Identification Surrender
Identification Surrender... is it meditation? Is it mindfulness, a combination of both, or is it something different?
Humm... om... amen... amma... abba... allahu... ah...
On the most obvious level, humans first gathered at the world's waters because of the ever-present need for water... but, as known to everyone who has ever camped or sat by a stream or a river or near the ocean's shore, the earthy-mystical sound of water becomes a sort of spiritual inebriation, inviting the listener (even in sleep) into a deep-pulsing rhythm of breath-with-soul-with-spirit. The wandering Poet-Mystic of Nazareth, Yeshua, invited fishermen to follow him -- not because of their business skills -- but because they were men of the water, they were already opened to the natural rhythms of water... And a short while later when he turned "water into wine" (perhaps at his own wedding), it was as an invitation to spiritual inebriation... the inebriation of the mystic entranced by the pulsing Love of the Universe in Evolution and Spirit...
Yeshua was intimate with the tides of the ocean in the very tides of his blood... the tides that connect the parts with the whole... And it is right here, precisely here, that we humans want to hunker down: we want, desperately so, to know our "little tree" for the entire forest, our "little stream" for the water of the world. We desperately want the tides of our blood, in ontological fact, to be separate from the tides of the ocean, from every "other": we want our precious ego intact and forever... We cling to our ego more tightly than to the lover who shares our bed... Called to the remembrance of union, lover to Lover, we simply can't imagine our living without the demand of our separate self...
Our natural impulse to the mystic fails for the same reason our marriages do: we don't want to disappear into a through-and-through union... Called to a love affair with the Primordial Tao... with the Divine Beloved... with the pulsing rhythm of a Dancing God... we prefer playing the game of separation... and so it goes... world without end...
But, on the other hand... The one work we should rightly undertake is eradication of the self. Could you completely forget yourself, even for just an instant, you would be given everything. (Meister Eckhart)
Identification Surrender is, yes, meditation and mindfulness... But it is also "not". It is not about the "quieting" of the rush of thought or attention to the quality of thoughts. Rather, it is entirely about identification with the Beloved and the practice of surrender... When Angela of Foligno wrote the world is pregnant with God, she was expressing the indescribable reality of Only IS...
The photo (above) of St. Teresa in Ecstasy is a "capture" of the spiritual inebriation experienced by the mystic in communion with the Divine Oneness: that moment when the sense of ego-separation has dissolved into the pure bliss of surrender into the Love of the Beloved: what is foreshadowed by the orgasmic-bliss of the mutual surrender, one into the other, of lovers, when for a moment, the separate self disappears... The fundamental reality of the New Creation announced by Yeshua is the wonder-of-wonders: the Divine Beloved is not separate, not other: but the bliss of an ever-expanding, all-embracing, loving-within-Not Two-Only One...
The liberated soul loses her name in the One through Whom and in Whom she merges; just as a river reaching the sea loses the identity with which it flowed through many countries to arrive at this destination... (Marguerite Porete)
God inhabits every soul, even those of the greatest sinners in the world. There is always this union between God and His creatures, for through it He preserves their being. If it were not so, these souls would instantly cease to be... (St. John of the Cross)
When the soul has lost her nature in the Oneness, we can no longer speak of a "soul" but of immeasurable being. (Meister Eckhart)
I AM can be spoken by no creature, but by God alone. I must become God and God must become me, so completely that we share the same "I" eternally. Our truest "I" is God. (Meister Eckhart)
Having read many books containing different methods of reaching God, I felt that they would confuse me rather than help me find what I was looking for, which was to become completely God's. This led me to resolve to give all for the All. I renounced, for love of Him, everything that was not Him, and I began to live as if there was nothing but He and I in the world. (Brother Lawrence)
If even only for a moment you can throw yourself into That in which there are no separate beings, then you will hear what God says. Just stop all your thinking and willing, and you will hear the unspeakable words of God. (Jacob Boehme)
Allah is non-being and being, existence and non-existence. He is the relative and the Absolute. All these concepts return to Allah, for there is nothing we can comprehend or write or speak about that is not Allah. (Abd Al-Kader)
God is your mirror in which you contemplate yourself and you are His mirror in which He contemplates his divine attributes. (Ibn Arabi)
The mystics speak in a hundred different ways, but if God is one and the Way is one, how could their meaning be other than on? What appears in different disguises is one essence. A variety of forms, but a unity of substance. (Jalaluddin Rumi)
All of the strategies that we employ to differentiate our "self" from every other self is only a service to separation. Even the strategies of religion facilitate the appearance of separation. It is simple: the acquisition of power and privilege require our subservience to separation. Identification Surrender is the employment of sacred pauses in our ego identities through remembrance prayer. In the Holy Qur'an, Allah says Remember Me and I will remember you... Remembering the Oneness by the cultivation of sacred pauses of adoration for the Everywhere-and-At-All-Times, we will steadily dissolve our need for a sense of separation into the Divine Bliss... Realization is this essential mystic experience: there is, has been, and will be only the Oneness... The true mystic is not a devotee lost in ecstatic communion with the One, or a reclusive saint who avoids others. The true mystic lives alongside other people -- coming and going, eating and sleeping, buying and selling, marrying and chatting -- but not for a moment does he forget God. (Abu Sa'id Ibn Abi-l-Khayr)
Wherever you find yourself, whether in worship or in ordinary life, contemplate God -- in what you eat, what you drink, whom you marry, always aware that he is both the Contemplated and the Contemplator. (Abd Al-Kader)
Love calls -- everywhere and always. We're sky bound. Are you coming? (Jalaluddin Rumi)
God has stolen my false "I" and brought me close to the true "I." All colors have returned to pure white. The journey is over and nothing but God exists. All attributes and relationships have been erased. The primal state has been reestablished. (Abd Al-Kader)
Don't think that saying "I am God" is proclaiming one's greatness. It is actually total humility. Someone who says, "I am the servant of God" infers two -- God and himself -- whereas someone who says "I am God" negates himself. He relinquishes his own existence. "I am God" means "I don't exist. Everything is God. Only God exists. I am nothing. I am utter emptiness." This is complete humility not arrogance, but people often misunderstand. When someone says he is God's servant, he still sees himself as a doer, albeit in God's service. He is not yet drowned in the ocean of God. When he is, there will be no such thing as "his actions," only movements of the water. (Jalaluddin Rumi)
Identification surrender and the mystic path is the gifting of love: love embracing without reservation: our daily lives are our schools of love. Love compels us to "drop our egos": to put aside our self-interest in the precious unity of loving. Our monastic habits are the little gifts that we give the sacred "others" in our lives: in the literalness of Oneness. The mystic knows that every breath is a love-affair-in-action: our breath, in-coming and out-going, is a participation in the Elemental Tides of the Divine Breath that breathes creation into existence with every breath... This is the "pull" of the rivers of the world and the Sacred Sound uttered in every wave of every sea... Identification surrender within our breath, in-coming love and out-going blessing, is the Elemental Remembrance Prayer... Falling in love is the ecstasy that is the loving-in-the-moments of our daily lives... Loving-in-action is the bridge of immanence with transcendence...Until lover and Beloved dissolve into each other and only Love remains...
Humm... om... amen... amma... abba... allahu... ah...
Resources:
Pastrix, The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint / Nadia Bolz-Weber
Bones of the Master / George Crane
Autobiography of a Yogi / Paramahansa Yogananda
Be Love Now / Ram Dass
Tantric Jesus / Rev. James Hughes Reho, Ph. D.
Humm... om... amen... amma... abba... allahu... ah...
On the most obvious level, humans first gathered at the world's waters because of the ever-present need for water... but, as known to everyone who has ever camped or sat by a stream or a river or near the ocean's shore, the earthy-mystical sound of water becomes a sort of spiritual inebriation, inviting the listener (even in sleep) into a deep-pulsing rhythm of breath-with-soul-with-spirit. The wandering Poet-Mystic of Nazareth, Yeshua, invited fishermen to follow him -- not because of their business skills -- but because they were men of the water, they were already opened to the natural rhythms of water... And a short while later when he turned "water into wine" (perhaps at his own wedding), it was as an invitation to spiritual inebriation... the inebriation of the mystic entranced by the pulsing Love of the Universe in Evolution and Spirit...
Yeshua was intimate with the tides of the ocean in the very tides of his blood... the tides that connect the parts with the whole... And it is right here, precisely here, that we humans want to hunker down: we want, desperately so, to know our "little tree" for the entire forest, our "little stream" for the water of the world. We desperately want the tides of our blood, in ontological fact, to be separate from the tides of the ocean, from every "other": we want our precious ego intact and forever... We cling to our ego more tightly than to the lover who shares our bed... Called to the remembrance of union, lover to Lover, we simply can't imagine our living without the demand of our separate self...
Our natural impulse to the mystic fails for the same reason our marriages do: we don't want to disappear into a through-and-through union... Called to a love affair with the Primordial Tao... with the Divine Beloved... with the pulsing rhythm of a Dancing God... we prefer playing the game of separation... and so it goes... world without end...
But, on the other hand... The one work we should rightly undertake is eradication of the self. Could you completely forget yourself, even for just an instant, you would be given everything. (Meister Eckhart)
Identification Surrender is, yes, meditation and mindfulness... But it is also "not". It is not about the "quieting" of the rush of thought or attention to the quality of thoughts. Rather, it is entirely about identification with the Beloved and the practice of surrender... When Angela of Foligno wrote the world is pregnant with God, she was expressing the indescribable reality of Only IS...
The photo (above) of St. Teresa in Ecstasy is a "capture" of the spiritual inebriation experienced by the mystic in communion with the Divine Oneness: that moment when the sense of ego-separation has dissolved into the pure bliss of surrender into the Love of the Beloved: what is foreshadowed by the orgasmic-bliss of the mutual surrender, one into the other, of lovers, when for a moment, the separate self disappears... The fundamental reality of the New Creation announced by Yeshua is the wonder-of-wonders: the Divine Beloved is not separate, not other: but the bliss of an ever-expanding, all-embracing, loving-within-Not Two-Only One...
The liberated soul loses her name in the One through Whom and in Whom she merges; just as a river reaching the sea loses the identity with which it flowed through many countries to arrive at this destination... (Marguerite Porete)
God inhabits every soul, even those of the greatest sinners in the world. There is always this union between God and His creatures, for through it He preserves their being. If it were not so, these souls would instantly cease to be... (St. John of the Cross)
When the soul has lost her nature in the Oneness, we can no longer speak of a "soul" but of immeasurable being. (Meister Eckhart)
I AM can be spoken by no creature, but by God alone. I must become God and God must become me, so completely that we share the same "I" eternally. Our truest "I" is God. (Meister Eckhart)
Having read many books containing different methods of reaching God, I felt that they would confuse me rather than help me find what I was looking for, which was to become completely God's. This led me to resolve to give all for the All. I renounced, for love of Him, everything that was not Him, and I began to live as if there was nothing but He and I in the world. (Brother Lawrence)
If even only for a moment you can throw yourself into That in which there are no separate beings, then you will hear what God says. Just stop all your thinking and willing, and you will hear the unspeakable words of God. (Jacob Boehme)
Allah is non-being and being, existence and non-existence. He is the relative and the Absolute. All these concepts return to Allah, for there is nothing we can comprehend or write or speak about that is not Allah. (Abd Al-Kader)
God is your mirror in which you contemplate yourself and you are His mirror in which He contemplates his divine attributes. (Ibn Arabi)
The mystics speak in a hundred different ways, but if God is one and the Way is one, how could their meaning be other than on? What appears in different disguises is one essence. A variety of forms, but a unity of substance. (Jalaluddin Rumi)
All of the strategies that we employ to differentiate our "self" from every other self is only a service to separation. Even the strategies of religion facilitate the appearance of separation. It is simple: the acquisition of power and privilege require our subservience to separation. Identification Surrender is the employment of sacred pauses in our ego identities through remembrance prayer. In the Holy Qur'an, Allah says Remember Me and I will remember you... Remembering the Oneness by the cultivation of sacred pauses of adoration for the Everywhere-and-At-All-Times, we will steadily dissolve our need for a sense of separation into the Divine Bliss... Realization is this essential mystic experience: there is, has been, and will be only the Oneness... The true mystic is not a devotee lost in ecstatic communion with the One, or a reclusive saint who avoids others. The true mystic lives alongside other people -- coming and going, eating and sleeping, buying and selling, marrying and chatting -- but not for a moment does he forget God. (Abu Sa'id Ibn Abi-l-Khayr)
Wherever you find yourself, whether in worship or in ordinary life, contemplate God -- in what you eat, what you drink, whom you marry, always aware that he is both the Contemplated and the Contemplator. (Abd Al-Kader)
Love calls -- everywhere and always. We're sky bound. Are you coming? (Jalaluddin Rumi)
God has stolen my false "I" and brought me close to the true "I." All colors have returned to pure white. The journey is over and nothing but God exists. All attributes and relationships have been erased. The primal state has been reestablished. (Abd Al-Kader)
Don't think that saying "I am God" is proclaiming one's greatness. It is actually total humility. Someone who says, "I am the servant of God" infers two -- God and himself -- whereas someone who says "I am God" negates himself. He relinquishes his own existence. "I am God" means "I don't exist. Everything is God. Only God exists. I am nothing. I am utter emptiness." This is complete humility not arrogance, but people often misunderstand. When someone says he is God's servant, he still sees himself as a doer, albeit in God's service. He is not yet drowned in the ocean of God. When he is, there will be no such thing as "his actions," only movements of the water. (Jalaluddin Rumi)
Identification surrender and the mystic path is the gifting of love: love embracing without reservation: our daily lives are our schools of love. Love compels us to "drop our egos": to put aside our self-interest in the precious unity of loving. Our monastic habits are the little gifts that we give the sacred "others" in our lives: in the literalness of Oneness. The mystic knows that every breath is a love-affair-in-action: our breath, in-coming and out-going, is a participation in the Elemental Tides of the Divine Breath that breathes creation into existence with every breath... This is the "pull" of the rivers of the world and the Sacred Sound uttered in every wave of every sea... Identification surrender within our breath, in-coming love and out-going blessing, is the Elemental Remembrance Prayer... Falling in love is the ecstasy that is the loving-in-the-moments of our daily lives... Loving-in-action is the bridge of immanence with transcendence...Until lover and Beloved dissolve into each other and only Love remains...
Humm... om... amen... amma... abba... allahu... ah...
Resources:
Pastrix, The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint / Nadia Bolz-Weber
Bones of the Master / George Crane
Autobiography of a Yogi / Paramahansa Yogananda
Be Love Now / Ram Dass
Tantric Jesus / Rev. James Hughes Reho, Ph. D.