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We each come to junctures in life, when we do not know how we will get from one place to the next. Often, we do not even know where we want to get. Possibly, all we feel is a sense that there is something more for us, though we cannot name it. Or, we sense there is more we want to be and give to someone, but we do not know how, for we feel we have exhausted our limits. Fortunate are we, if we are sensitive enough to the Inner Spirit, to sense these embodied messages. Sad are those persons who are so blunted by self-consciousness that they are not attuned to the wisdom of such sensations toward Mystery and selflessness.
I rarely give a lesson or sermon with points. I am more interested in the Mystery of the Journey, in this moment, Right Now. I want you to know the joy of not-knowing, a not-knowing that is, positively speaking, what we call faith. I want us to know, together, that Reality will support us each step of the way, when we step out faithfully.
But, what happens when determination fails us? What happens when we cannot seem to summon the courage to act, to take the step into the unknown? Indiana is motivated by a Love that allows him to step out. Likely, he would not have stepped out, had it not been for his loving Henry. Therefore, I write of a "loving trust," or a "faithful loving."
Alan W. Watts contrasts “hell” and “heaven” from a contemplative perspective, which looks at such realities as present processes within the Now (The Wisdom of Insecurity). He writes, “Hell is the fatuity, the everlasting impossibility, of self-love, self-consciousness, and self-possession.” Hell is “trying to see one’s own eyes, hear one’s own ears, and kiss one’s own lips.” Basically, Hell, then, is a self-orientation that contradicts all-inclusive Reality.
Hell, then, is the futile attempt of self-love to create a life counter to the innate principles in Nature, as expressive of the Deep Center of All. Without this Orienting Center, Hell engulfs us, individually and collectively. Hell is a self-love, when even religion or “spirituality” seeks to present and advance teaching and action contrary to the naturally divine operations of this Moment. Why? Nature, reflecting the Nature Giver, or God, reflects the universal principles by which we live in Heaven, here and now.
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Watts proceeds to speak of Eternal Life, or Heaven. He observes that the future is “everlastingly unattainable, and, like that dangle carrot, always ahead of the donkey…” Rather, the “fulfillment of divine purpose does not lie in the future.” And, “For this is the meaning of that universal and ever-repeated religious principle that to know God, man must give up himself.”
Then, Watts connects this giving up of self to the New Testament “in Christ.”
The Christian religion contains its own hidden answer to the problem in the idea that man can only surrender himself “in Christ.” For “Christ” stands for the reality that there is no separate self to surrender. To give up “I” is a false problem. “Christ” is the realization that there is no separate “I.” “I do nothing of myself [John 5.30]. … I and the Father are one [John 10.30]. … Before Abraham was, I am [John 8.58].”
Jesus never says, “I and God are the same” or “I am God” or “God is I” …; rather, he speaks of the differentiated union, or oneness, between Source and Word, as One in the Spirit, or Love. That is, Jesus saw an “I” that is Himself, but an “I” within union with the Father, a derivative I, not an I apart from the Father or equal to a self that could have been apart from the Father. That Jesus is the Fullness of this Incarnation of Union does not imply that we, as far as we are not a separate self, also, do not partake of the same union. And, the fact that a biblical writer or Christian writer does not delve into these contemplative depths of Meaning is not proof that this contemplative View is incorrect or unorthodox. Possibly, such is only proof that Scripture symbolizes an Absolute with relative symbols, and the inspiration of a Scripture writer of post-biblical writer may be limited by the level of consciousness of the writer, even as he or she may reveal much more than the writer knows.
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