 Sage of the Secret Luminosity
the tao that can be defined is not the eternal tao... the secret luminosity that can be spoken is not (and also is) the eternal light... There is mystery to this thing that we call life... is there not? Oh, to be sure, there are those who assert they have the answers, no doubt because they think they can control all the questions... just as there are (and have been) a seemingly infinite number of folks who have surrendered their thinking minds over to the purveyors of one creed or another... is that you? Are you in that number? If so, it is probably unlikely that you would be reading this! I have long submitted lists of books that I recommend for your spiritual consideration, from the Tao Te Ching to Be Love Now by Ram Dass, from the poetry of Rumi to the Prayers of the Cosmos by Neil Douglas-Klotz... It is of profound importance that you read! Monks of both our time and yesterday (and for thousands of years) have recommended the practice of a slow, deliberate, contemplative reading... but not just books! It is of equal importance to "read" one's culture, politics, economics, etc. Reading includes the "reading" of your own mind-heart... Of course, not believing everything that you think is one of the building blocks of wisdom -- and your sacred life! The mystic tends to give only marginal creedence to the thoughts that fleetingly inhabit our minds... let them go... let them go without judgment... let them go without the formation of an opinion... Why? Because, the heart is where the real-mind dwells in a secret luminosity... All of the great "I Am" declarations by Yeshua in the Gospel of John are, as it were, clarifications of the secret luminosity that in-fills all of us and all of creation... While dualism on the one hand needs to separate, divide, judge, and eventually condemn opposites and differences, non-dualism seeks to re-member, unite, free, and eventually liberate every opposite and difference into beatitude... When Yeshua declared I am the Light of the world, that declaration was so much more than the birth of a new religion! "I am the vine and you are the branches" is linked, directly, with the Light... no plant and no life grows without the light of the Sun: so too, the light of a secret luminosity which is the soul-core of every life and, indeed, of every thing, is the non-dualistic real reality to which we are all called to embrace as our very own life... Now, here is the key to this embracing: yearning, hunger, and surrender in contemplative prayer... Tao (pronounced dow) is a word, comparable to Christ (or deeper, christed)... both Tao and Christ are thought of by practitioners as way... but, also as vehicles of transportation or transformation... To engage in the building of your sacred life... is, as much as anything else, the learned practice of referencing every aspect of your life into the perspective of already sacred! When you cook, when you eat, when you work, when you play, when you rest, when you sex, when you read, etc., etc. there is not a different person "doing" this or that... you are one... so too, in the real reality, you are already a secret luminosity! You are connected to the Vine... you are shining with the Light... The Beatitudes of Yeshua and the Tao of Lao Tzu, are lessons directly from the life experiences of wisdom masters: these teachings are not religions in the popular sense of the word, rather they are revelations of that which already is, and the Way, and the Vehicle to get us all to where we want to go: into the real reality, already here and simply waiting for our "Yes! Now!... Heaven isn't a distant time or a far-off place: it is within us right now, it is all about us and everything right now: it shines as a secret luminosity... pregnant, in a delightful anticipation... or like a rising orgasm that would be impossible to stop... ultimately, the Beatitudes and the Tao are about just riding the wave... and keeping it going...
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 The burn of Love's hand... what in the world does that mean? And so I have wondered and pondered for many years now... the brief phrase has become something of a "koan", or mystic-thought, for unraveling... While cooking the Soup of the Day in our old Kitchen for the homeless, chopping the veggies, and stirring the big pots of slow-boiling soup, I would ponder the phrase that especially challenged me -- after hearing it in my heart, years earlier, while on a solitary retreat high in the mountains of the Sierra Nevadas... You see, I was on my yearly retreat from the Soup Kitchen, with my handful of best-friend-books: poetry and contemplation... One morning I woke up to a Black Bear looking at me from the "distance" of the length of my arm: I slept with a hammer and small cast iron skillet next to me: ready to clang-a-ruckus for the inevitable bear... My bear ambled off and I rolled over to sleep a bit more... As the sun finally began to shine over the peaks and through the cedar trees, I rose, determined to write some poems... After a week of searching and effort, I had yet to "find" a single poem... oh to be sure, both Li Po and Rumi were ready with their counsel, but nothing... I was singularly empty: a jangle of disconnected thoughts and words and then, just the silence, birds, rustle of leaves, and my crunching feet on the trails... and a quiet sadness as my retreat was quickly passing... All of the prayer and contemplation Masters write of emptiness just as poets write of those similar hours, days, weeks, months, and even years in which the poet experiences the seeming abandonment of the grace and gift... And so the fateful day arrived, my last day of my mountain retreat and my last favorite hike along the tumbling Kings River, up the rising mountain, to the look-out point directly across from the mountain named "Sphinx", so named by the intrepid explorer John Muir... I had walked about a half-mile when I suddenly stopped, almost in mid-stride. I had forgotten my pen and pocket tablet which I always carried, ready for the potential arrival of a poem... To return to my camp for tablet and pen would add an obvious mile to my trek: I had not written anything for a week: why should today be any different? I returned to my camp, picked up pen and paper, and returned to the trail... The disappointing sense of abandonment found in my contemplative sittings mirrored the empty hunger for a poem... One foot and then the other, moving up-trail... It turned out that the empty silence had, after all, been pregnant: a sequence of some thirty poems simply gushed out: I would walk in emptiness, holding no thought in my mind: one complete line after the next would come, fully formed, from mind to pen to paper... and then walking... walking... no thought... and the next, fully formed, line would appear in my head... athlete's call this being in the zone... poets, on the other hand, only bow in humility... words are potentially as sacred as anything else in the Universe... words are the evidence of the heart's hunger and yearning for the One Word that will complete, in self-surrender, the One Life... I remember, when the phrase the burn of Love's hand simply went Boo! in my head... I stopped, stunned at what the heck does that mean? I pulled pen and paper from my pocket, and wrote it down... I wondered at it, but returned to the trail and re-centered into empty-mind... Now, years have come and gone and still I ponder the burn of Love's hand... sacred moments, here and there, have served as threads of revelation and the slow weaving of understanding... if you are interested in this weaving, you can keep reading... The burn of Love's hand is this thing that we all call life... In living, and in and through all of our struggles, we are meant to turn the pages of our story into the self-realization that the one, precious, life we have been given is not, is never, about "me"... it is always about a "you", one-by-one, and the Glorious Secret Maybe, that "you" can save someone's life... I was hungry and you fed me is how Jesus put it, but the essential point is not the food, but the flowing action of simply loving... And didn't he also say, go and do likewise?  "All things sacramentally exist in the sacred, and the sacred sacramentally exists in all things." -- Hans Gustafson
The worldview that lives and promotes the conviction of all things as possessing the potential and the capacity to serve as mediators of the sacred, the Cosmic Consciousness, is perhaps the most important building-block for a sacred life... All things in the Divine and the Divine in all things is the manifestation of the on-going Jesus rEvolution... If the goal is both personal and global transformation, the lens through which we identify and interpret reality is of profound importance! Regardless of religion, the fundamentalist always promotes a very small (and usually warped) worldview. No doubt, you have already figured that out! Only the expansion of consciousness, through a practiced and vital mysticism, is one made ready for seeing the connections and changing the likely outcomes... When belief is exchanged for experience, the hidden wholeness is found... and the variety of ways of implementation become obvious... the student becomes the sage through loving-in-action... Touchstones that are the sagely guides into the practicalities of pansacramentalism are personalism: caring, cooperation, compassion, nonviolence, and the daily reference of everything to its underlying Oneness... Evidence of these practicalities are the heart and essence of the Beatitude Way of Jesus... The best source-book for a study of the Beatitudes is Prayers of the Cosmos (Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus's Words) by Neil Douglas-Klotz. Joanna Macy had this to say about this book: "For the many of us who want to peel away centuries of dualistic, patriarchal forms and recover the life-affirming beauty of our Christian roots, nothing could be more welcome than this exquisite little volumn." Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault, in her book The Wisdom Jesus, also renders Jesus the sage and transformation master that quickly went out of style in the long-ago formation of the "princely" church and its strategy of accomodation to empire, greed, violence, and the marginalization of women and the divine feminine. Continuing the strategy of accomodation to empire might facilitate the power-building of fundamentalism, whether new or of ancient heritage, but it will never serve either our transformation or the regeneration of Planet Earth... Pansacramentalism, while an unusual and uncommon word, is the word for re-training our eyes, ears, hands, hearts, and minds: everything that we do can be made a conscious instrument of Beatitude... everything that surrounds, penetrates, and otherwise serves our well-being is wholly holy-ground... with this breath, I will become an instrument of peace... with this breath, I will kiss my lover with lips and soul... with this breath I will work in the garden... wash the dishes... scrub the toilet, organize for justice, demonstrate for equality, and dedicate my heart and life to building a brand new Beatitude Culture...  Being + Consciousness + Bliss
Three (3) is a Magic number... but, who cares? And, why care? Especially since the new "depth" metaphysics can now be apprehended through a one hour course on mindfulness, why in the world should anyone need, or even want, to undergo complete ego annihilation? In what circle of conversation is there any interest in the subject of the Trinity? Language is such a hobgoblin! I am certainly among those who resent the mere idea that "God" is, first and foremost, "Father" without any reference to "Mother"... this seems to me like a very big pot of soup with only one carrot and water as ingredients and, behold!, a group of "chef-theologians" are looking into the gently boiling water, poking at the lone carrot with long wooden spoons, and arguing, "No! That single carrot is really three! How could it be a mother?" And now we are going to practice mindfulness! A charming bell sounds... A beautiful woman with a luxurious voice begins to speak... she gives precise instructions in the "how" of mindfulness practice... for the span of three breaths, I am at the threshold of mindfulness!... Then, I wonder, am I the only one to hear that gruff-voiced interrruption, "Who am I?" Well, who the hell am I? I ponder... I was, for some thirty years, "Robert of the Soup"... but, I always knew that that was only a fraction of "me", and mostly, just a false self... (When no one was around, I was someone else entirely, and like an abused dog in an animal shelter, only then could I emerge from my cage... when no one was present...) Thirty years of conversation with homeless, completely shattered, ego annihilated folks unveiled the mystery of our human condition... We are all a big fat nobody... but more, we are all addicts to these, our non-identities... Somehow, though, we survive. We make more nobodies, who eventually become more non-identities... And then, in one way or another, we all eventially go poof... How can a non-identity ever be mindful? How does a caricature of a human become a being? How does a mind, a fully activated mind, come to inhabit a body? What might be some evidence that a being is home in a human body? How about this: a human being intensely desires engagement with other human beings: intensely desires dialogue, encounter, and communion with other human beings... In other words, soul is our desire and capacity to no longer be an "I"... soul is our desire and capacity to jump into the abyss of isolation and to become another Christ: to become another Mother of God and to give birth to another Christ... to become, like the Blessed Trinity, no longer Three, but Many (how about Everyone and Everything?)... Soul is our intense desire and capacity to return from the exile of "mindfulness" into a rugged "mindlessness" and then to become the Real Self, liberated, free-in-delight, and truly conscious... From False to Real The Vedantist "names" the Blessed Trinity as Being + Consciousness + Bliss (Sat... Chit... Ananda)... From false to real, from non-identity, to magic... (God is Alive, Magic is Afoot. -- Leonard Cohen) is the daily work of attunement: attuning to contemplative practice and activated compassion: there is no mindfulness without the mindlessness that bridges the false with the Real... Finally emptied of the false: mindfulness becomes an entirely new dimension of being... when the Real has become our Identity, we'll become who we really were all along... Finally, if you are not certain as to the truth of compassion, just take this quote from Ram Dass to heart: Treat everyone you meet like God in drag... And, if you are not certain as to the truth of contemplative practice, go ahead and take this quote from a Sufi saint, Rabia of Basra, to heart: I saw that the divine beauty in each heart is the root of all time and space. We are all just walking each other home. -- Ram Dass |
AuthorRobert Daniel Smith was privileged to serve the homeless and marginalized for 30 years in California. He is living now almost within shouting distance of the Twin Cities. He is a poet, artist, writer, and long-time Companion of the Way still dreaming... Archives
May 2022
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