We must walk this lonesome valley, we have to walk it by ourselves.
Oh, nobody else can walk it for us, we have to walk it by ourselves.

Somewhere in Luther’s table talk, he mentioned that each of us have to do our own faith-ing, just as each of us have to do our own dying. Whatever Luther said, this will be my introduction to what I will call “aloneness,” and I will extend that word to mean “the intentional living of our solitary contemplative inquiries.”

“Contemplative inquiry” is the conscious viewing of the contents of our own consciousness. No one else can do this for us. “Contemplative inquiry” is also our thoughtfulness about these inward contents. This is essentially a solitary practice even though it can go on in group settings led by experienced persons.

For example, a contemporary Vipassana Buddhist retreat focuses strongly on a personally practiced meditation. This solitary practice entails getting used to a vibrant type of aloneness. This is quite different from a self-absorbed U.S. president rising at three in the morning to rage in his current defendedness and write tweets castigating his critics.

A Vipassana meditation practice focusses on the seemingly boring practice of carefully watching our own breathing—in-breath, pause, out-breath, pause for 45 minutes or more at a time, perhaps followed by a period of solitary walking, focusing on each step. What is going on here is an inquiry into the reality of our actual lives beyond the workings of our busy minds and beyond the always present impulses to think and do our established habits of living. This practice can be understood to be religious in the sense that it seeks to allow the happening of a realistic type of enlightenment of what it actually means to be a conscious human being. The interest that sources this practice is human authenticity. In doing this practice, we are not defending our current sense of self, we are watching those defenses come up and thereby preparing ourselves to be aware of the real me as something wondrously opposed to the self I think I am, wish I was, or hope to be.

We don’t have to invent or produce the reality of our own authenticity. Authenticity is simply Reality being Reality. It takes no effort to be authentic. It takes a sort of willing surrender not to be false. Meditation is a discipline of surrender that allows our authenticity to emerge into awareness from where it has been hidden among the replacements for authenticity that we have invented, defended, clung on to, and presented to the world.

Jesus practiced another solitary practice he called “prayer.” In Mark’s portrait of Jesus we see him going apart for hours of solitary prayer. This intense need for solitude dramatizes Jesus’ humanity, as well as our own.

Nevertheless, Jesus was not a recluse. He lived and worked with very close friends, both men and women. He was a public figure who was followed by large crowds who listened intently to his teachings. He was an organizer who sent out teams of followers to villages throughout his region, and listened carefully to the reports they brought back.

Mark’s story tells us that after Jesus’ baptismal washing by John the Baptist the spirit drives Jesus into the desert for a 40-day fast. I am guessing that this intense solitary time alone was about his vocation, his dangerous mission—whether and how to pursue his authentic calling. Mark, Matthew, and Luke all picture Jesus all alone dealing with serious temptations during these 40 days of this preparation for the rest of his life.

We can also see Jesus as an exemplar of our solitary authenticity in that intense aloneness pictured in his prayer vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane. Perhaps no other story is more vivid as an illustration of the meaning of prayer as a practice of solitary freedom in preparation for living freely within a future situation. In this story Jesus’s prayer is a solitary practice in preparation for living freely in the anticipated experiences of a trumped up trial and a probable torture to death.

Aloneness practices, whether of Buddhist description or of Christian description, is revealed as a big part of our authentic life. Whether the circumstances we face are grim or joyous requiring courage or celebration, we can envision meditation or prayer as an exercise of freedom in carving out for our ongoing nurture life enough time and enough intense time to be alone in this lonesome valley of walking the walk that nobody else can walk for us.

Solitary Discipline

Discipline is not the opposite of freedom. Discipline is an expression of freedom. Taking responsibility for each bit of food we eat, each bit of entertainment we partake, each person we hang out with, each drug we don’t take or do take, each book we read or don’t read, each movie we see or don’t see. No one else can make these choices for us. We have to take full charge of our solitary lives by ourselves. We are challenged to employ a stubborn aloneness in searching out our grounding in realism for our free choices.

Such freedom-enhanced aloneness is an empowerment for our lives. Aloneness is certainly not a deprivation or a punishment. Self-chosen solitary time can be an enablement of an otherwise wasted life. Indeed, solitude is necessary for the discovery of our spirit depths and for living out those deep truths that have graced our consciousness.

I strongly recommend a disciplined solitary practice, but I do not presume to prescribe what solitary practice is appropriate for each person. I am going to suggest three broad arenas of solitary practices that each of us can consider for our own solitary time: (1) reading contemplative-dialogue sources, (2) practicing basic mediation-type exercises, and (3) articulating our life intents.

Reading Contemplative-Dialogue Sources

A devotional classic by an acclaimed personage of spirit depth is a primary source of contemplative reading. Poets and writers from many religious traditions quality—Rumi, Lao Tzu, Jon Bernie, A. H. Almaas, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Thomas Berry, and Thomas Merton are among the many examples of devotional reading that I have found useful. Novels that were written to reveal life truths, as much or more than to entertain, also qualify as contemplative dialogue sources— Sir Walter Scott, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Powers, and many others have written such novels.

Reading Christian theology cannot be omitted from our list, if we are going to practice a Christian religion. Theologizing with the best of thinkers is a religions practice of great importance. Any of the more devotional writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer are excellent. Paul Tillich’s sermons and brief books are likewise useful for a wide audience. H. Richard Niebuhr’s books are competent theology written for general readers. For our solitary nurture time, we may prefer writings of a more sermonic quality, rather than of an academic quality. Yet it is also true that we may find some sermonic material boring, and we may find some academic material gripping. For example, the hot essays and the personal biography of Rudolf Bultmann I found quite nurturing as well as exceedingly thoughtful. In addition to these context forming 20th century theologizing luminaries, scores of other theological writers of every gender and race, and almost every ethnicity, and nationality have contributed to the reemergence for our time of the Christian “good news” and to the modes of witnessing to this “good news” to our various communities of humanity.

Everything depends on who each of us is at this particular time in our journey of spirit. We need readings that push us, but we do not need to be entirely overwhelmed by materials that are too difficult for us or best read later in our lives.

Finally, a Christian solitary life is incomplete without the Bible. For Christian nurture to neglect a familiarity with these texts would be like practicing Buddhism without meditation. Both mediation and Bible reading are lifetime practices that we never finish learning how to do. It is much more difficult than commonly understood to render contemporary the ancient Christian Scriptures. Ancient literature of any sort requires a mode of metaphorical translation from that very different time and place. In spite of these difficulties, the actual poetry of the Bible can be marvelously useful for our solitary practices.

Practicing Basic Mediation-type Exercises

Many Jews, Christians, and Muslims have found deep help in a serious practice of Buddhist meditation. Hindu yogas, Tai Chi exercises, and other well-fashioned products of the East have also been working well for persons of many religious backgrounds. Native America and Africa has also provided contemplative practices that meet important needs for people across the planet. If practicing Christianity is our core practice, we also need to be aware that contemplative practices have flourished in Christian heritage as well.

Contemplative-type exercises are not the same as doing spirit readings with which we dialogue. Contemplative exercises are actions of our consciousness that exercise consciousness itself beyond the experiences of a conscious using of the mind.
Contemplative exercises are crafted to seek an aliveness that is sometime spoken of as “being out of our minds.” This does not mean a contempt for our minds or for our religious thoughtfulness. Contemplation means enlarging the primal discovery that our conscious being is deeper than our mere thinking can ever fathom or be a substitute for.

Articulating Our Life Intents

Making a list of things to do is a practical form of articulating life-intents. Items on a serious do-list are more than a useful memory device. Each item is an externalization in writing of a life intent, and thus is a prayer for some change in the future course of our lives. The word “prayer” has been understood in the heart of Christian monastic practice as a life intent. Here are four types of life intent according to that understanding:

A confessionary prayer is an intent to face up to some aspects of our life that resists exposure. This could be a failing or a wayward bit of living that you regret. It could be a hard-to-face feeling of emptiness, or overwhelm, or grueling despair that you are resisting knowing, suffering, or handling. Confession does not always entail sharing your life with someone else. Solitary confession can mean a secret solitary intent within your own private life for the sake of moving forward within an absolution you already assume.

A gratitudinal prayer in an intent that brings affirmation, vitality, and liveliness to whatever is happening. Our positive experiences require our intent of gratitude for their full enhancement. Grim times also require intents of gratitude to enhance a full bodied living of these life passages of grief, fear, despair or whatever.

Petitionary prayers are acts of preparation for receiving what you need and for enabling what you project. In a petitionary prayer we are consciously recording what we are open to receive as some blessing for our personal lives.

Intercessory prayers are acts of intent on behalf of others— acts of preparation for specifically shaping our living in readiness for our outgoing, caring, loving responses to other persons, to groups of persons, and for the broad social changes that claim our commitments.

Conclusion

Whatever solitary practices each of us choose from this large “paint pallet” of options for our solitary time, we do well to opt for our own, effective, self-initiated, solitary practices. We need a disciplined form of spirit aloneness, crafted just for ourselves and for our own life calling. Discipline is freedom. Discipline increases freedom. Also, freedom enhances the disciplines we continually reinvent for our solitary time and for our lives as a whole.

We must walk this lonesome valley, we have to walk it by ourselves.
Oh, nobody else can walk it for us, we have to walk it by ourselves.

The post Freedom and Aloneness first appeared on Realistic Living.

And Truth is One:
Forgiveness.

The righteous and the wicked
both vanish into one
overall humiliation:
Forgiveness.

The friend and the enemy
both melt into one
all encompassing affirmation:
Forgiveness.

The best and the worst
play their roles
in one grand drama:
Forgiveness.

Blaming someone,
blaming one’s self,
blaming something,
blaming everything,
is not the Truth.

There is one Truth:
Forgiveness.

When the Truth of forgiveness dawns
all life philosophies crumble
like a tall building
into a heap of dust.

The Truth of forgiveness
is a scandal to the moralist
and sheer foolishness to the thinker.

But whoever steps off the cliff
of moral and intellectual certitude
into trusting the Truth of forgiveness
becomes mighty and golden,
becomes both servant leader
and wise follower,
seeing the whole picture
with compassion for all.

Forgiveness is not too hard to understand, but it is surprisingly easy to misunderstand.

Forgiveness is not something you have to accomplish or deserve. Forgiveness is always present. It is part of the cosmic face that each Real moment offers each of us—a fresh start. It is always true no matter what has happened, is happening, or might happen. An option for fresh start is being offered to you and me and everyone in this living moment.

The past is real, it cannot be changed, but our relationship to that past can be changed. The first change we may need to consider is our memory of that past. We have forgotten the real past. What memory we do have of the past is actually a memory of what we thought was real at the time, but our thinking was always limited—somewhat true, somewhat flawed.

But however flawed our memory is, the real past is completely gone and forgiven. A fresh start is at hand, perhaps that fresh start will include remembering more of the real past— perhaps to laugh or cry at how mistaken our views of that past have been. Cleaning up such memories may improve our lives, but not the consequence of what our lives have done. These consequences live on as part of our capacity as a human being to alter the course of history. We altered history in every moment of our past living, just as we will alter the course of history in our next action, in our next thinking about our next action. Every motion of our brain or our body alters the course of history in our lives and in the lives of all we touch and through them in the lives they touch forevermore. Such a tragic, yet wondrous karma is very real.

Nevertheless, a fresh start is open before us right now. No admission fee is required, no begging is necessary. And there no price to pay for this fresh start except the consequences of taking on this humiliating new start for our personal programing.

Our understanding of this “forgiveness for a fresh start” makes us more bold in our freedom to take on the consequences. We can make this unprecedented leap into the future, because we know that however this works out, we will be forgiven for a fresh start once again.

Forgiven does not mean excuse or permission to flee from real life or to indulge in our worse impulses, additions, and potential meanness. We will pay the consequences of whatever actions we do. We will remain in need of forgiveness for whatever we do. Believing in forgiveness means believing that there is a fresh start in realism before us, right now and always will be.

Let us also be warned that our delusory choices can become stuck ways of life for our personal being—life ways to which we cling, defend, and never own up or accept their needed forgiveness. Being stuck in unrealism is like an internal bondage or slavery in which we may have become powerless to change. We may find ourselves dependent on Reality and waiting on Reality to expose our unrealism and forgive us again.

We cannot presume that when we have lost touch with Reality, that Reality will find us again—at least not right away. We can drift down the corridor of time for quite a while before the judgement of our unrealism comes up again for review. We need to take care to not mess with Reality, or thumb our nose at Reality, or think we can get away with creating our own reality.

Consider how long the racist patterns of the U.S Confederacy have lived on in the lives of both whites and blacks and all those in between. We are all forgiven for a fresh start in a new world order in which black and white have no more horrific implications than short or long feet. Nevertheless, we cling to familiar patterns of status, privilege, mindsets, and rages, rather than be forgiven for that fresh start that fights the tragic karma of our ongoing culture.

Martin Luther King Jr. helped us find some fresh start on this unrealism, but we still cling to, or slip into backslides to, old familiar untenable patterns of delusion. Many U.S. citizens persist in fanning and fostering our racial delusions for the sake of some other delusion that Reality has not yet vanquished.

So, when and if Reality has found us again, we do well to grab hold of Reality with all its forgiveness and fresh starts before we lose our way again. The pay-out of unrealism is despair in the end, for Reality always wins. And the pay-out of realism, however costly in some ways it may be, is always on the winning side, for Reality always wins.

Lord Reality have mercy on me a sinner, may my estrangements from Thee be healed this day.

The post Forgiveness first appeared on Realistic Living.

But the “total obedience” I want to describe is a devotion to the mysterious all-powerful encounter that includes everything that happens to us in every event we face. Such realism means taking in what is actually happening to each of us and to us as societies. This includes possibilities as well as limitations. It includes the consequences of human choices as well as the processes of nature over which humans have no control. It includes the horrific as well as the glorious. In addition to our everyday content, the Reality we actually face includes the Abyss of No-thing-ness from which each thing, including our own lives, have come and to which each thing, including our own lives,will return. Reality also includes the Every-thing-ness of that Expansive Sea of Mystery within which each identifiable thing exists for now. Reality includes the Awesome Otherness that we encounter as well as the Awe that the Awesome occasions in our inner being.

The Word “God” is a devotional word that is attached to this inclusive view of Reality. The Word “God” adds no reality to Reality: this holy word is but a human expression of obedience to Reality—a devotion to realism. the word “God” adds only trust in the trustworthiness of Reality. The word “God” renders Reality, all of it, “holy.”

The rational content we have about Reality is created by human beings and is, therefor, a limited knowledge of Reality. Reality in its wholeness is an enduring mystery. As every realistic research scientist knows, science is a progressive movement of thought that approaches Reality with ever-greater correspondences with Reality, but science never reaches the final fullness of comprehending Reality. In truth, the perceptive scientist knows that the more we know about the nature of things the more we know we don’t know. Our vision of the Mystery of Reality grows greater the more we know about Reality.

The same dynamic of “never fully arriving” also applies to our contemplative approaches to Reality. Our years of meditation upon our inner beings never exhausts what can be learned about our own consciousness and what it means to be conscious of anything including consciousness itself. All the fine arts are contemplations about Reality. Great music is expressing our deepest inner awarenesses. Note that composing music never ends. We never get “there” with a “final” symphony.

Back to the troublesome word “God” As used by the monotheistic religions, “God” binds all the parts of the “One Whole” of Reality into a single devotion to the entirety of Reality. The God-devotion to Reality promotes our learning about Reality, even though our learning never reaches an end point of final truth. The-God devotion affirms both the search for Reality and the endless nature of that search. In other words, the God devotion affirms our always being ignorant in spite of however vast our wisdom becomes.

Humans are indeed avid in creating an overall “sense of reality” based on our physical senses and our inner experiences, but our “sense of reality” never corresponds entirely with Reality. Looking back over our lives we can notice that our “sense of reality” has changed many times. But the Reality I am pointing to with this capitalized word is not our changing sensibilities, but the continually Encountered Power of Mysteriousness that is occasioning in us these perpetual changes and is always revealing our ignorance. Wisdom is indeed an awareness of our perpetual ignorance. The word “God” makes our ignorance “holy.”

Further, Reality is like an active power that is always asserting itself. Reality operates like a blood hound that chases us down and bites our “sense of reality” with some “sense of truth” we have been escaping or have never considered before. Our obedience to this blood-hound Reality is a freedom from our illusions, and compulsions. Reality roots us out of our slavery to illusion. It is in that sense that Reality sets us free.

Here is a simple example with which anyone in their 80s, like me, can identify. As a teenager and into my 70s, I was pushing the edges of exhaustion in my running, my basketball, my study, my teaching, my organizing, and more. This long-practiced pattern of living now has life-threatening consequences in my eighties. Reality is requiring of me a different sort of obedience. This requirement is, however, freedom, for it requires me to give up slavery to my old push-push life style and make choices that fit the reality of my current being and the environments I now face.

Here is a sociological example of Reality opening freedom: Many oil executives and politicians who thrive on oil-industry wealth are making up an alternative reality to the “inconvenient truth” of an already present climate crisis. The truth of the climate crisis is supported by 97% of the climate scientists. We cannot honestly deny that fossil-fuel burning has changed and is changing the atmosphere with devastating consequences. The Reality we confront in the climate-crises requires humanity to leave about six trillion dollars worth of already discovered fossil fuel wealth in the ground. Such is the obedience required for plain realism.

That such obedience would be freedom is an insight not squarely faced by wealth-addicted fossil-fuel executives. Giving up a fossil-fuel powered society opens in us the freedom to build a society powered by the sun, the wind, and falling water. Such a response of freedom builds a society that has no pollution, abundant power falling on ever part of the Earth, human societies that is more decentralized and stable, a prosperity that can extend to the last village on this planet, and much needed aid for ending tyranny and oppression thus providing more democratic power to the currently poor. We have all these advantages simply by giving up an energy source that makes the rich richer, the poor poorer, and the Earth devastated. This fossil-fuel hierarchy is also destroying democracy, wrecking honest education, and enslaving the working classes. Obeying Reality in this instance is as Exodus from an Egypt of slavery. Such obedience means an expansion of freedom for humanity as a whole.

This very real freedom I am identifying here is not an indulgence in our druthers, ambitions, desires, emotional feelings, wealth, and status. The profound freedom that results from obedience to Reality is an intentional spontaneity of our profound being, an actual dance of living from our profound awareness. Such obedience is a holy facing of the following truth: We humans with our own creativity invent all our values and principles with which we make our decisions. Our choices are ambiguous with regard to all of these value inventions. It takes courage to embrace our freedom over good- and-evil values, but this courage is also an experience of our primal strength and joy.

Our profound freedom is also the opposite of fatalism. The oil, gas, and coal establishments tend to argue that we cannot get along without fossil fuels, that the sun does not always shine, that the wind does not always blow, and that falling water is never enough to power a viable and just society. But such talk is a failure of imagination. Freedom is our capacity for embracing the imagination that can create a way through the problems we face. Freedom cuts through the logic of the past and creates whatever new logic is needed to do the job that is called for.

For example, a problem that comes up when we actually face doing away with fossil fuels is storing the sun and wind energy. Fossil fuel is already easily stored and transported. Fossil fuel is already stored sunshine. It takes imagination to invent ways to store sunshine on the scale that fossil fuels already store. Freedom means finding the way to do that. A very promising way already found is to use our almost unlimited amount of sunshine to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. Then we turn the oxygen loose to make up for what the disappearing forests are failing to provide and put the hydrogen gas in liquified hydrogen tanks that can fly airplanes cheaper and safer that jet fuel. (These claims are made by the hydrogen expert David Scott). Following such creative imagination is what profound freedom looks like in its relations with the climate crisis.

Here is another example of how obedience to Reality can lead to freedom. A fight has gone on in Christian circles in relation to the topic of evolution. Christian thinking for many people has been locked up in a bondage to a literalistic understandings of the Bible. This view not only prompts a rejection of evolution in favor of an authoritarian creationism, it also blocks a true understanding of most biblical texts. For example, Genesis One is poetry, a story-time literary gem about the goodness of the natural world. This crucial meaning is lost when that opening chapter of the Bible is viewed as scientific statements about a literal creation of the cosmos in 7 days.

Also, the poetic nature of all speech using the word “God” is lost by this literalism. In Genesis One, God is a character in a story. This fictitious character “God” is speaking to his fictitious angles, “Let there be Light” etc. This is a poetic story about Reality and the demand for human realism. Such realism is lost when we insist that “God” is a literal being in a heavenly realm. In Genesis, “God” is Reality—Reality colored with a God-devotion to be realistic—that is, to be obedient to a good and trustworthy Reality. Genesis One is telling us that everything that Reality does is good for humans, and that includes our death and our suffering as well as our birth and our pleasure. It includes the consequences of our deluded living as well as our realistic living. This goodness also includes our evolution from the yet unexplained appearance of those enclosed cells of livingness on this well-positioned planet.

The famous Sufi poet, Rumi, expresses the core issue of our literalism with this short poem: “Life and death are two wings on the same bird.” Only living beings die. And death is part of the life story of anything living. When we humans insist on a devotion to birth, but not death, we are in rebellion from the God-devotion to Reality in the first chapter of the Bible. We reject thereby the holiness of death and suffering. The God of Genesis One is the source of all things, including our evolution from simpler forms of conscious being, and including our return to the dust from which we come as the 90th Psalm spells out.

Why do some find it humiliating that we humans have emerged from a common ancestor who grand-mothered two other chimpanzee species: the pigmy chimpanzees, and the larger chimpanzees. The human species (every race of it) is remarkably close in DNA with these other two primate companions. We can be viewed as a third species of chimpanzee. To reject this very well documented “theory of evolution” because it is inconsistent with a very poor means of Biblical interpretation is a fight with Reality that cannot be won. Obedience to Reality requires the freedom of abandoning any view of the Biblical heritage that in any way contradicts the still evolving theory of evolution.

If trusting God means obeying Reality then a God-devotion means submission to the absolute power of Reality that cannot be defeated or avoided. We are driven to despair by each attempt to fight or flee Reality. A God-devotion to Reality means nothing more nor less than openness to being realistic. And being realistic turns out to be a manifestation of the very deepest experience of human freedom.

Our openness to be being realistic also includes our openness to the contemplative discoveries of Reality as well as to the scientific discoveries of Reality. In terms of the consciousness capacities of our species, we are gifted with a capacity for language, art, intimacy, social forms, and thoughtful reflections that the other two species of chimpanzee cannot match, however much we attempt to train one of them in our form of awareness. The process of evolution took a turn in creating us that we need to notice.

Let us return to how obeying Reality is perfect freedom. It might seem that obeying Reality would restrain our freedom. Perhaps we ask, “Why can’t I believe whatever I want to believe or what my peers believe, or what my ego finds more pleasant to believe?” “Why is obedience to Reality perfect freedom?

The second story in the book of Genesis is about this obedient freedom and the tragedy of its loss. Eric Fromm, a renowned psychologist and writer, interpreted the Garden of Eden story as an example of authoritarian religion. God in this story does seem like a authoritarian Pope. God in this story forbids humanity “the knowledge of good and evil.” Fromm sees all religion as either authoritarian or humanistic, the later of which he favors. So he sees the Eden story as authoritarian. But let us examine how the Adam and Eve story is not authoritarian or humanistic. Let us note how this story is a witness to what is real for all of us in every generation. Reality does indeed forbids to humans a knowledge of good and evil. Every decision we make requires some reflection on values, but our decisions are still ambiguous. Our values conflict; our principles do not always apply; our thinking only brings us to the raw cliff of making a choice—to leap into the dark of the impending future and the unknown consequences of our decisions. We do this every day without the benefit of an absolute knowledge of good and evil. We eat from the forbidden tree when we assume this ignorance is not so.

Fromm, like many others, misunderstand this story-time tree to be about knowledge or the quest for knowledge. But “knowledge” is not the name of this tree. The ongoing quest for knowledge is a way of loving Reality. Knowledge of Reality is not what Reality is forbidding in this story. This tree has to do with value—the knowledge of good and evil, not the knowledge of Reality.

Reality requires realism. An obedience to realism includes human freedom, for this profound human freedom is part of realism. Our freedom is a limited freedom in terms of controlling outcomes, but our freedom is also real in the sense that our free acts do participate in bending the course of history—doing so in tension with many other forces. In the interior sense, perfect freedom is creating our responses out of nothing but freedom. Freedom is our real lives, even though we flee from freedom. Perfect freedom is our human essence, our authenticity, our realism, our holiness if “holy” means obedience to Reality.

Therefore, eating from the deadly tree means some sort of bondage or slavery to a set of values, rules, or principles made up by human beings. Any obedience to our own creations, our own desires, our own status, our own public brand, our favorite peer group, etc. is eating from the deadly tree. Obedience to Reality includes living beyond all those “good and evil” human creations. This total freedom is freedom from every self-created good-and-evil set of values, acquired from whatever source we learned those values. Total freedom is the essence of the radical monotheistic God-devotion. Any time we suppose that we have a final ultimate knowledge of good and evil, we are in a fight with Reality—we are employing an illusion, created by us or by some other human being, who has eaten from the forbidden tree. Freedom is our real life. Any other program of living is an enslavement.

“Plant your feet firmly, therefore, within the freedom that Christ has won for us, and do not let yourselves be caught again in the shackles of slavery.” Paul (Galatians 5.1 J. B. Phillips translation)

The post When Total Obedience is Perfect Freedom first appeared on Realistic Living.

I have come that human beings may have life and may have it is all its fullness. I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hireling, when he sees the wolf coming, abandons the sheep and runs away, because he is no shepherd and the sheep are not his. John 10 :10-12

Those who give sermons on the good shepherd often assume that this ancient image applies to a contemporary pastor who tells his flock what they should believe and how they should act. Such a view also assumes that most people are sheep in the sense of being gullible, go-along, authority-addicted dumbbells.

I do not believe this was the meaning intended by the original author of these verses. The original shepherd image was grounded in the experience of noticing highly dedicated persons working on a hillside with a flock of sheep, providing them grass and water and protecting them from wolves. Being a follower of Jesus means being such a leader.

So where can we actually experience this Good Shepherd in our lives today? Let me answer this with a fictitious story—a story made out of my own experiences. In my story, Sally McGillicutty teaches an adult class in the Sunflower room of the Umpity Ump Christian Church. Sally trusts the Ultimate Message that the Infinite Silence we meet in every event of our lives loves Sally and every other person (and creature) on this planet or any other planet. Because of her trust in that Eternal Wholeness that is faced by Sally and by us, Sally is thereby an embodiment of the Ultimate Message from Eternity.

When Sally walks into the room, the Ultimate Message walks into the room. When Sally speaks, the Infinite Silence speaks the Ultimate Message. When Sally notices the despairing living going on her class, that despairing living knows itself noticed by the Infinite Silence, audited by the Infinite Silence, forgiven by the Infinite Silence, and called by the Infinite Silence to a free, trusting, compassionate, tranquil sort of living. Sally constantly confronts each member of her class with the option of living human life in victorious freedom. Sally is a person through whom the Infinite Silence speaks. She challenges her class to live their lives with courageous freedom—to live with compassionate freedom the same lives over which each of her class members quite commonly despair.

The men in her class who feel they have no feelings worth expressing learn from Sally to experience, to trust, and to express those feelings. They learn that every anger, every fear, every hostility, every compassion, every bodily desire, is part of the goodness of life. The women in her class (most of whom always thought that being nice was the one thing that a proper woman should do) learn from Sally that being firm and ruthlessly honest is the sort of aliveness approved by Eternity. The parents in her class (most of whom live in despondency with the thought that they are to blame for every failure or flaw in their offspring) learn from Sally to realize that each of their children is virgin born, an offspring of the Infinite Silence–that children are strange and mysterious beings who must do their own despairing, failures, depravities, as well as find their own buoyant living and astonishing novelties. “Parents,” Sally says, “who love, feed, and protect their children from injury, are doing their job.” “And loving them fully,” she says, “includes allowing them the freedom and the dignity of going astray in their own way.” “Maybe,” Sally says, “you might pray without ceasing that your children will find trust in the Infinite Silence, but if they don’t, it’s not your fault.” In these and many other ways, Sally is the Ultimate Message in human flesh. Sally is the Resurrected Jesus to this particular flock who come each week to probe with Sally into the secrets of living life in an ongoing trust of the Infinite Silence. Sally is the Good Shepherd. Before Abraham was born, this strange Sally IS.

Sally is not appreciated by every person who has attended her class. Some left in a huff and never returned. One particular official in the church sought to have her class disbanded. “A disgrace,” he called it. But Sally believes that such opposition is to be expected. She even uses this opposition to teach her point that we live in a world of darkness that opposes the light. As to her own inconvenience and grief over being opposed in these ways, Sally says, “The Good Shepherd lays down her life for her sheep. Therefore, a bit of grumpiness from the congregational establishment does not discourage me.”

Now my story might have taken place in some other environment than a church. Sally could be a teacher of secular wisdom in some university. Sally could a teacher of Buddhism. Or perhaps Sally is not a teacher at all, but a plumber who comes to fix your water faucets. Perhaps Sally is a political leader who knows how to take care of her staff. Perhaps Sally is as organizer of a revolutionary movement. The Jesus Christ-dynamic, since it is the Ultimate Message from the Infinite Silence, is not limited to the communication that might go on in the context of a Christian church. The communication of the Ultimate Message does not even require the context of Christian symbolism.

Any person who communicates in any way that we are loved by the Infinite Silence is a fleshly embodiment of the Ultimate Message. That person can be said to be “in Christ.” That person is living “in the name of Jesus, the Christ” Indeed, that person, insofar as he or she actually embodies the Ultimate Message, is the Resurrected Jesus Christ!

Those two words “Jesus Christ” do not only point to a first-century peasant teacher from Nazareth; they also point to a dynamic of healing that is built into the cosmos. Perhaps you have noticed the opening verses of John’s narrative that this dynamic, “The Communication of the Infinite Silence,” was present at the creation of everything. This was poetry, but poetry about the everywhere presence of this Word of healing.

There are many deep, profound, compassionate persons who do not call themselves by the name of “Jesus.” We who do revere Jesus in an ultimate way can, however, view any authentic spirit messenger as “Jesus Christ.” Why? Because these two words, deeply understood, speak of a dynamic that can happen anywhere. The true flock know their Shepherd wherever and whenever that Shepherd shows up. Yes, the Resurrection of Jesus really happens, happens indeed!

Every Good Shepherd is the second FACE of the triune experience of Divinity. Every Good Shepherd is the Beloved Offspring of the Infinite Silence, the Ultimate Message in human flesh, the New Adam or Eve who knows the Eternal as Love and in that context lives the full ambiguities of a human life. Perhaps you have met some Good Shepherds who have laid down part or all of their lives for some fragile sheep like, for example, you.

The post The Good Shepherd Lives first appeared on Realistic Living.

This is a quote from a book, Crossing the Unknown Sea by David Whyte, (page 75) and it states exactly what was happening to me at age 20 as a senior in college in 1952.

In order to share with you the depth of this shift, I need to brag a bit about my accomplishments in mathematics and physics at that tender age. I had taken every course in mathematics that was offered in my high school and made an A in all of them.

In the summer of 1949 I took and passed tests for college credit for two courses. This enabled me in the fall of my freshman year to be taking and mastering a college calculus course along with some senior engineering students that were struggling with that required course for the second time. In mathematics and physics, I was the star student at the university then called Oklahoma A & M. I continued making A grades in every mathematics and physics course offered, and in my senior year I was asked to teach a freshman course in mathematics. I represented my university at a national mathematics conference where I met mathematicians and physicists who were way more expert than me, one of whom insisted that I read a book he pulled out of a library self for me about Einstein’s theory of relativity. At that time this revolution in physics was still filtering down to places like Oklahoma. My mind was permanently blown by this revolution is thought about the basic foundations of our cosmos.

I had been expected by my parents and peers to proceed with graduate degrees in math and physics and become some sort of teacher or professional in that field. So it was a big deal for me that I had also “begun to form a philosophy of existence that demanded a larger language than the scientific one.”

To the surprise of my parents and many of my peers, I abandoned my scientific track and entered Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas in March of 1953. I chose that school because a revolution in existential theology was taking place there, and I had met a Perkins professor, Joe Mathews, with whom I wanted to study. In my first quarter I managed to enroll in a course with this professor. I never worked harder in a course in my whole life, and I was embarrassed, because with my poor language and spelling skills I ended up with a C grade. I also had to take a remedial philosophy course which also worked my being with unfamiliar content. On top of that, I was an outsider in that pastor-training community. No one I met there matched the sort of scientific nerd that I felt myself to be.

I became what my father correctly predicted, a third-rate preacher rather than a first-rate mathematician. My first church was a sort of disaster. Half this rural east-Texas Methodist congregation thought it was great having an enthusiastic young paster who gave them the best he could do with recreated Paul Tillich sermons, but the other half of that congregation wanted to get rid of me. All this was taking place while I was finishing seminary as well as getting adjusted to married life, complete with two baby boys. But my lifetime in “a larger language than the scientific one” was on its way.

So as I headed off to seminary in 1953, I was seeking a larger language, a contemplative language with which to make a deeper approach to Truth. David Whyte talking about his own life in the paragraphs that followed the above quote says:

“Somewhere out there beyond (my current work) was another work and another life that would support those farther explorations. . . . Every path, no matter how diligently we follow it, can lead to staleness . . . We might reach dizzying heights . . . the top floor . . . but if we lose our horizon and the excitement of that horizon, our high office . . . can seem like a gilded cage.” (Whyte, David, Crossing the Unknown Sea (Riverhead Books, New York: 2001) page 75-76

So what does has this larger-language revolution become for me 60 years later as I write about it at age 84? I am now very clear that there are two very different approached to truth: the scientific approach to truth, an approach that Ken Wilber calls the “It” approach, and the existential or contemplative approach to truth, an approach that Wilber calls the “I” approach. I would like to share with you this very deep discovery with a video-recorded talk I gave on the subject:

http://realisticliving.org/videos.htm

Scroll down to the video entitled The Enigma of Consciousness Workshop Opening Talk. This is the best talk I have given on this topic. It is a brief contemplative talk. Perhaps it will be worth your time.

If you prefer reading, I have also addressed this topic in an earlier blog post:

https://realisticliving.org/New/contemplative-truth/#more-33

By the way the Realistic Living blog has been thoroughly redone, all the previous Realistic Living Pointers are posted there. Take a look; send me a comment. I will answer it.

Finally, I have published a whole book, The Enigma of Consciousness, the first part of which is on this topic of the approaches to Truth.

http://www.realisticliving.org/PDF/EnigmaFlyer.pdf

If you don’t already own this book, well you should (my opinion, of course).

The post A Larger Language first appeared on Realistic Living.