the Promised Land

“Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have already given to you, as I promised to Moses..” Joshua ch1 v 3


Meditation: “Saying the mantra is like playing verbal hopscotch from now to now.”


Via Positiva

WHAT-DREAMS-MAY-COMEOne of the things our parents teach us if we are well socialised is to suffer the sweet pain of deferred gratification – resisting immediate sweetie rewards in order to receive a sweeter reward later. I swallowed it. I still had Easter eggs left over when I went on my summer holidays.

This capacity to resist the temptation of an immediate reward in anticipation of a later better reward can be seen either as sign of growing up or or a sign of being controlled by the grown ups or those in authority. Religion has cornered the market in deferred gratification with the trump card of heaven – put off eating all chocolate until you taste the resurrection egg.

This is neither biblical nor liveable. When God promised Moses the Promised Land He wasn’t referring to heaven but to the conquest of Canaan in the next generation and before Joshua crossed over God encouraged him with these strange words. “Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have already given to you, as I promised to Moses.” The future promise is already a present given. Like a Russian Easter egg the favourable future outcome is already hidden in the womb of the present moment. Jesus said “the Kingdom is within you.”

That’s why there is a seed of truth in the second step of Skakti Gawain’s four steps to effective creative visualisation. “You should think of it in the present tense as already existing the way you want it to be.” The danger of living on a promise is that tomorrow never comes and you miss the gift in the present. You become addicted to the idea that there is something missing and you go looking for it somewhere else. As Lauren Britt puts it, “beware of Destination Addiction—a preoccupation with the idea that happiness is in the next place, the next job, or with the next partner. Until you give up the idea that happiness is somewhere else, it will never be where you are.”

The other danger is only living for the present moment as though there was no promise for tomorrow – what has become our YOLO mentality of “you only live once” which confuses happiness with pleasure. The utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill puts this ‘pleasure paradox’ succinctly. “Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness along the way. Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

Which reminds me of something Charles Kingsley says. “We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements in life, when all we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”

If you want to be happy find something to be enthusiastic about or, if you want to be uber enthusiastic like Soren Kierkegaard, find the idea for which you are willing to live and die for. It may involve a little deferred gratification following this path but you’ll be happy in the moment. What did the Buddha say? “There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.” I still don’t really understand what he meant. It is tautological.

The thing that separates us from our future happiness is time. If it wasn’t for time the happiness that you anticipate experiencing tomorrow in your promised land is already here now. Which is fortunate since all mystics agree that time is an illusion of the mind.

In the inspiring documentary ‘Taro – El Eco de Manrique‘ the artist Cesar Manrique says “time is a creation of the brain.” Living in the now is the surest way to the promised land.

“Here is the Promised Land. The eternal is here. Have you ever noticed that you have never left here, except in your mind? When you remember the past, you are not actually in the past. Your remembering is happening here. When you think about the future, that future projection is completely here. And when you get to the future, it’s here. It’s no longer the future.

To be here, all you have to do is let go of who you think you are. That’s all! And then you realise, “I’m here.” Here is where thoughts aren’t believed. Every time you come here, you are nothing. Radiantly nothing. Absolutely and eternally zero. Emptiness that is awake. Emptiness that is full.” Adyashanti


 

an idea to live and die for

“The thing is to find a truth which is a truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.” Kierkegaard


Meditation: “Saying the mantra is like entering the void – each syllable a hachure stroke towards perfect darkness.”


Via Negativa

Kierkegaard WarholIn the credits at the end of the film ‘Amores Perros‘ – dangerous loves – if you are patient towards the end you will catch a quote which, if my Spanish serves me well, says “we are also defined by what we have lost.”

In a world addicted to the pursuit of happiness and specifically the misconceived idea that acquiring more – more knowledge, more experience, more love, more stuff – will make you happy it may seem counterintuitive to entertain the idea that less is more.

Yet the way of the mystic in all traditions has always included the ‘Via Negativa’ – the negative path, the way of negation, of taking away, the dark night of the soul of the desert fathers, the ‘neti neti’ ‘not this not this’ of the Hindu mystics. The path leading to the irreducible core or ground of being – die grunde.

The founding father of what we now call Existentialism, Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard, understood that knowing yourself embraced this not-knowing and in this knowledge was authentic freedom. “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” says Jesus in John 8v32.

As Kierkegaard puts it in his journal AA “One must first learn to know oneself before knowing anything else. Only when the person has inwardly understood himself and then sees the way forward on his path does his life acquire repose and meaning.”

Kierkegaard knew about loss. His early life in Copenhagen in the second decade of the nineteenth century, the Danish ‘Golden Age’, was a litany of loss. He lost six siblings and both his mother and father by the age of twenty five and only his elder brother, Peter Christian, survived. Kierkegaard all his life was convinced he himself was going to die at the age of thirty three. In his diary in the Royal Library in Copenhagen I read the page where he expressed his surprise at reaching his thirty fourth birthday.

His father’s first wife died after two years of marriage and within nine months his father, a pious stern Lutheran, had an affair with the maid who was four months pregnant when they married. His father once raged against God and cursed God and was convinced that as a result of his misdeeds he and the family were cursed and so the young Kierkegaard grew up under the sombre shadow of being cursed by God and being convinced he was going to die at thirty three.

Not the most promising start for a man who was to set a cat amongst the pigeons of complacent bourgeois thought and belief in Danish society, church and academia and go on to establish the foundations of modern philosophy. But in his case it was the catalyst he needed to forge his purpose in life. “The thing is to find a truth which is a truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.”

In his comparatively short life – he died at the age of 42 – he published over 40 books on philosophy and religion redefining what it is to be Christian … or indeed a free human being “alone in this terrible exertion.”

The starting point on the path to truth is to surrender all you know in the fire of not-knowing.

And I watch you run down on your bended knees By the burnt out well, can you tell me please? Between Heaven and Hell, wont you take me down? To the burning ground, to the burning ground.

Van Morrison


 

neti neti

“Once you label me you negate me.”
Søren Kierkegaard


Meditation:

“The more you abandon all images, all words, all imaginings and the more you allow the silence to overwhelm you … the more powerful you become.”


Via Negativa

My favourite guru in the annual spiritual supermarket sweeps in Tiruvanamalai in Tamil Nadu every December and January was a dreadlocked Jamaican kindly bear of a man from Brixton called Mooji.

I chose to spend most of my seven weeks in Tiru attending his ‘satsangs’ – open meetings in a rice mill including a five day silent retreat.

One of the little exercises he set us was to walk about town observing everything but resisting the temptation to label anything … ‘tuck-tuck’, ‘cow’, ‘chapati’ … but rather seeing things for what they are. As soon as you name anything you negate its true essence – a bit like the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics when an object is observed. It was playing hide and seek with you until the very moment you observed it when it crystallises into the familiar object you give a name. Names are useful but merely socially conducted concepts or taxonomies to help us impress a matrix of meaning on an otherwise chaotic sense-world.

In every mystic tradition there is a form of meditation called apophatic – from the Greek ἀπόφασις from ἀπόφημι – apophēmi, “to deny” – which takes as its starting point the fact that God is not what you can say about him. “We do not know what God is. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not, because He transcends being.” John Scot Erigena (9th century)

In India this is called ‘neti neti’ which is a Sanskrit expression which means “not this, not this”, or “neither this, nor that”. You arrive at a closer affinity with God by a process of taking away. In the Christian mystic tradition this is called the Via Negativa. Try observing without naming; reducing everything to its ‘isness’ which is God.

“The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” Luke 17:21