walk more swiftly than the wind .. . Therefore, investigate mountains thoroughly. When you investigate mountains thoroughly, this is the work of the mountains. Such mountains and waters of themselves become wise persons and sages." Here, words are used playfully in bringing together things that seemingly have NO OBVIOUS SIMILARITY, yet which are nevertheless - and playfully - capable of being experienced AS each other!

Photo: Variations on Indian Paintbrush, Grand Teton National Park, WY, July 6, 2015
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Fundamentalism is a potential danger for EVERY path!

Here's another passage I underlined during my Wyoming retreat last weekend:

"Nowadays, we thought that if we stopped believing in God we would be free from belief. But instead we believe in everything! Conspiracy theories, medical treatments, fundamentalism from anywhere except Christianity, power in stars, crystals, apparitions, and dogmatism seem to be everywhere."

Richard Rohr

Yes, I've become acutely aware that fundamentalism - the attitude of "my view (with the 'my' or 'I' usually dropped for convenience) is the correct, unfiltered view - is absolutely everywhere. Yet in our own culture, Christian (and perhaps Islamic) fundamentalism has become the "whipping-boy" or scapegoat, enabling all of the other more fashionable forms of fundamentalism to go unrecognized!

Photos: (Top) Mount Moran and Aspen trees; (Middle) Showy Goldeneye and The Cathedral Group; (Bottom) Reddish grasses, Sagebrush, and the Tetons; All four photos were taken in Grand Teton National Park, WY, September 4 and 7, 2015

Nature Can Help Spirituality Remain REAL

There is a tendency in religion for various aspects of human experience to be ignored or denied. For the fundamentalist wing of each faith, the tendency is to deny the unity of all things, the value of silence, and the goodness of another person's religious tradition. For the mystical wing of those same religions, the temptation is to deny the individuality of things, the fact that one possesses a relative perspective even when experiencing the absolute, and a denial of the importance of ideas, words and theology in the life of the spirit. Contemplatives like myself have a tendency to live in denial about our experience of anger, even when others can still feel it. And all religious and spiritual traditions succumb to the temptation to deny the reality and sacredness of sexuality. 

Fortunately, however, frequent contact with Nature helps counteract these deficiencies by keeping us "real." Intense beauty, suffering, individuality, unity, sex, male and female realities, personality, non-personality, cooperation, competition - it's all there. Oh, and mosquitoes, rocks to smack your knee on, sunburn, frostbite, overpowering sunsets, and the beautiful Nature writings contained in the book you stashed in your backpack. It's all there!

Photos: (Yellow Senecio, pink Fireweed, White Cowbane, Black Lake and various waterfalls, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, September 1, 2015

Mountains Inspire a Disciplined Life

The brisk air and steep inclines of the mountains inspire a disciplined life, which is one of the great keys to happiness. Discipline - which usually involves some form of saying 'no' - creates the boundaries of a psychological "container" that allow the divine life to spurt up and over the lip and overflow like a lovely inner fountain. Paradoxically, the more consciously enclosed within our own self we are, the more easily grace is able to overflow from our lives, watering everyone around us. In the absence of such limitation, the self-container keeps getting bigger and bigger, and the divine life is thus never able to overflow for the benefit of all.

Photos: (Top) Mountain Bog Gentian and Mount Rainier; (Middle) Mountain-Ash berries and Mount Rainier; (Bottom) Mount Adams, as viewed from the slopes of Mount Rainier. All three photos were taken at Mount Rainier National Park, WA, on July 28, 2015

Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object; let it come to you.

"Be not preoccupied with looking. Go not to the object; let it come to you."

Henry David Thoreau

Photos: (Top) Alpine Bog Birch; (Middle) Waterfall, with Keyboard of the Winds and Pagoda Peak in the background; (Bottom) Subalpine Arnica and unnamed waterfall; Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, September 1, 2015

The Sacred Flow of the Goddess

These unnamed falls - located just below Black Lake on Glacier Creek - are among my favorite in Rocky Mountain National Park. They remind me that one of the major qualities of the Goddess - the Sacred Feminine, Gaia, Mother Earth, Sophia, Shakti - is that of seamless FLOW. Each of us is like a water droplet that dances up into the air and out of the flow, and then returns to it once again. And this process doesn't just happen at birth and death, but during each moment of our lives! At each instant, we dance out of the flow and inhabit our water-droplet individuality, fall again into the sacred flow, and then emerge once again! Actually, to be more precise, I'm speaking here in terms of our EXPERIENCE.  On the level of our being, we never, ever leave the Flow :)

Photo: Subalpine Arnica and falls, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, September 1, 2015

The six directions are holy and mysterious beings.

"The six directions are holy and mysterious beings. With them and through them we send our voice to God."

Frank Fools Crow
Oglala Lakota medicine man

The six directions are West, North, East, South, Up (Tunkashila: Grandfather) and Down (Grandmother Earth)

Photo: Indian Paintbrush, Tipsoo Lake, and Mount Rainier, Mount Rainier National Park, WA, July 30, 2015

Nature's University

"Oh, yes, I went to the white man's schools. I learned to read from schoolbooks, newspapers, and the Bible. But in time I found that these were not enough. Civilized people depend too much on man-made printed pages. I turn to the Great Spirit's book, which is the whole of His creation. You can read a big part of that book if you study nature. You know, if you take all your books, lay them out under the sun, and let the snow and rain and insects work on them for a while, there will be nothing left. But the Great Spirit has provided you and me with an opportunity for study in nature's university: the forests, the rivers, the mountains, and the animals, which include us."

Walking Buffalo
Stoney Nation
(Alberta)

Photos: (Top) Indian Paintbrush and West Glacier Lake, Snowy Range, WY, August 22, 2015; (Middle) Subalpine Aster and Nokhu Crags, Never Summer Range, CO, August 29, 2015; (Bottom) Mountain Gentian and Medicine Bow Peak, Snowy Range, WY, August 23, 2015

Mount Rainier steals my vision! . . .

In the presence of Rainier and her meadows, I frequently lose all power of thought. Gazing on her, I find, is like seeing a lover unclothed for the first time. I’m left speechless and stunned by the majesty of the view. In fact, it seems as though the peak always finds a way to steal my visual capacity away from me, until my eyes are really hers. She is then able - through my vision - to gaze with playful haughtiness on her own amazing beauty! I recognize this phenomenon whenever I feel my awareness gripped by the overwhelming beauty of the setting . . .
 

Photos: (Top) Mount Rainier, Tipsoo Lake and Elderberries; (Middle) Cliff Paintbrush and Mount Rainier; (Bottom) Detail from one of Rainier's glaciers. All three photos were taken in Mount Rainier National Park, WA on August 28-30, 2015

Calling the planet "it" can numb us to the awareness that the planet is a sentient, ensouled body with means and ends all her own."

"Calling the planet 'it' can numb us to the awareness that the planet is a sentient, ensouled body with means and ends all her own."

Jane Caputi

Photo: Senecio and Notchtop Mountain, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, August 18, 2015

The human body knows that it needs a multiplicity of relationships . . .

"The human body knows that it needs a multiplicity of relationships with the whole of its surroundings. Our bodies have co-evolved with cedar trees and salmon and windstorms and moon and sun, with critters and plants. We believe that the only place we can encounter otherness is in another human being. But another human, alone, cannot possibly provide all that otherness, and the strain rapidly shatters so many marriages and partnerships."

David Abram
Ecological Philosopher

Photo: Indian Paintrbrush and Subalpine Arnica, Saint Louis Lake Trail, near Fraser, CO, August 9, 2015

"Nones" and Wilderness Mysticism

In preparing for a workshop I'm giving on Wilderness Mysticism this Sunday, I did a little more research about "Nones" - i.e., those who identify themselves as religiously unaffliated. According to a 2014 Pew Research Center study, 23% of the U.S. adult population are Nones, up 8 points from 2007. Especially important in driving this increase are those in the Millennial Generation (born 1981-1996), 35% of whom consider themselves to be Nones. Interestingly, only 7% of Nones identify themselves as atheist or agnostic. While more studies need to be done, it appears that increasing numbers of Nones consider Nature their primary source of religious inspiration. A new study from Baylor University claims that those areas containing especially beautiful landscapes in the vicinity also have a higher percentage of Nones. Portland is certainly an example of this correlation, where 42% of the population identifies as Nones.

In any case, I've been committed over the past 30 years to providing meaningful theological reflection on the spiritual experience of Nature. Many people I know (at least in Colorado, where I live) love to recreate in the Great Outdoors, but very few actually reflect on the meaning of their experience and relate it to their spirituality. I am excited to offer Wilderness Mysticism as one way of doing that! :)

Photos: (Top) Indian Paintbrush and West Glacier Lake; (Middle) Rocks on an unnamed lake. These two photos were taken in the Snowy Range (WY) on August 22, 2015; (Bottom) Subalpine Arnica and Lake Helene, with Notchtop Mountain towering above, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, August 25, 2015

Embracing Contradiction

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes."

Walt Whitman

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Ralph Waldo Emerson 

One of the things that is most fascinating about life is the fact that we as human beings are a bundle of contradictions. We sense a stable core at the center of our beings, but are carried away by a thousand passions. We want to conform to a singular view of Life, but Life itself keeps showing up as a many-sided jewel. Every truth implies its opposite. Oneness keeps shapeshifting into multiplicity and multiplicity continually transforms into Oneness. Eternity is in love with time, and time forever seeks to partner with the Eternal. Light cannot reveal itself without some degree of shadow, and vice versa. "We are gods with anuses," as cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker famously declared. It's no wonder that quite a few indigenous tribes celebrate a trickster side to the Creator. Raven, Crow, Coyote, Iktomi the Spider. The best thing we can do is throw our heads back and LAUGH at the wonder of it all :)

Photos: (Top) Rose Crown / Queen's Crown and West Glacier Lake; (Middle) Subalpine Arnica, a quartzite block, and Medicine Bow Peak; These two photos were taken in Wyoming's Snowy Range on August 22-23, 2015; (Bottom) Subalpine Aster (Erigeron) and Notchtop Mountain, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, August 25, 2015

Solitude puts us in touch with our True Self.

"I have never found a companion who was as companionable as solitude."

Henry David Thoreau

Solitude is an important spiritual practice because it strips away all social images and expectations and makes us face who we are and what we really desire in our innermost being. It may take several days for all of the accumulated societal clutter to dissolve in the healing waters of solitude, but once that happens, we come face to face with our True Self. And that occurrence makes us really and truly happy :)

Photos: (Top) Mountain Gentian and Medicine Bow Peak; (Middle) Green quartzite boulder and Sugarloaf Mountain; These two photos were taken in Wyoming's Snowy Range on August 22-23, 2015; (Bottom) Subalpine Arnica and Notchtop Mountain, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, August 25, 2015

Nature teaches us to think our own thoughts . . .

Earlier, I spoke of the realization that each of us is a completely unique lens through which the Divine knows and celebrates Itself.

However, in our current era, many of us hardly ever listen to or follow our core self. As a result, we run across very few real individuals these days. People identify themselves instead with the media and entertainment culture, which seeks to make each of us into a sort of robot with no mind of our own. Rather than create our own mythical stories that embody the paradoxical life of the Divine, we instead rely on the technological expertise of moviemakers to do the imagining for us. Rather than think our own thoughts, we listen non-stop to the thoughts of others: to the love-dramas of pop-singers, the incessantly negative news promoted by the media, and the dogmas of religious groups that would discourage us from ever coming to our own conclusions. Rather than enjoying the self-possession that is the product of a disciplined life, we rely instead on the "Likes" and "Comments" of OTHERS recorded in Facebook and Instagram posts.

Nature, on the other hand, teaches us to think our own thoughts, imagine new theological stories, be embraced by Silence, and practice the disciplined life we crave. Time spent in the natural world helps us once again become who we REALLY are in our deepest core. How wonderful!

Photos: (Top) Sunrise on Medicine Bow Peak, with white and pink-colored quartzite in the foreground; (Middle) Subalpine Arnica; (Bottom) Mountain Gentian; all three photos were taken in Wyoming's Snowy Range on September 21-23, 2015

One of the most important principles in the spiritual journey is the fact that we always view Truth or Reality through a particular lens.

Photography involves taking a unique and particular perspective on a subject, one that helps open up fresh ways of seeing for the viewer. For me, that means aiming for a layered effect, as in this sunrise photo, or looking at a scene from a ground-level perspective, as in the two wildflower photos. I never present a landscape setting "as it is," but rather through a particular perspective. Similarly, one of the most important principles in the spiritual journey is the fact that we always view Truth or Reality through a particular lens, filter or perspective. We never see things "as they are," but rather through the lens of our own individual, psychological, cultural, gendered, racial, philosophical and religious filters. After all, that is precisely what the Divine is after in creating this world - knowing Itself, Himself and Herself through an infinite number of filters and then marveling at the freshness, nuance and surprise that each filter provides. There is no other filter exactly like ours! And that is true as well for the 7.3 billion other human beings who inhabit the planet. Add to that the perspectives held by the billions of other life forms, and the result is an endless source of amazement available to the Creator. For we human beings, this means both that we remain forever humble (realizing that we only know the Truth through one or several particular fliters), AND that we will always and forever need the perspectives and filters of others to fill out what is lacking in our own. This keeps us ever reaching out toward one another and serves to bond together the plethora of different ways of seeing into one multi-faceted Whole :)

Photos: (Top) Sunrise on Medicine Bow Peak; (Middle) Rose Crown / Queen's Crown, an unnamed lake and Medicine Bow Peak; (Bottom) Mountain Gentians and pond; All three photos were taken in the Snowy Range (WY) on August 21-23, 2015

We so often imagine that our own ideas are elegantly simple, while those of others are hopelessly complex!

This weekend, as I meandered around marshy mountain meadows looking for the last remaining wildflowers of the season, my mind turned to examine a curious human trait. This is the tendency we have to believe that OUR views are elegantly simple, while the beliefs of others are hopelessly complex. For example, during my early fundamentalist days, if a person with an intellectual bent would try to talk to us, we would invariably reply: "I follow Jesus, NOT philosophy!" We'd explain that "The gospel is so simple even a CHILD can understand it!" What we didn't realize was that we held a whole network of supporting beliefs and ideas - many of them unconscious or unexamined - that were every bit as complex and philosophical as those of our "non-Christian" opponents.

Thus, for example, we held to a billiard-ball conception of the self, a substitutionary atonement based in Roman law, the idea that Jesus is an individual rather than a cosmic or archetypal presence, and a dualistic split between Creator and creation. All of these ideas are every bit as complex as the convictions of others. It's just that our own unconscious philosophical beliefs APPEAR simple, while those of someone else who believes differently may seem complex because we are unfamiliar with them, and because those beliefs may require quite a few word-pictures painted from various angles to try to elucidate them. The same is true of we modern contemplatives who may be tempted to believe we trust only in Silence but who actually hold a whole network of complex and unexamined ideas that attempt to articulate the meaning of that Silence. What a curious species we humans are!

Photo: Subalpine Aster (Erigeron) and the cliffs of Medicine Bow Peak, Snowy Range, WY, August 23, 2015

Two Fundamentalisms: Dualistic and Nondualistic

This past weekend, as I was hiking in the beauty of Wyoming's Snowy Range, I enjoyed immensely both the vast and imposing backdrop of the mountain peaks AND the individual expression of beauty - found in wildflowers, trees, rocks and lakes - that arise within that vastness. While walking, I found myself reflecting on the fact that the tendency toward a fundamentalistic mindset is so incredibly pervasive in human affairs. In fact, it often takes seemingly opposite forms! In the realm of spirituality, this means, for example, that for conservative traditionalists, ONLY duality is the true reality. Here, there is a Creator-creation split and a billiard-ball view of the self, both of which deny that any kind of overarching Unity has any reality. On the other hand, a kind of mystical fundamentalism holds that ONLY the Unity has any ultimate existence, and that all individuality - including the words, ideas and thoughts that correspond to discrete insights or beings - are actually illusory. This pattern reveals the fact that fundamentalism is a typically HUMAN trait and is not the possession of any one group. It always focuses on one sliver of the truth to the exclusion of all other slivers. In my experience, all of the various slivers are needed to make a more complete picture. Here, for example, BOTH duality and non-duality issue continually into and proceed from one another. Accordingly, nondual vastness continually gives birth to individual beings, AND individual beings perpetually manifest nonduality in their tendency to run toward the horizon of Unity and dissolve there. Amazingly, both duality and nonduality continually issue in - and shapeshift into - one another. And that, of course, is precisely the magic of life!  

There is, of course, a more inclusive Unity, but this consists in dwelling IN BETWEEN these two realms and in becoming the space in which they integrate into a single, dynamic yet restful Reality :)

Photos: (Top) Subalpine Arnica, A quartzite block, and Medicine Bow Peak; (Middle) Rose Crown (Queen's Crown), an unnamed pond, and Medicine Bow Peak. These two photos were taken on August 23, 2015; (Bottom) Silvery snag in an old burn, August 21, 2015. All three photos were taken in the Snowy Range, WY

God sighs to be known in us . . .

"God sighs to become known in us. God is delivered from solitude by the people in whom God reveals himself. The sorrow of the unknown God is softened through and in us."

Ibn al-Arabi
13th century Sufi mystic

Quoted by Franciscan friar Richard Rohr in his book: "What the Mystics Know"

Photos: (Top and Middle) Indian Paintbrush at Twin Crater Lakes, Rawah Wilderness, CO, August 14, 2015; (Bottom) Snowbank and The Sharksteeth, just below Sky Pond, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, August 15, 2015

The Importance of Self-Forgiveness

There's a lot of talk these days about forgiving others and how important this is for our own inner peace. When we hang on to our grievances regarding what others have done to us, we feel constricted and leaden inside. Forgiveness serves to release us from this tightness. However, what is often neglected is the equally important necessity of forgiving ourselves. We all have mistakes in our past that sometimes continue to plague us into the present. We wish we could reverse the video recorder, as it were, and redo those parts of our lives where we "messed up." But we unfortunately cannot, so we seem to be stuck with all of our mistakes. Obsessing over past errors then becomes like an unhealed wound that festers and will not heal. It is easy, therefore, to understand why - in our own religious culture - so many people, especially evangelicals, find a theology of substitutionary atonement so appealing. If one can say: "Jesus took the blame and punishment for all of my sin, thereby releasing me from guilt," then the resulting liberation can be experienced as quite powerful.

However, for those of us who do not find release in having someone else - especially someone as special as Christ - be punished and killed for our misdeeds, there is another way of release. And that is to realize that the "self" which "blows it" is not the True Self after all. To the contrary, our REAL self is a vast lake of love and awareness that underlies the more superficial parts of our personality, which correspondingly form the "sunlight diamonds" dancing up on the surface of that lake. Those flecks of light are the things we say and do - sometimes helpful and sometimes not so helpful - during the course of our daily lives. Our temptation, however, is to consider those glints to be who-we-really-are, causing us to miss out on the vastness of our underlying Identity. Therefore, we actually NEED those times when we mess up in order to move us - forcibly, almost - to a deeper level, where we REALLY and TRULY dwell on the level of Being. All character development, in fact, is simply a deepening awareness - through both thick and thin - of this deeper Self.

And for those seekers who are Christ-followers, the liberating truth is the fact that this deeper Self is actually the ever-present reality of  . . . Christ!  Christ, Buddha-Nature, Brahman, Tunkashila, Gaia, Sophia, the Tao, Yahweh, Allah, Wakan Tanka, Ein Sof, the No-Self - they are all THERE, on that deeper level! But we could never KNOW the majesty of that vast Lake of divinity unless it were lit - you guessed it - by the sunlight diamonds of our more superficial selves dancing up on the surface! Forgiveness in this context comes in realizing that we can let go of our mistakes (AND our accomplishments) in order to identify instead with the deeper level of the vast True Self.

Oh, and one more thing. A lot of the talk these days about self-love or self-forgiveness can seem quite shallow in its tendency to remain caught up in a solipsism of "me, myself and I." In truth, the Self is a community, and the "I" who does the self-forgiving is actually not simply "me" but is instead . . . . [ ] !

Photos: (Top) Rosy and Western Yellow Paintbrush blooming above Saint Louis Lake near Fraser, CO, August 8, 2015; (Middle) Elephanthead blooming on the shore of one of the Twin Crater Lakes, Rawah Wilderness, CO, August 14, 2015; (Bottom) Fireweed and Arctic Gentian blooming on the shore of Lake of Glass, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO, August 15, 2015