...recognized.[i]
-Dag Hammarskjold
 
There is a sphericity to the experience of life, accessed through learning to expand the attention, or arriving through the instantaneous illusion shattering strike of baraka (grace), that can hold a field of interpenetrating simultaneity between the part and the whole, time and eternity, the horizontal and vertical axis, and the lower and higher being parts of the human. “This reconstitution of the scale of things” comes about by way of what the Western Wisdom tradition terms, remorse of conscience.[ii] 
 
Remorse of conscience becomes the necessary, albeit costly, turn-key to fulfill the creative calling of our species. Mirroring the words of the poet David Whyte:
 
“... to be human
is to become visible
while carrying
what is hidden
as a gift to others...”[iii]
 
The fault-line coursing through the irreconcilable lower and higher being parts of the human machinery[iv] becomes the cruciform apex of the Lenten pilgrimage as remorse of conscience fills the crack between the poles of these tectonic plates of our makeup, widening the chasm, engulfing the ego, producing an activated middle, joining the mouth of our will with the mouth of a higher, wholly integral will.
 
This union or rather, unification, is the access point for the birth of real, or, objective conscience. Where our lives become disposed of rather than reflected upon. Connected to all through the eyes of faith-objectively accessed through sensation in the unified web of a field the Christian path hankers after as, Resurrection. Life lived from the resonant note of an inner song pulsing throughout, everything. And as we correspond and coincide with its rhythm, we awaken its likeness in everything we touch. Holographically sounded through as persons. Mirroring the ancient psalmist’s words-Deep calls unto deep-living our lives as verbs, in the great Logoic “resurrection parade.”[v]
 
In Conscience all are the same; all of us in our Conscience touch the same place and are open to the same world. This means that people can understand one another and their lives and be harmonized, but only to the extent that they are able to be open to their Conscience. I said our conscience; I should have said “conscience” because it is not a private possession of any one of us. That of which I can say “I,” “you” is the way to it-the way that we have to find in ourselves. Attention is the extraordinary instrument that is able to make that journey, a journey that must always go through uncharted territory because no knowledge will help us in this journey to that part of ourselves where we are able to stand in front of the possibilities of the Whole. Although that vision of the Whole is very remote from us such as we are now, something can nevertheless be transmitted to our ordinary state. It may help us to see this if we compare Conscience itself to the light of the sun. Some light passes even through the thickest clouds, and because of this light, everyone is sensitive to the need to find Conscience. However much we may run away from what it implies, and however much we have been encouraged, and encouraged ourselves, to prefer dreams to reality, something in us cannot be quite at peace with that. That “not quite at peace” state presents itself to us in the form of some question. If we face that question with the determination to find an answer, we are led step-by-step to the point where we realize that it is not in what we do but in consciousness of what we are that the transformation has to be accomplished.[vi]
  
However, like the intelligence of the ancient, extensive and ever spreading network of mycelium underground, the buried seed of conscience must remain buried to crack the mushrooming code that is human flourishing.
 
Meaning we humans must not only abandon our precious and valued methods of looking back at ourselves as arbitrarily measured objects; digging ourselves up to determine whether we are successes or failures. But we must also internalize the humiliation of accepting that we don’t know how to abandon this incessancy for asking and answering the isolated notion of how we’re doing essentially every moment of our lives.   
 
Seeing does not come from thinking. It comes from the shock at the moment when, feeling an urgency to know what is true, I suddenly realize that my thinking mind cannot perceive reality. To understand what I really am at this moment, I need sincerity and humility, and an unmasked exposure that I do not know. This would mean to refuse nothing, exclude nothing, and enter into the experience of discovering what I think, what I sense, what I wish, all at this very moment.[vii]
 
In other words, we must fertilize the ground of our lives by bearing the pain of the accurate seeing of our own hypocrisy, allowing that felt sense of remorse to become the placental access to receiving assistance from Divine Mercy. Not as an attempt to escape our human condition and get on with “successful living” but as a permanent ground for receiving, becoming and transmitting Wisdom. Here, remorse of conscience transmutes itself into compassion, or the seeing of the heart-conscience as the impartial and non-judgmental bearing of our own and a part of the collective pain of the planet.   
 
Where do we begin such an undertaking of mining for this buried seed of conscience? 
 
The short answer is right where we are. Unfortunately, though, the simplicity of that answer can’t be conveyed with all due force without first looking at the dilemma of how our brains (and therefore our culture) typically locate the idea of freedom. On top of recognizing that we’re not actually really here.   
 
The now late metaphysician and contemplative philosopher Beatrice Bruteau contrasts two types of freedom that correlate strongly with the Western Wisdom Tradition’s notions of acquired versus real/objective conscience (in the way described above by J.G. Bennett). 
 
“I make a distinction between choice-freedom and creative freedom,” she writes, “The stimulus for choice-freedom originates in the environment, which presents me with alternatives: should I order steak or fish, pie or cake? The various foods are there in the outer environment, and my own hunger as part of my inner environment puts pressure on me to make a choice. What is specific about choice-freedom is that both alternatives among which you may choose and the inner urgency to make such choices come from the environment-where environment includes feelings that are inside yourself. Usually when people think of freedom, they have in mind this kind of ability to make choices among alternatives.”[viii]
 
‘Choice freedom’ as the modus operandi of the best of our culture and mind, in isolation from the heart and the collective, cannot not check how it’s doing by digging up the seed of conscience-it does so to keep it in the cultural field of pseudo light, or acquired conscience. That is to say, acquired conscience is always informed by a culturally conditioned metric and dependence on self-reflective consciousness and its default attachment to the emotional programs of happiness of seeking security, survival, power, control, affection, esteem or a combination of any or all of the above.[ix] 
 
The best that choice freedom can produce, in terms of moving humans towards higher purpose, is culturally conditioned duty-externally motivated or internally conditioned action arising from a place of separation. In this place, living conversations regarding human obligations and responsibility are eventually, if not mainly, seen as burdens; rather than privileges of service energized from generative and ever-renewable energy sources, sustained by inspiration instead of anxiety ridden pressure, be it externally or internally.[x] This is because the best reward duty can promise as I’m referring to it here, is an ego stroke. Honor is equated with winning and the best dying can become is a martyrdom of exclusion moving us further from our shared purpose as makers of wholeness.   
 
In fact, Bruteau equates acts of evil as arising from the agent’s desire (as an isolated finite ego) to keep itself alive.[xi] Self-preservation-always a form of choice-freedom reacting to external stimuli, or internal anxiety, unable to act originally or against the grain of culturally conditioned morality or group pressure. We see the practical examples and consequences of this at every level of society. In fact, we confuse the identification with our stories about ourselves, our personal myths if you will, as the best we can aim for in this life. But herein lies the problem. If your story is good you won’t be here to know.        
 
We all know this on some level.  And we all know that more choices do not equal more freedom, neither for ourselves in the insatiability of satisfying these programs for happiness nor for the good of the whole for what these programs produce in propping up the illusion of separation between ourselves and our neighbors. Be them human or otherwise.
 
Though Bruteau, and the Western Wisdom Tradition, I believe, offer us a viable alternative in both theory and practice.

“But there is another kind of freedom, namely, creative freedom.  It means that you act from yourself as author, as from a first origin or source.”[xii]    
 
Creative freedom, like objective conscience, cannot act against what it is. It is therefore generative in and of itself, original in the truest sense of the term, always operative in the Now-though mostly hidden and buried from our everyday awareness-always impartial in its impact as it seeks the most good for the most recipients arising from and reflecting the whole from which it emerges. It is choiceless in this way. It does what it is. Integral, in aligned action.   
 
Conversely, acquired conscience, and its sister motivator, choice freedom, cannot move beyond culturally defined categories of morality as it is biologically encoded into the survival mechanism of our species’ brains.[xiii] It is therefore reactive. It can do no better than the best group’s thinking-isolated from the infusion of higher assistance and the harmonized base of the centers of intelligence of the human being.    
 
Objective conscience, and its sister fuel, creative freedom, cannot be taken from you nor given to you by another, as it is the seed of the core of your makeup as a human being.[xiv] Yet, most typically, it is awakened, at least initially, through getting an accurate picture of the unconscious impact of your sleepwalking behavior and emotionally allowing that impact to be owned and accepted for oneself. Including the powerlessness to change what it is that we see. 
 
But conscience is the fire which alone can fuse all the powders in the glass retort which was mentioned before and create the unity which a man lacks in that state in which he begins to study himself. The concept ‘conscience’ has nothing in common with the concept of ‘morality.’ Conscience is a general and a permanent phenomenon. Conscience is the same for all men and conscience is possible only in the absence of ‘buffers.’ From the point of view of understanding the different categories of man we may say that there exists the conscience of a man in whom there are no contradictions. This conscience is not suffering; it is joy of a totally new character which we are unable to understand. But even a momentary awakening of conscience in a man who has thousands of different I’s is bound to involve suffering. And if these moments of conscience become longer and if a man does not fear them but on the contrary co-operates with them and tries to keep and prolong them, an element of very subtle joy, a foretaste of the future ‘clear consciousness’ will gradually enter into these moments.[xv]
 
The “bottoms” and emptiness that we try our best to avoid or climb desperately out of as quick as we can, are the very nothingness of our being that is the beginning of allowing the buried conscience of our “Real I” to grow and make manifest the gifts of life disposed from the source of life versus the source of our ego’s reflection on itself.
 
This is true recovery. The recovery of our claim to the birthright of our own embodied originality and goodness; ongoingly through the mutual beatidunal exchange of staying planted in the energy that flows at the cross-section of human and divine vulnerability. Herein lies, what some call heartfulness, where life blooms its way as dynamic, integrous, and singular seeing of the whole as conscious participation with the unfoldment of emergent knowing. Real conscience meeting the evolution of consciousness in “the axis and the arrow.”[xvi] Where indeed a tree is known by its fruits. 
 
And its fruits are, I believe, a growing commitment to a universal highest good, grounded courage that comes from living on the other side of that commitment, along with a contemplative seeing that is the wielding of love in all of its finest manifestations embodied as compassion in its purest most potent concentration. 
 
These fruits of commitment, courage and contemplation are then taken up as the gifts and practical tools that they are-objective pathways of energetic alchemy in the ancient and evolving sciences of prayer, imagination, and love. These pathways as human gifts for the whole human family are housed in the very religions that we must make peace with in discovering their common Source at their deepest depths. 
 
This is not, necessarily, a call to improve or conserve our forms and structures of religion let alone to “draw people back” into what many have rightly rejected, but rather a call to take responsibility for those of us who claim faith on any level. To take up an inheritance, perhaps discovering it for the first time, that can only be lived and always on behalf of the whole.  Reconstituting religion, not as central and static, but as a catalyst of evolution and transformation of consciousness by design. Now exiles by choice. Not claiming victimhood, having abandoned our own “personal rights” in favor of service to the whole from a deeper particpation.  
 
I believe the only really valid thing that can be accomplished in the direction of world peace and unity at the moment is the preparation of the way by the formation of men and women who, isolated, perhaps not accepted or understood by any 'movement,' are able to unite in themselves and experience in their own lives all that is best and most true in the various great spiritual traditions. Such men and women can become as it were 'sacraments' or signs of peace, at least. They can do much to open up the minds of their contemporaries to receive, in the future, new seeds of thought. Our task is one of very remote preparation, a kind of arduous and unthanked pioneering.[xvii]
 
And like Merton we discover that the traditional and perennial practices of solitude, silence and stillness at the heart of our religious traditions are recapitulated in an evolutionary framework as, solidarity and communion with all sentient beings, presence in non-localized inter-abiding relationships of mutuality and dynamic creativity as the fountainhead and base of being.  
 
In rediscovering who we are as bearers of traditions now perhaps knowing them for the first time, we can then do the liberating work of combating evil and systemic injustice from a context both bigger than we’ve allowed ourselves to see and more integrous with the evolutionary trajectory of our lives and planet integrally woven through with the fruits of the energy streams of love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control and gentleness.[xviii]
 
The divine energies are rushing past us at every nanosecond of time. Why not reach out and catch them by continuing acts of self-surrender and trust?[xix] 
 
Wisdom can maintain what life will begin on its own terms if we allow it-that is, open the door to awakening Real I.  And often in the falling apart of what we are trying so hard to keep together, keeping the heart open as the path of awakening consciousness through the harvesting of real conscience on the foundation of a human being who is present to true human potential and purpose in its largest most practical sense. The ancient sciences held in our great spiritual traditions are pathways to begin to, not only reorient ourselves towards conscience and human purpose but, to give us a solid, secure, foundation and connection. One rooted in embodied presence, contentment, and an ability to participate in life free of fear-come what may. 
 
This journey then, is nothing more, yet nothing less than a period of acclimating to a new way of seeing, a time of transition and revelation as it gradually comes upon "that" which remains when there is no self. this is not a journey for those who expect love and bliss, rather, it is for the hardy who have been tried by fire and have come to rest in a tough, immovable trust in "that" which lies beyond the known, beyond the self, beyond union and even beyond love and trust itself.[xx]
 
 


[i] Words from Dag Hammarskjold as quoted in: Roger Lipsey, Politics and Conscience (Boulder: Shambala, 2020), 88.

[ii] See Cynthia Bourgeault’s teaching on ‘Remorse of Conscience’ from 2021 Enneagram Summit

[iii] David Whyte, David Whyte: Essentials (Washington: Many Rivers Press, 2020), 53.

[iv] If you can’t see it in your own life-see the traditional and theological reflection of this state from St. Paul in chapter 7 of the book of Romans.

[v] See Colossians 1:18-20 in Eugene Peterson’s The Message.

[vi] J.G. Bennett, Making a Soul (Santa Fe: Bennett Books, 1995), 44.

[vii] Jeanne de Salzmann, The Reality of Being (Boston: Shambala, 2010), 205.  

[viii] Beatrice Bruteau, Radical Optimism (Boulder: Sentient Publications, 2002), 81.

[ix] See Thomas Keating’s teaching on emotional programs for happiness through Contemplative Outreach.

[x] The pressure of constriction of time, relationships of commitment like family, and deadlines do play an important role in not only the conditions in which we live but in assisting us towards moving into action.  But this in and of itself is not able to sustainably produce original, generative and truly creative objective art.  Either lived as conscience or through another mode of artistic expression.   

[xi] Bruteau, Radical Optimism, 81.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Patricia S. Churchland, Conscience (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019).

[xiv] Though it can be awakened in us by another who has attained it. 

[xv] G.I. Gurdjieff

[xvi] Pierre de Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon (Chicago: Sussex Academic Press, 2015), 7.

[xvii] Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985), 126.

[xviii] St. Paul’s fruits of the Spirit…for an extensive exploration of this theme see Cynthia Bourgeault, Eye of the Heart (Boulder: Shambala, 2020).  

[xix] Thomas Keating, Reflections on the Unknowable (New York: Lantern Publish & Media, 2014) Chap. 2, Kindle.  

[xx] Bernadette Roberts, The Experience of No-Self: A Contempative Journey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 13.

​Over the last year I’ve worked closely with the sick and the dying in the context of hospice as a chaplain. Mostly though, I have sat with caregivers still often wrestling with the shock of being flung into their current circumstances, many of whom are either, completely overwhelmed at the prospect and realities of care, coupled with the incipient grief of imminent loss, or, completely overwhelmed with gratitude at the beauty and privilege of caring for their sick and dying loved ones, with its intimate, though at times terrible, experience of embodied wonder. 
 
Typically, both poles of this spectrum are held at some level. The difference lies in who’s driving the vessel of the human being.
 
Either the ungrounded mind is driving, while imposing brakes on the moving and emotional center, or, the mind entrained in the heart is driving while the moving center follows in moment by moment trust, with the intellectual and the emotional centers hanging and balanced, like supportive wings for the flight of faith.      

Through death’s built in constriction, immediacy invites a choice that we actually all live with every day of our lives. The choice to lean into the unforeseen challenges as invitations for our own inner work-the proof of which is borne in our lives as service-or, allow the incessant mind in isolation to crank down on making rational sense out of the real or perceived surrounding chaos. Feeding the flames of more of the same in the process. The mind, being on its own, a punctured flotation device in the seas of life. Which currently rage. 
 
Though this fact does not let any of us off the hook. Choice remains. The choice to raise ourselves to the highest possible ideal inside of the circumstances of our lives, or not. 
 
Though of course fear, and perhaps fear of death, and its denial have us all up in arms, some of us literally, and others of us, literally masked, with our righteous judgements. Can we not own that we’re all generally terrified of being on the wrong side of things?
 
No right action can come from this fear nor the arrogance that assumes we are in fact on the “right side of things.”    
 
We are all aware on some level of being guided together on this planet, towards ourselves, towards the earth’s inherent, balancing and reckoning intelligence, towards the webbed consciousness of all species, towards the “holiness of plants, animals and humans”[i] and towards more responsible stewardship of our chronological time here. A responsibility, taken seriously or not, that only our children can judge. 
 
To acknowledge this guided convergence is in itself a courageous confession. For to make this confession would place responsibility on us for the collective situation we find ourselves in, our powerlessness to fix it (at least within a timeframe our industrial military complex would like to pat itself on the back for), and most importantly, our heart’s capacity to read, coincide with, and indeed shape, an expanding and unfolding universe in concert with its sustaining intelligence for the common and highest possible good.    
 
It’s not that we can’t solve many of the problems we have individually and collectively, it’s that we won’t. The cost seems too high. And when our individual chronology is the only context we’re banking our life’s meaning and purpose on, or at best the chronology of our legacy in the eyes of our children or children’s children, then of course the cost is too high.
 
“If the spatial self-the waking ego-in a material world is all that we are, then of course we are terrified by the thought of it coming to an end.”[ii]      
 
To be fair though I don’t believe this is only a question of having ego-centric values. I think we also lack the maps expansive enough to then follow the heart’s knowing that make the hard work of being able to live the simplicity of moment by moment trust attractive, let alone feasible.    
 
What if your life was more than what happens to you? What if you’re not your story? What if there is no hero? Nor villain for that matter? What if the best thing you can do for someone else, isn’t help them in the ways your brain is attracted to? What if your purpose for being here is what all of our great spiritual and philosophical traditions have pointed to: to produce subtle, qualitative, though powerfully real, energetic foods with the raw materials of our eating, sleeping, working, daily lives.       
 
In this place though, most of the time driving with the brake on, bracing ourselves against the unknown, we have to acknowledge-if first just to ourselves-that we’ve all had experiences of sensing a deeper sense of selfhood that knows we are more than what happens to us during the years we inhabit these bodies. We can physically remember being released from our clutching, defending, justifying and obsession over personal preferences, opinions and where we are in the pecking order of the species in these moments. 
 
Like death, these momentary glimpses of something more, often are incited by, and veiled in, the beauty of normal everyday life. Things like art, nature, sex, shared meals and laughter. The mutual energetic exchange of kinship and deep connection with the earth and its fruits, deep connection with ourselves and one another, and the deep connection borne through creativity in all its dynamic manifestation. The diaphaneity of the divine shines most intimately as relationship through the materiality of our lives. There’s no denying our inter and intra connectivity in the eco-system of evolved nervous systems. We are currently looking over the edge on the cusp of its next great leap. Trembling together shoulder to shoulder. Invited to reach out to one another hand in hand as we are gathered and pulled forward into the void. Trusting the awaiting presence our hearts know as their home.     
 
The universe’s intelligence is revealing itself and veiling its latency in, as, and through the personal. The human heart is the chalice of its reception and its outpouring, the fulcrum of its balance, and the beacon of its conscience. Personal, particular, infinitely shaded and shrouded in the pigment of flesh. Woven as a tapestry of an energetic web dedicated to cosmic service by the means we’ve left mostly untried by commoners. Reserved for the saints. At once enjoying the distance between those groups, something we can no longer afford to ascribe even exists. All such categories are hereby erased. 
 
Contemplative prayer is no longer a luxury; it is an absolute necessity. Up to now, many have thought of contemplation as a devotional wellness or personal transformation practice. We’re not just doing our meditation to chill out and get right with the world. We are trying to bring to bear a structure of perception, as system of consciousness, that allows us to empathize and relate to each other without fear, judgement, demonization, or division.
 
Contemplation is a non-negotiable. If we want our world to come to oneness, each one of us must take on the responsibility of bringing the mind into the heart so we can become contemplatives not in lifestyle only, but in a complete revisioning and cleansing of the lens of perception. People at the non-dual level are much more useful, flexible, versatile, attuned, cosmic servants.[iii]
 
What if, like the anonymous builders of the great cathedrals, your life was meant to be a small yet crucial part of the brick laying of a collective edifice of conscience that could stand against and disarm the fear based desperation and violence sweeping the psyche of our planet…and here’s the catch…without getting any credit whatsoever for being a part of its construction nor getting the satisfaction of knowing if you’re even a part of the group that’s doing the construction, yet holding the conviction that it needs to be done and willingly throwing your hat over the fence in offering your life to the service of its completion-knowing you’ll never see its end-even while already seeing and somehow sensing its completed presence now. 
 
Can you live from that place? 
 
No, not without help you can’t. But yes, it starts with a commitment to anyways.       
 
We’re all the emperor behind our own curtain colluding with one another in defending, justifying and denying our own culpability in the current state of affairs while avoiding the responsibility the moment calls for. The situation is in fact incessant and incestuous, often most troubling within the dark corners of our culture’s digitalized and demonic echo chambers. So, let me tread carefully here.   
 
I believe it’s further fueled and enflamed by our inability and unwillingness to face fear which is inversely proportionate to our ability and willingness to trust and offer our lives as mercy. That is, as sacrifices for, and on behalf of, the whole. Most of the time quietly, serenely and brutally without fanfare, squirming in the gaps of our personal and collective integrity. Closing them through our blood, sweat, devotion and tears.    
 
Society can never think things out:
It has to see them
Acted out by actors,
Devoted actors at a sacrifice.[iv]
 
Look, COVID is real. Evil is real. People have died and will continue to by racist violence. And unless we work on changing our very structure of perception, we will continue to tear down the very leaders we raise up for any blemish we deem that they have while sitting back in aloof or cynical observation. Either waiting for a later heaven that can’t exist without a more transparent, loving, earth, or, feeling helpless to even know where or how to start.  Eliminating our association with the leaders we’ve chosen for ourselves (be it entertainment or in official office) for the sake of saving the faces of our most precious self-images. The world, the weak, and the future are now knocking at the door of our entitled, jockeying exceptionalism.   
 
Our greatest failure is that we have collectively aborted the call of our species to develop something of substance that feeds all, in all realms, throughout all time, something, we have perhaps glimpsed the seeds of in our own lives or observed in the lives of those we most universally admire and hold up as embodying the ideals of what it means to be most fully human. Something we’ve been willing up to now, to mostly give lip service to within our great spiritual traditions. Thus, avoiding our own agency and highest potentiality. The time for this play has run its course. We must come to terms with being both the answer and the problem.       
 
We are the possibilities of the ones praying and the ones being prayed for in this sobering prayer left by an unknown source at the body of a dead child in a Nazi death camp.
 
O Lord,
Remember not only the men and women
Of good will, but also those of ill will.
But do not remember all the suffering they inflicted on us;
Remember the fruits we have bought, thanks to
This suffering-our comradeship,
Our loyalty, our humility, our courage,
Our generosity, the greatness of heart
Which has grown out of all this, and when
They come to judgment let all the fruits
Which we have borne be their forgiveness.[v]
 
This seed of something more, we might simply refer to as conscience, is built on the foundation of our species abandoned purpose and uniquely positioned role. To build what the Western Wisdom tradition refers to simply as, being.
 
This project, its fruit shimmering and reflected in the words of the above prayer is something we can no longer afford to hold up as unattainable. And the only way to do this is to acknowledge the blood on our own hands and bear the pain of the carnage from which it has been drawn. 
 
Drop the weapons. Loosen the grip. Put down the finger. And pay attention.   
 
In a year of reckoning(and by “year” I count 2021 as no different than 2020 unless things actually change on a level these words are attempting to point towards)the time is ripe to be taught by the dying, by the suffering, by the little ones and rediscover the treasures that our great religious traditions have been housing all along-to really stop business as usual and look. What are we here for? How are we answering that question through our lives?  What does it mean to be a citizen of conscience?  
 
“A citizen is one who is willing to be accountable for and committed to the well-being of the whole. That whole can be a city block, a community, a nation, the earth. A citizen is one who produces the future, someone who does not, wait, beg, or dream for the future.”[vi]
 
An unmanageable though exquisitely coherent context we are all swimming in beckons us forward to realize the faint, though real drumbeat, we recognize in the beacon of the heart, is more real than the stories we tell ourselves and one another about what is going on, out there.  Time to stand up and be counted. To face the reality that the chaos is going on in here too. Finally equipped with the skillful means necessary to tackle the task at hand in order to lighten the sorrow of common Father.    
 
[i] Words from a favorite prayer of J.G. Bennett 

[ii] Jeremy Johnson, Seeing Through the World (Seattle: Revelore Press, 2019), 53.

[iii] Cynthia Bourgeault, The Heart of Centering Prayer (Boulder: Shambala, 2016).

[iv] Words from Robert Frost as quoted in: Alan Jones, Soul Making (New York: Harper One, 1985), 129.

[v] Cynthia Bourgeault, The Wisdom Way of Knowing (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003), 20.

[vi] Peter Block, Community (San Francisco: Berrett-Kohler, 2009), 63.

Today


Today is not a new day, unless allowed to be…


Today is not a test to be passed, nor a threat to be survived.


Today is not a riddle to be figured out, nor a stage to be performed upon. 


Today is not mine to protect, nor is it yours for the taking.

Today demands all and nothing, while inviting Everything.


There’s no timer indicating Today’s beginning. 


Today is.  


Today will be what Today will be.


Today can be molded but never manipulated...


It can be shaped but cannot be scrapped. 


Today cannot be shared until accepted. 


Today cannot be possessed until surrendered to.


Today cannot be wielded until possessed. 


Today cannot be observed, unless it includes participation. 


Today must be lived.  


Today must be dove into. 


Today is not an obstacle to overcome… 


Not a second chance to redo or undo what’s been done.


Today is like an unfolding dawn, given to expand what is seen.


It includes Yesterday, and Recycles History.  


Today demands unknowing yet expels fear.


It invites vulnerability, yet does away with insecurity.


Today relentlessly invites the Now-even while being guided by Tomorrow.


Like intimate companions Today follows Tomorrow, or is it Tomorrow that follows Today?


Today does not hurry, yet neither does it wait.


Today both shakes and fills…


Enter into Today-a boundless inquiry of Mystery and Thrill.

In taking on the task to investigate Gebser and his work and lest, I, and we, fall into the trap of perspectival seeing itself in trying to attain seeing-getting the next new thing in our own personal spiritual development. Where the Imaginal realm, or citizenship in the Kingdom of Heaven is seen as better or higher than, instead of ontologically objective, given as a birthright to be unveiled and stabilized in us as a viewing platform of the heart. Here the Imaginal’s meaning only matters in relationship to the whole of Creation-and therefore to all worlds and all beings. I offer a word of caution and context for my sense of where many of us are being led and called to hold posts within our community, communities and world.

Chosenness and privilege, in the universal sense of being a pixel of consciousness as human being, is and always has been equal to the role of service; not a reward for being “virtuous” or “morally admired” (ie the best of World 48). It’s this perspectival confusion of equating chosenness with specialness that creates and comes out of the closed loops of self-reflective thinking. Just look at most of the forms of Christianity many of us grew up in. But even now, from this place we confer positive or negative qualities on ourselves and others-often justified by our “spiritual work and development.” The minute we begin to think, “they” need to do their “inner-work,” we’ve inevitably left doing our own.

Breath.
 
I was reminded today that the words for breath and spirit in most every great spiritual tradition are the same. 
 
We all, from the lowest to the highest forms of complex life, share in the one great breath.  The breath is our bridge of exchange between the finite and infinite realms.  Before we can cry or speak or make sound out of the womb we must first breathe. 
 
Truly it is up to the cosmic creator to give and take breath away. 

Yet, we don’t typically notice this life sustaining and cosmic connecting exchange of breath until it is somehow impeded or strained. 
 
Breath is the backdrop for the stage upon which our lives are animated.
 
Breath is the shared, even though personal, anchor connecting us to the very ground of our being and to a circle of belonging that includes all of humanity.  This includes the deceased as not even our loss of breath can separate us from the infinite spirit with which we carry and from which we originate. 
 
The faint cry of “I can’t breathe” has not been quieted in the days since George Floyd breathed his last breath on earth.  The injustice through which it was squeezed out of his black body has become a birth canal to a chorus of cries from the one collective body of humanity.  Sounded loudest from those sick and tired of feeling like they can’t breathe as freely as some of us as they go about living their daily lives.  George Floyd’s murder and loss of breath serves as an icon and a place holder for a deeper, collective, cry.   
 
You see, what you do to the least of these you do to Me. 
 
Well when did we see you? 
 
To the extent that we see the blood on our hands from turning blind eyes to our own prejudice, privilege, and, profit at the expense of black and colored bodies will we experience salvation (read awakening).  Where we recognize that what we do to one part, to one person, we do to the whole. 
 
I’m ready and willing to turn around and change my mind-to stand up and be counted-voluntarily placing my voice, my body and my privilege in service of not just an ideal but a concrete reality that says there is but one breath from which all of life draws and to which I owe each returning breath. 
 
And as the systems I have colluded in creating have skewed the balance in giving unequal opportunities to vessels of breath colored in darker shades than mine, it is not my right to project my own unchecked darkness onto the color of their pigmentation in judgement, but rather it is my responsibility to examine the repressed darkness hidden in the silence, fear, justification and deceit within my own heart with which I consciously and unconsciously exhale day-in and day-out through both inaction and action. This, in order to see from the light, the beauty of black and colored skin within the blessed gift of the created and creative order. ​
What we inhale with intention we effortlessly exhale its corresponding energy.
 
Courage-Compassion
 
Fear-Separation
 
Hope-Wholeness
 
Hate-Violence
 
I invite you now to take a few seconds to consciously slow your breathing as a gesture of gratitude for the precious gift of your connection to life. 
 
I now invite you to hold your breath for several seconds in solidarity with our black brothers and sisters who time and again have, and continue right now, to suffer great loss. 
 
I finally invite you into the wonder of breath’s holographic and intrinsic relationship with spirit. To the place where ancient, cosmic and concrete belonging resides in physicality here and now.  
 
What will you do with such a powerful gift?
 
My own intention for myself is the following...

That I may breathe collected and responsibly as a single cell for the sake of the entire body of humanity. 
 
And,
 
That I may ride that breath with courage, confidence and hope into whatever darkness exists in my own heart and keeps me from yielding to the master’s prayer to “Lord, make them one.” 
 
Veni Sancte Spiritus…
 
Come Holy Spirit…
 
Come Holy Breath…
 
Come make us One…
 
So, let it be.
 ​