Number One Hundred and Four

From the first day of life there is one plan for us -- to learn.  We learn from breaking; from feeling lost, untethered to the "whole."

The dark comes, early or late.  We learn from walking in it, knowing the morning will not come again in this life.  The plan was to learn by breaking -- the pain held, carried this long way by some ferocious miracle.

Number One Hundred and Three

Hell was invented by priests to earn power over the flock.  The devil is no more real than dragons or gargoyles.  Yet while Dante's mythical inferno was scaring Christians back to church, the spiritual disease that makes hell on earth was a runaway plague in Europe.  That disease is the belief in good and evil.  It is the dense and heavy fabric of judgment, separating souls from each other.  And locking them in a prison of anger, contempt, and violence.  Judgment dehumanizes; strips souls of beauty and worth.  Right-wrong, worthy-unworthy -- each judgment is a brick in the walls of our own self-made Hades.

Number One Hundred and Two

Accessing deep wisdom, gathered over many lifetimes, is a spiritual skill.  It involves listening to atman -- the part of our soul that remains in the spirit world during each incarnation.  Each choice -- even early in life -- is made either by listening or not listening.

Listening starts with waiting, and not acting.  Waiting for the impulse -- whatever it is -- to pass.  Waiting to see what lies behind each drive -- the fear or the desire.  At the moment of impulse, we access atman by entering the quiet place, the wise place.  Letting the feeling rise and fall.  Listening for the whisper of what we have always known.

Number One Hundred and One

Aloneness has a Janus character. One face seems grounded and content; the other full of fear, watching the specter of an empty universe. Being alone -- strong and content -- depends on being able to hear the oceanic connection to "the whole."  When we hear only silence, or the thrumming of an inchoate world, the aloneness is empty and frightening.

It's as if we were out to sea, trying to catch the sounds of a ship-to-shore radio.  At times voices can be heard, and we know we are somehow connected.  Then we get nothing but squeals and static.  In truth we choose what we listen to.

Number One Hundred

There are three kinds of desire: Authentic desire is any wish or seeking that is in alignment with spiritual values -- particularly connectedness and universal consciousness. Authentic desire leads the soul toward the work it came here to do.

Venial desire is the pursuit of simple pleasures -- without significant negative consequences.  It's enjoyment for the sake of enjoyment, a sweet indulgence in what our senses give us.

Compensatory desire seeks experiences that mask, numb, suppress, or control pain.  It often takes the form of addiction or compulsion.  Its role in suppression makes it reinforcing and hard to give up.  This desire seeks without concern for outcomes.-- the damage to body, spirit, and relationships.

Identifying the type of desire is critical to mindful decision making.

Number Ninety Nine

A personal god is a concept, a human invention. Consciousness is god. All of it. Consciousness creates  conditions to provide for its own learning and growth. It creates each universe so that universe can, in turn, shape and advance consciousness.

Number Ninety Eight

The highest spiritual purpose is not insight, not letting go of the body or things of this world.  It is not piercing the amnesia inherent in each return to physical life.  It is, rather, the awareness of the spiritual choices built into each moment.  The choice to listen, to have compassion, to attend, to be open, to know and feel the pain, to do what connects, to say the deepest truth, to do good. Mindfulness, at the most practical level, is about paying attention to now so the spiritual choice can be recognized, and sometimes taken.

Number Ninety Seven

In the place we gather after each life, no one is missing.  Through the long night of an incarnation, we look for each other.  We enter and leave each other's lives in ways that were foreseen and arranged.

When the play is finished, we go home.  We take what we have learned back to "the whole," back to the light.  We greet the one who was our brother in one life, and a father, daughter, friend in others.  We greet a lover who left early, and in another play survived us.

When the play is finished, we enter the circle of those who taught us, learned from us, fought for us, killed us.

Number Ninety Six

Pain is a path to truth.  It refracts light to reveal things not otherwise seen.  Pain reveals the invisible ties, the vast network of energy that connects everything.  In the heart of pain and loss is love.  By running from pain, we run from love.  By avoiding pain, we lose the pathways to connection.  In the heart of pain is a moment when the universe -- and our place within it -- finally becomes visible.

Number Ninety Five

Beauty has one purpose: to dissolve whatever holds us separate -- from each other, from every fractured rock that makes the earth, from every star in the sky. Beauty is the breath that joins us. Beauty is the dream -- in this dark sleep -- of a place where every rock, every planet, every star, every soul collides to make the next, more true and perfect version of itself.

Number Ninety Four

Joy teaches as much as pain.  Joy -- the passionate living of this moment -- is the window through which can be glipsed a soul's essence; a soul's purpose.

Joy is not bought, and there is no price to pay later.  Joy is not found; it is entered as one enters the moment.  It is held as one holds a child.

Joy is a path made of the now that leads to a center -- a center that always holds, always is there, always tells the truth.

Number Ninety Three

We especially must love our flaws. But loving the flaw is not living the flaw.  Loving the impulse to hurt isn't the act of hurting. What we do matters.  It is how we love everything outside ourselves. Choosing to be kind -- when everything inside demands cruelty -- is an act of love toward another.  Accepting the desire to be cruel is an act of love toward the self.

Number Ninety Two

Each incarnation requires the soul to struggle with a key flaw -- addiction, shame, fear, hubris, narcissism -- which in fact is a gift. It is the illness we have chosen, the work we have selected to do.  The flaw both drives us to catastrophe, and lights a path toward the learning we came here for.

Our virtues, which we celebrate, and weave into our identity, are less important than the flaw.  Our virtues are the toolbox we were given for this struggle.  And it's the struggle that matters above all.

Number Ninety One

The lessons of loss begin early.  A child's favorite toy is left somewhere and never found.  A parent turns angry or disappears, striking at a child's feelings of safety or worth.  Over time the losses mount -- people, places, things that were loved -- sometimes losing even faith or trust or sense of self.

There is nothing we have that can't be taken away.

The lesson of loss is not surrender, not detachment.  It is not to prepare for the worst, not to numb or rid the self of desire.  The lesson of loss is a more perfect form of love; a love that requires nothing, that depends on nothing -- not even the presence of the beloved.

The lesson is to love the essence and not the object.  The object can be lost, changed, eroded by time.  The essence exists always in consciousness -- outside of space and time -- and is the true, immutable core of what and who we love.

Loss leads to a form of love that is unchanged by fading beauty or scars of time; a love that is unchanged even by destruction, by absence or death. Loss teaches how, eternally, we hold the beloved.

Number Ninety

Every soul is a witness.  We see at first our own life, where we can be the elemental observer without thought or emotion.  We witness through a cloud of feeling and cognition, but it obscures the simple river of experience, the flow of what can be seen and heard and touched.  We collect -- images, events, stories.  We hold, individually and collectively, light touching the Tigris at a wide bend, the feeling of wet clay spinning on the first flywheel, the sound of wind susurrant through an ancient corn field.

Every soul is a witness.  First for the self, and then for the other.  The other needs to be seen; the love and pain mirrored, known.  The soul is incomplete, untouched, its work caught in the limits of the "I" -- without a witness.

The witness sees every fall, every getting up -- deepening what's real because there's more than one of us who carries it.

Number Eighty Nine

Human emotion is central to our education on this planet.  To learn from fear and loss, to learn the work of love -- how to care while in pain.  How to see each other while bent with hurt or grief.

Emotions lie; we know that.  But they also hold truth.  Because there is an emotion of rightness: seeing the beautiful, the harmonious; seeing the opposites that belong together, the unseverable relationship between loss and hope, failure and discovery.

The emotion of rightness comes as a dancer moves in a certain way, as the sculptor chooses a certain shape.  It comes while reading the perfect lines of Steven's On Mere Being.  It comes as we finally say the truth that took so long to find.

The emotion of rightness is a sometimes dim, sometimes brilliant lantern -- lighting our way.

Number Eighty Eight

All human relationship takes one of two forms -- acceptance or control.  Acceptance is unconditional; it is seeing the other as a whole, with love.  Control always involves the use of force; control destroys love because it requires the other to give.

Whether control takes the form of small, coercive manipulations or complete enslavement, this is the same continuum of what Buber called the "I-It" relationship.  The other is not seen; the other exists only to serve the needs of self.

The verbs tell everything: One takes control; one gives love.  At the far extreme of control-based relationships lies sociopathy; at the far end of acceptance lies belonging -- to the whole, to all of consciousness.

Number Eighty Seven

The last sunrise illumines the east.  The last day begins.  Soon all plans will end; the hope for what the next day brings will end.

In the window a bird sings to no one.  It is over; this life.  The body's heavy burden is lifted; the last lesson either learned or unlearned.

Now is the gathering of moments, of every choice.  We listen to every uttered word, the truth and the deception, feeling what the words brought -- whatever pain or comfort.

Now is the gathering of every touch -- for violence, healing, or love.

And now, in the darkness at the end of the last day, the ones arrive who know us.  They have been there in a hundred lives.  Soon we begin again.

Number Eighty Six

The objects around us appear to exist in the moment.  But they contain all the elements of the future and the past.  They exist -- at the same time -- in every form they have taken, or will ever take.

Soul consciousness can hold the past and the present.  And when not in human form, can extend backward through every incarnation.  Like rocks and suns, soul consciousness contains all future selves, all future development.  But this is hidden, compartmentalized to create the illusion of linearity.  Because all learning, all development happens simultaneously.

Number Eighty Five

Ultimately, we are here to create.  First one learns to love with a love that holds everything, every element, every facet of a particular "thou,"  Love is attention: seeing and knowing thoroughly.  Nothing can be created without love and attention. We create by loving and knowing something so deeply that we cause it to evolve, change, become.  We do that whether we are creating a story, a sculpture, or a universe.  Creating is the outcome of love.