The Mothers of God

I language the world for a living. And though I hate to admit it (because it’s bad for business) it really can’t be done. As a writer, lecturer, and singer-songwriter, my entire career has been a quixotic battle to achieve the impossible. I strive to express what cannot be expressed. I oversell and under-deliver every single day.

            And yet I keep trying. Because you get close. Once in a while you pierce the fog with the bright shard of an idea, a fortunate turn of phrase, an apt metaphor. You get close to naming the mystery. You almost sing truth. But stepping off stage you know you missed it. Your old friend disappointment comes to visit. You didn’t get it, not really. But on the calendar a string of speaking events, concerts, and writing deadlines loom before you, like downstream towns on a river journey – chances to try again. You’ll do better next time.

            I guess all work is like this. Raising children, starting a business, writing books, mastering any craft. You begin with the end in mind, or at least what you imagine the end to be, and you get busy. But you don’t really know what you’re doing, or where this is all going, or what value any of it will have. You have nothing to guide you but your gut sense that this is worthwhile, that it matters, that it will somehow help others meet their own nameless needs. Because that is one thing you do know – that all work is service, that we are all here to play our part in a symphony of infinite complexity and breathtaking beauty. Seen this way, life begins to shimmer with significance, and you begin to see your choices as instruments wielded not by your narrow self-interest but by the cosmos itself. It no longer feels like you alone are doing this. It’s more like you are being led or called or compelled by something not you. Maybe the way we show up and offer our gifts is how the universe shows up and offers its gifts. Everything in the foreground is the mouthpiece through which the background depths speak. When you get out of your own way your true voice emerges.

            When you begin to understand this better, you begin to relax. You let go of the illusion of control and you renounce the need to be perfect. You know that who you are, how you are, and what you are is enough. And with a sense of play you go about improving your work in a thousand little ways, not because what you did last time was lousy – it wasn’t – but because something better is trying to emerge through you, as you. And who are you to interfere with that?

            It’s liberating to know that you don’t have to have all the answers before you begin. It’s inspiring to know that your own nameless longing is the same nameless longing that courses through everything. And it’s empowering to know that our private suffering connects us to one another in a web of what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “inter-being.” We are never alone. There is no such thing as alone.

            As we deepen into the realization that our yearning is not a private pang of deficiency, but the cosmos longing to give birth to itself through us, we surrender, let go, smile, and shift into optimism and wonderment. Being a witness and a participant of this great unfolding is our highest bliss.

            The 13^th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart put it this way: “What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the Son of God 1,400 years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.”

            And 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi put it this way in his poem Each Note:

God picks up the reed-flute world and blows.

Each note is a need coming through one of us

a passion, a longing-pain.

Remember the lips

where the wind-breath originated,

and let your note be clear.

Don’t try to end it.

Be your note.

I’ll show you how it’s enough.

Go up on the roof at night

in this city of the soul.

Let everyone climb on their roofs

and sing their notes!

Sing loud!

When we live authentically, answering the call and courageously trading security for the danger of self-realization, we honor ourselves and the universal source in one fell swoop. How can this not lead to rewards unimagined in more timid hours?

We do not breathe – we are breathed. We do not sing– we are sung. We do not make art – art makes us. As Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” And when you begin to experience life this way – not as a private event but as a wave in a boundless sea of waves – you slip into illumined stillness and from there everything is possible.

It is the role of the artist to bring forth these realizations in ever new forms relevant for their time and place, and to show us our oneness. Art connects us all in a binding ritual and reminds us of our common humanity. Art crosses all borders, no, annihilates all borders. The storytellers and film makers who reveal our secrets through the lives of their characters, the musicians who color our silence with sound, the poets who say the unsayable, the painters who show what cannot be seen, the sculptors who wrest shape from shapelessness – artists re-present the ineffable power of our own lives to us over and over again, and in this way affirm us in our limitlessness and infinite beauty.

As Meister Eckhart said, we are here to give birth to God – the formless source that takes form as our thoughts, our bodies, our words, our actions, and the majesty of the entire cosmos. “God is always needing to be born,” he wrote, and he was right. As we midwife one another’s birthing, and as we endure the sometimes agonizing process of our own birthing, we honor ourselves, each other, and the sacred source. Our lives are the instruments through which the universe sings. And as Rumi wrote, “Let your note be clear…be your note. I’ll show you how it’s enough.”

The Power of Silence

There is just so much noise.

We are limitless in our capacity to fill the silence with so much clutter that even God can no longer hear himself. If there is a God I mean. Why don’t we debate that again. That sounds fun.

Humans invented writing about 5,000 years ago. But we’ve been talking for far longer than that. No one knows when humans first formed words with our mouths. 50,000 years ago? 100,000 years ago? But one thing’s for sure – once we started, we never stopped. That’s a lot of chit chat.

It cannot be denied that language and its capacity to externalize thought has been a tremendously transformative development in human evolution. The art of language has in many ways unlocked the cage door and released us into wider and wider freedoms. Yet it is also true that words trap us in limited and limiting definitions, squeezing the uncarved whole of the experiential realm into lifeless categories and concepts. Language promises freedom, then becomes another prison. Words obscure as much as they reveal. The more we talk, the more we feel the essence of this mysterious existence slipping away.

From Concepts to Conflict

In many creation myths, primal man is given the task of naming the world. In Genesis 2 Adam gives names to all the animals. In the Mayan Popul Vuh, God goes through several iterations of proto-humans before he arrives at the final model, one that could finally remember and say his name. The ability to allot a word to every little thing in creation seems primary to the formation of human consciousness. But this great gift costs us something. By naming the world we also ascribe hierarchy, setting all things in opposition to each other. This is especially evident when we divide humanity into ethnicities, races, and tribes. These are of course useful concepts, to a point. But they too readily facilitate conflict. The words we call ourselves, and the words we call each other, like flags, set us into unavoidable strife. When we identify more with our tribe than with the whole of humanity, when we lose our capacity to empathize and see our unity, we descend into ethnocentrism, racism, hatred, genocide, and war.

Twentieth century teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti put it this way: “When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why this is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.”

It is in this same spirit that John Lennon sang, “Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” Language, concepts, and categories kill.

The Illusion of Self

           

Once we cut the whole of the world into parts, we didn’t stop there – we turned the blade on ourselves. When human consciousness became conditioned to hierarchical multiplicity rather than unity, it’s only natural that self-awareness would calcify into ego, becoming the ruling monolith of our lives. Words like I, me, and mine create a fiction – a phantom of enormous power. As Spiderman reminds us, with great power comes great responsibility. But the ego has yet to embody that wisdom. Instead, the ego exerts most of its energy on self-preservation, self-aggrandizement, and criticism of others. It takes responsibility for nothing. If everybody else is wrong then I am, by default, right.

Everybody’s a critic. Emmet Fox wrote that, “Criticism is an indirect form of self-boasting.” By pointing out everything that’s wrong with everything and everyone around us, we construct solidity. We know who we are by knowing what we are against.

And then there’s our meticulous tallying of every perceived slight. In his book Grace and Grit philosopher Ken Wilber writes that, “The ego…is kept in existence by a collection of emotional insults; it carries its personal bruises as the fabric of its very existence. It actively collects hurts and insults, even while resenting them, because without its bruises, it would be, literally, nothing.”  It’s important to bring this process out of the shadows of unconsciousness and into the light. Notice how we use our perceived woundedness and victim status as glue to hold our fictional self together. What if we let go of our tired grievances? Who would we be without our resentments and self-righteousness? For many people, that question is simply too frightening to consider. But the answer is simple. We would be free.

The Power of Silence

           

            There is an alternative to this madness. And it is nearer to us than our jugular vein.

            The first thing we need to do is stop. Just stop.

            Stop clothing every experience, every passing impression, every iota of awareness in language. You don’t have to name everything. You don’t have to reduce every dynamic and nuanced experience to a concept. You don’t have to compare and judge everything on some arbitrary and self-serving hierarchical scale. Let it be. Learn to be still. There is a Zen Buddhist saying: “Don’t seek enlightenment. Just get rid of all your opinions.”

            Meditation is a good idea. By practicing the art of silence and no-thinking, we learn to slip beneath the waves of our incessant thought stream and descend into the depths of our own stillness. Each of us carries an infinite boundlessness within us. It goes by various names in the world’s many wisdom traditions – Atman, Buddha-consciousness, the Kingdom of Heaven. But they all agree. It is not somewhere out there. It is within us.

            It is what we are.

            We do not have to struggle to become something different. We have only to let fall away the hindrances that inhibit our awareness of our primal oneness. “God is not attained by a process of addition to the soul,” wrote 13^th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, “but by a process of subtraction.” What we must subtract is the busy mind and its addiction to language and concepts. What we do is so much more important than what we think. Who we are is so much more important that what we say. Instead of delivering a learned treatise on theology or arguing yet again with the Pharisees and Sadducees, Jesus knelt and washed feet.

            And didn’t say a word.

The Sounding Joy

[This article first appeared in my A to Zen column in the November/December issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Every day at 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. the bells ring out from the monastery.

Perched on a mesa overlooking Mission Valley, nestled in the quiet San Diego neighborhood of Normal Heights, the Carmelite Monastery is home to the daughters of St. Teresa of Avila, the 16^th century Spanish mystic. The nuns live simple lives of silence and contemplative prayer. Keeping with tradition, the bells are rung by a different nun every day so their rhythm and cadence varies – an aural expression of the unique human hands on the other end of the rope.

These cloistered mystics have little interaction with the outside world, yet the sound of the bells penetrates every fiber of matter in a two mile radius – the homes and bodies of thousands of people. For 82 years, twice a day, nearly 60,000 times, these bells have startled an entire community out of their distracted, busy minds and into the sacred thrum of this present moment; the ringing clarity of the here and now. Sound does that. It gets your attention. It passes unimpeded through every cell of your body and leaves you changed.

The Book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning God spoke the world into being. He could have pointed his mighty finger or simply intended the universe into existence with his divine mind, but instead he chose sound and language as his creative medium – the original spoken word artist. “Let there be light,” he said. And there was light. And it was good.

In an act of alchemy the spoken word transforms intangible thoughts into physical vibrations that travel through the air and alter distant objects, even the fabric of reality itself. Words have power. The well-intentioned nursery rhyme, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” turns out to be disingenuous if not downright false. While it is true that no one can shame us without our permission, it is also true that violent hate speech greases the skids to actual violence. Stemming one curtails the other. Words, it turns out, are real things.

This is why the Buddha made Right Speech one of the eight steps of the Noble Eightfold Path. If we are serious about transforming consciousness, then along with increased mindfulness, right action, and meditation, we must learn to use words thoughtfully, compassionately, and truthfully. As Don Miguel Ruiz pointed out in The Four Agreements, our negative self-talk is the first place to start. If the spiritual practice of being impeccable with our word is to bear any fruit, it must begin with self-affirmations strong enough to counteract a lifetime of habitual self-loathing and denigration.

And by the way, in case you were wondering, when a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, it does not make a sound. The impact of the tree makes waves in the air that travel a mile in five seconds, or 767 miles per hour. These waves cannot properly be called “sound” until they are perceived by a hearer. When they hit our eardrum our brain converts these waves of soundless energy into an experience called “sound.” Sound, like color, exists only in the mind of the perceiver, not in the outer world. Perception is an inside job.

So it is that sound connects us to each other and to the outer world in an intimate, symbiotic way. We co-create the perceptual field in concert with the stimuli around us. We are all creators who hear and speak the world into being.

Every time the nuns ring the bells, despite their vows of silence and chastity, they join with us and with the world in a way that transcends the categories of corporeal and spiritual. Sound joins us to each other and to ourselves by avowing our boundless, indefinable nature. The toll of the bell moves through us and shifts us on a molecular level. Throughout world philosophy this truth is affirmed – the soul itself is a musical harmony, and the sound emitted by all things impacts the physical and metaphysical composition of all other things. In this way, we are all one in sound. May we have the ears to hear the needs of others. May we speak the truth, and sing our love. May we choose to create instead of destroy. May we repeat the sounding joy in this and all seasons.