The distant place that lies within.

The expression, “Home is where the heart is,” suggests that our home is in union with another. The problem with that understanding is our sense of home is then wedded to the other’s well-being. So long as that union is well, our well-being will be good. However, the opposite is also true. Tying yourself to another can be dangerous, especially when the other jeopardizes our sense of stability and wholeness.

Another perspective is more favorably secure: the perspective that home lies within, right where your spiritual heart exists. The first view can be problematic, but so too can the latter. It all depends on how we understand and experience ourselves. If our view is one of self-love, that is one thing. If our view is self-hatred, that is even more dangerous than the first. In either case, wherever we go, we go with ourselves.

Both self-love and self-hatred can and do vary according to changing circumstances—everything of a mortal nature is constantly changing, and no one can stop that flow of mortal change. Consequently, it is necessary to look beyond mortality to get to the root of the matter.

Three different spiritual teachings point us to the resolution. The first comes from a familiar source (The teaching of Christ, as expressed by St.Paul the Apostle). The second and third sources are less familiar but dovetail with that of The Apostle. Let’s start with the second, move on to the third, and check back in to conclude with St.Paul.

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French philosopher, paleontologist, and Jesuit priest who thought deeply about the meaning of our existence and relationship with the Divine. Chardin held this unorthodox view that within our mortal shell was our true home. Accepting this perspective changes how we understand ourselves (and others) from a constantly evolving mortal being that ends in death to a never-changing immortal being that never ends.

The third source comes from one of the greatest spiritual poets, artists, and educational theorists who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 (Rabindranath Tagore). Few in the West have heard of Tagore, but he shared de Chardin’s perspective and conveyed his view through many of his works, not the least of which is his poem Journey Home.

“The time that my journey takes is long, and the way of it is long.

I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light and pursued my

Voyage through the wildernesses of worlds, leaving my track on many a star and planet.

It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself,

and that training is the most intricate, leading to a tune’s utter simplicity.

The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own,

and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.

My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said, ‘Here art thou!’

The question and the cry ‘Oh, where?’ melt into tears of a thousand

Streams and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance ‘I am!’”

Like de Chardin, Tagore was persuaded that the discovery of our true home—the one of spiritual essence—only came about through a quest within, where we find our eternal source.

Now, to tie all three together, let’s examine what St. Paul had to say in the book of 1 Corinthians. He said (metaphorically), “You are the body of Christ. Each one of you is a part of it” (the concluding point of 1 Corinthians 12:12-27). Still, when taken literally, it unites with the other two perspectives that our true home—the one we can never leave lies at our spiritual core. There, alone, all of us can find the eternal spirit of love—our Divine essence. And when we see that core, we know that our essence is the same as the Divine. Short of that, we are all left with a self-understanding that bobs and weaves like a cork tossed about on the waves of change, sometimes loving and at other times with hatred. God is undivided love, and that is us.

Reality and perfection.

I am a subscriber to an email newsletter from Windmill, the header of which says: “You do not need to be ashamed of being imperfect. We were all made that way. You do not have to be ashamed that it’s so hard to work with your imperfections: the very tools you have for doing this are imperfect. We are all truly doing a difficult thing in being human.” 

I enjoy Windmill and think it is helpful in many ways. However, I want to address an essential point in this post within their header: “You do not need to be ashamed of being imperfect.” Due to some fortunate education, which others may not have been afforded, I learned to read Koine Greek—the language used to write the New Testament of the Bible and discovered much of value, not the least of which is how perfection was understood and defined way back then and has continued to find it’s way into modern culture.

The word “perfection,” properly defined in Koine Greek is not some abstract notion of being without flaw. The word (and it’s definition) is enlightening. The word for perfection is teleos and means complete or finished. Aristotle apparently said, “‘Nature does nothing in vain.’ So far, there’s no teleology to explain why you haven’t left the couch for several hours.”

Unfortunately, we still cling to the incorrect idea of being without flaw. I do agree it is impossible to be flawless living as a mortal. However, that is a side issue to what I want to convey in this post, which is reality. Until we get that issue right it doesn’t matter how we understanding anything, perfection included. 

So what is real? Those locked into the physics only, perspective, define reality as tangible, measurable phenomena (in other words objects known through the senses rather than through thought or intuition) or alternatively, a temporal or spatiotemporal (e.g., belonging to space-time) object of sensory experience as distinguished from noumenon. 

From this understanding, we can glean two essential points: There are measurable phenomena and noumenon (a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes). Noumenon goes by various names, among them Suchness and/or Thusness. Both terms arise from mystics, such as The Buddha or Meister Eckhart, as well as anyone who has plumbed the depths of consciousness to their ineffable core to find the true nature of reality—the basis, or foundation of all things (phenomena).

To repeat myself, what’s real? The realm of phenomena is physics based, and the realm of noumena is metaphysics based. Therefore there is a world, subject to perception (which we naturally assume as all there is). Does that make one right and the other wrong? Not at all. We humans are a mixed bag of both a physical, tangible, perceptible body (our house) and a metaphysical, intangible, unseen noumenal soul.  

Reality is thus like a coin with two sides (heads and tails) and perfection (completion/perfection) entails moving on a pathway leading to an awakening of that which is undetectable, yet the basis of all things. And when, at last, we awaken, it changes everything and we see with new eyes the two-fold nature of ourselves and others, one part of which is complete and the other part is a work in process— birth, change, growth and ultimately death of the “house” with the soul (which never dies) released to move on along the ultimate pathway to indwell another house.

“When you do things from the soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” and, “My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”—Rumi

Mixing it up.

We’re a curious species. Being human puts us at the top of the food chain. It also puts us at the top of other chains, such as the chain of creativity. No other life form (at least none that we know of) can imagine and solve problems as we do. 

Unfortunately, this seems to be a two-edged sword. One way cuts in the way of creation, and the other way cuts in the form of destruction. We are masters of both.

Awhile back, I wrote an article called a “Bird in hand” and spoke about compounds that result from mixing different things together. The point of that article was that once mixed, an entirely new compound results. The separate ingredients can then no longer be detected, but something new has been created.

I’m an old man now and have been kicking around spiritual conclaves for quite some time, and I’ve noticed a meaningful thing about compounds. People show up in a wide variety of such places for various reasons, but the alleged reason is they go there seeking God. After a time, many remain for other reasons, and they forget about why they came in the first place. A rare few figure out an essential truth: God doesn’t live in churches, synagogues, or temples. God lives in people.

Many people pay lip service to what their own scriptures tell them. For example, Christian scripture says that “You are the body of Christ.” If you happen to be a Buddhist you’re taught that everyone contains the enlivening essence of The Buddha. But too few seem able to accept the resulting compound and just go ahead and act like God is absent from the true temple of themselves.

Have you ever wondered what our world would be like if everyone conducted themselves by embracing this fundamental principle? If we really want to make the world a better place, begin to see yourself and others as a compound container of divinity. I am aware that most of us exhibit some less than ideal nastiness, but it’s also mixed together with genuine love and compassion. Adversity seems to bring out the goodness that is always there. And even if you don’t accept the idea that we are the resulting compound mixture of spirit and matter, it never hurts to pretend that we are.

A Bird in hand.

Here or There?

Permeate. Interpenetrate. Assimilation: all mean essentially the same thing—To infuse one thing completely into another thing, so the distinction between the two no longer exists. 

Mix the color red with the color blue and purple results. Now there is no more red or blue. Combine liquid water with extreme cold and ice results. Now there is the result of interpenetration. Mix spirit with matter, and what do you get? A sentient being with no more boundary lines between matter and spirit. Now mix two or more sentient beings, and what do you get? Chaos. 

Red is different from blue, and they don’t fight. Water and cold are different, and they don’t fight. Spirit and matter are different, and they do fight. Isn’t that odd? How can it be explained?  The problem is consciousness and perception. Red, blue, water, and cold are not conscious, but suddenly, there is fighting over differences when you add consciousness. And the reason is simple: Consciousness produces the capacity to perceive, and what a sentient being perceives are differences. 

Nobody can perceive a spirit, just what a spirit produces—sentient matter. There are both benefits and consequences of being human. We are a mixture of matter and spirit. We are sentient beings. We perceive only differences. We don’t perceive our true spiritual nature because it can’t be perceived through our ordinary senses. We would rather have what we imagine is a couple of birds in the bush instead of the one in our hands. The one in our hands is no longer either spirit or matter. Now it is simply One whole sentient being: the infusion of Spirit and non-spirit. We are the Middle Way.

Fighting household gods

Around the world, different people have worshiped both “household gods” and God in another house called “The House of God.” Even today, many churches call themselves The House of God. There have been many ideas regarding where God lives. A popular thought is that God lives in heaven, located in the sky. 

When asked, Jesus said that God lives in each of us, but that idea didn’t get too far. I guess not many people could buy that notion, so they went back to the tried and true idea with which they were most familiar—God lives in the temple, or the church, or the synagogue or some other “holy place” but for sure not in our inner being. But this placement for his holiness didn’t stop the household god practice, and people still have both: the everyday god and the special God, who lives in the church, but never in us.

In ways this arrangement seems to work well since it keeps God/god conveniently located so that he/she doesn’t become pushy and intrusive. Shouldn’t everyone get some private time? Who wants a judge sitting on your shoulder watching your every move. Teens today have an Internet lingo worked out for that. It’s called “POS”—Parent Over Shoulder, which they can send via text messaging to their friends to signal, “What I’m going to send now is the cleaned up version since my parents are snooping.” So it looks like keeping God located away is a good thing. That way we can be two faced—One face we use normally and one face we dust off and use when someone is watching.

Unfortunately it is very tough to fool ourselves. We are always there, snooping and it won’t do much good to send POS to get away from our self. To reconfigure that dilemma, we have split ourselves into different compartments, which develop into split personalities. Apparently this becomes highly sophisticated with multiple personalities in the same body which gets very confusing when trying to relate to someone like that. “Is that you Jane? Mary? Lucy?...Who’s home today?”

All jesting aside, these are poor souls who can’t manage to integrate these conflicting aspects in a way that is acceptable to them (whoever “them” might be). It’s a sad situation but not so very far from the dilemma we all wrestle with by presenting the right face. This is a genuine problem when you don’t know who you are in the first place. In that case, you can be just about anyone you choose to and not be anyone at all.

Lots of people spend years in therapy trying to come to terms with this problem. It plagued me for a long time so I’m not making light of it. In this state of confusion we are simply imprisoned by delusions which are rooted in the phantom known as ego—The mythical monster that doesn’t exist but seems very real. That monster causes us to become wholly self-centered which creates a cascade of problems. 

In that state we think we are the center of the world. In effect we become the household gods and expect the world to bow down to us. It is very maddening (which makes us angry) when the world doesn’t respond well to our self-absorbing antics. And often times, after the fact, we think to ourselves: “Where did that come from? I can’t believe I was such a schmuck?” Then the guilt sets in, especially when we see ourselves repeating over and over the very behavior we just acknowledged about which we were embarrassed. That emotion fills us with self-doubt, self-hate and overwhelms us with thoughts of shame and inadequacy, all of which we experience as caustic and degrading.

In the midst of this all together nastiness what we fail to realize is that these emotions are like the warning light that switches on in our car when we need a change of oil. We should feel this way since these are signals to bring us up short and cause us to pay attention to what is fueling this causal chain. If we are really careful (usually takes years before we stop putting ourselves through this wringer) we’ll back-track these nasty emotions and come to see the phantom—our ego is the culprit. And after that, if we’re really careful (more years) we find that we are not any phantom. We are real boys and girls who share a common base of just your every day household variety, everywhere and nowhere, not special Buddha-Nature. Jesus was right.