Combining Heavenly Know-How with Down to Earth Be-Who

Picking up where we lifted off yesterday, how does one realize what one knows and integrate what one has experienced of the Divine? As I mentioned in the Coonifesto, it's easy enough to have spiritual experiences (!?), but how do we make them "stick," or transform them from transient states into stable traits, or (¶)?

It's easy. We don't. Nor could we ever do so, any more than we could build a tree or grow a carrot or bake a creative thought from scratch. Philalethes: "The whole process which we employ closely resembles that followed by Nature in the bowels of the earth, except that it is much shorter." Think of a baby that grows up into a normal civilized human being. In so doing, he is compressing 13.7 billion years of cosmic evolution into 20 or 30 years. But why stop at normality? Why not go "all the way?"

Really, all we can do is create the conditions, and then get out of the way of the same energies that turned dirt into Dostoyevsky or mud into Mozart or sh** into Shakespeare -- which is what "right living" is all about. It reminds me of when people "try" to get pregnant. Often it only happens after they've given up. I've even heard it said that it's not uncommon for people to adopt a child, thinking they'll never get pregnant, only to become pregnant once they've given up hope.

I can't tell you how hopeless I am. No (temporal) ambition at all. No hope that things will ever change. No glorious ideas of a better future. Besides, now that everyone is famous, anonymity is the new celebrity. It's enough that I'm famous in the tiny Coonosphere. Anything beyond that would be infamy. "Let not him who desires this knowledge for the purpose of procuring wealth and pleasure think that he will ever attain to it" (The Sophic Hydrolith). I only ask: be it thy will that we be kept still knowing and loving thee, and that we may never fall away from this blest way of life (Hermes).

In my utterly hopeless condition, I try only to burrow more deeply into the present, and again, let the rest take care of the rust. Call it blind I AMbition. Let the dead bury the dead, and let the unborn.... let them do whatever they need to do to become born, but certainly don't abort them or feed them steroids. I don't put them on a timetable. They'll arrive at their own pace, so long as I take care of my deportment, which is to fertilize the present. In fact, Christian hope paradoxically arises specifically from a kind of liberating hopelessness about this world. To place your hope in the world is to misplace it. Thus the intrinsically luciferian nature of the Obama phenomenon (luciferian is not necessarily satanic; it is more the perversion of light, as opposed to its absence).

I live very simply, because a complicated life begins to place barriers between yourself and human reality, or your feet and the ground. At the moment, I'm reviewing the section in The Spiritual Ascent entitled Integration, and it has many helpful pointers along these lines. Again, you will find that the insights are universal and that they apply to all traditions, since each tradition is "composed" of Truth as such. Being that they are Timelessly True, they are as invariant vis-a-vis the human realm as the Platonic truths of mathematics are with regard to the physical plane.

For example, Hujwiri tells us from across the centuries that "the Sufi is he whose thought keeps pace with his foot, i.e., he is entirely present: his soul is where his body is, and his body is where his soul is, and his soul is where his foot is, and his foot is where his soul is. This is the sign of presence without absence."

Like so many passages in this book, this is the whole teaching boiled down to a single phrase. You could identify any number of biblical passages that say the same thing in a slightly different way, and I'm sure Nomo will. But let's stand back and look at the big picture: what is the whole point of Christianity? It is that God took on mankind, that the Ultimate Principle, the Absolute, is present here in the human flesh.

But it's one thing to "know" this, something else entirely to realize it. This is why the saints are so important, for they are the realization, or earthly fulfillment, of the doctrine. In turn, this is why we learn more from them by "watching them tie their boot-laces" than from their words per se; or, bear in mind that their communications will always consist of "words and music," and that one must have an ear attuned to the latter to gain the full benefit from the former. Or, put it this way: the truth can be told in such a way as to become a lie, due to the unworthiness of the container. Again, the dreadful Deepak Chopra comes to mind.

By the way, one reason I was attracted to Sri Aurobindo was that his philosophy is very much this worldly. Enlightenment must not only take place in the body, but it must transform the body, i.e., recalcitrant matter, which is "resistant" to being spiritualized, so to speak. Again, think of how easy it is to have a spiritual experience "above" the body. But when you come back down, you're left with the same unreformed physical being, i.e., certain dense and mindless patterns that seem "opaque" to the light.

It's much, much more challenging to just be a regular guy in this world, and to sharpen your realization against the rocks of adversity. This is why I never trust "professional gurus" who not only don't have a real job, but are very likely unemployable due to the extent of their cosmic narcissism. Jesus was a carpenter. He worked with his hands and with natural materials. If you meet the Buddha on the road, first take a look at his hands. If you don't see callouses, or at least some dirt under the fingernails -- worse yet, if you see a manicure -- walk away.

This is why it was so easy for me to see the parallels between Aurobindo and Christianity, because in a way, Aurobindo is Vedanta with a Christian twist, while esoteric Christianity is a sort of "Christian yoga." In both cases, the focus is again on embodiment. The point is not to "escape" this embodiment, but to incarnate fully. Our incarnation is God's.... I don't know what the word would be, but it is analogous to saying that our inspiration is his expiration. God exwholes into us, we inwhole God, and this is how we oxidize the blood that courses through the arteries of the cosmos. Real Men take their realization into marriage, into child rearing, into work, into the constant battle that is this world. The world is a test that never ends. Like Michael Jordan, God puts his shorts on one leg at a time, despite his incredible vertical leap.

Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Here again, there is the upper vertical and the lower vertical, the celestial and the terrestrial, spirit and body, heaven and earth. It's easy enough for God's will to be done "above," where it is done "automatically," so to speak. The trick is how we allow it to be done in the herebelow, for there are many layers of influence between the top and bottom. Again, it's more a matter of getting out of the way, isn't it? Benjamin Whichcote: "Our Conversation is in Heaven, according to the Measure and Degree of our present State and Condition.... When we set ourselves to do the Will of God here, then Heaven is come down into the World..."

We mustn't wait until we are dead. Meister Eckhart: "This may well happen while the soul is in the body. I say more: while yet in the body a soul may reach oblivion of its travail not to remember it again." In other words, there can be a kind of egobliteration and "resurrection" in this life, or at least its "first fruits." For any transcendence is evidence of all transcendence, which is to say transcendence of all -- which is another way of saying resurrection, or at least rebirth.

William Law: "What could man have to do with the perfection of God as the rule of his life, unless the truth and reality of the divine nature was in him?" The Russian Pilgrim: "It is possible for man to get back to that primitive contemplative state in which he issued from the hands of his Creator." Why? Because you weren't issued in the past; rather, you are issued afresh each moment. You know, make your resurrections in advance, and don't forget your peaceport.... De-part and bewholed like in them seers' dialogues of old, then aim your eros for the heart of the world!

Hakuin goes even further -- it's not only senseless to wait until death for the tome of your life, but it is the most culpable negligence. It's a kind of philosophical malpractice. It's worse than a crime, it is a cosmic blunder.

Nope. "He that beholds the sun of righteousness arising upon the horizon of his soul with healing in its wings, and chasing away all that misty darkness" -- such a regular feller cares not "to pry into heaven's secrets, and to search the hidden rolls of eternity, there to see the whole plot of his salvation; for he views it transacted upon the inward stage of his own soul, and reflecting upon himself, he may behold a heaven opened from within, and a throne set up in his soul, and an almighty Saviour sitting upon it, and reigning within him.... It is not an airy speculation of heaven as a thing to come that can satisfy his hungry desires, but the real possession of it even in this life" (John Smith the Platonist).

Amen for a child's job! (And vice versa.)