|
Welcome to OneLife Ministries. This site is designed to lead you prayerfully into a heart experience of the Sacred, Who is Love. While it focuses on Christian teaching, I hope persons of varied faiths will find inspiration here. Indeed, "God" can be whatever image helps us trust in the Sacred, by whatever means Grace touches us each. There is a new offering daily. To be placed on the daily OneLife email list, to request notifications of new writings or submit prayer requests, write to briankwilcox@yahoo.com .
Blessings,
Brian Kenneth Wilcox MDiv, MFT, PhD
Interspiritual Pastor-Teacher, Author, Workshop Leader, Spiritual Counselor, and Chaplain.
You are invited to join Brian at his fellowship group on Facebook. The group is called OneLife Ministries – An Interspiritual Contemplative Fellowship. Hope to see you there. Blessings.
Today's Saying
We welcome the Sacred into this life of ours, the one we did not want, and find the Divine is waiting for us already, right there.
In Buddhist Tantra is a method of using a seed syllable, imaged as a single letter and representing energy symbolized by a deity, to open up to and in oneself the energy of enlightenment. Chōgyam Trungpa taught that the energy of confusion and ambiguity works as a seed syllable, also.
I contrast with the reason most of us enter meditation practice. We want to have relief and buttress our certainty, or we want to return to an old faith that we seem to have lost along the way. Sometimes we want to get back to a felt sense of closeness with the Spirit.
No meditation student I have ever had, upon entering the class, would have said, "Brian, I am here to get confused and enter profound ambiguity. I am here to lose the faith I have thought I have had." Rather, we enter for other reasons: feel close to God, have more peace, renew our lost faith, …
And, indeed, that is okay, for where we enter the Stream is fine, but the Stream will surprise us, for it has a direction of its own. I try to "warn" beginning meditation students of this; I even tell them they will, likely, come to get angry with me as teacher. I want them to know that the motives they enter the Stream with are fine, often noble, but the Stream will take them elsewhere. That is Grace. Our entering priorities are not the ultimate priorities of the Spirit of the Stream.
The Stream keeps going. We have respites along the way, as part of the flow, but we do not stop the current, for the Stream has the nature of life as vibrant and in process. God is in the process, the author of the process. We trust the process and, thereby, trust God.
* * *
Meditation, as process, has a mind of its own, so to speak, or the path has a wisdom that will not comply with our initial interests. What we discover if we keep practicing is the wisdom of confusion, ambiguity, and uncertainty. That is right, "wisdom."
So, what are we to do with all this emotion that seems much like a load of unfaith and which may be experienced as threatening to our religious devotion? Well, the practice opens us to see that our faith is often very insecure and defined quite wrongly. We begin to see that what we called faith has been somewhat a matter of manipulation and false security. The path shows us, thank God, that all that ambiguity and confusion is evidence that we are not as certain of ourselves, our belief system, or trust in Spirit as we thought. This is painful, but gracefully painful.
We, therefore, faithfully look into all the confusion, detaching from what I call false faith or a less mature faith. We move into all that cloudiness, a deep shade that we simply had not recognized before.
We might have been very comfortable hiding from the challenges to our belief system or what we have thought of as true. We might even have been very critical of anyone who tried to get us to look at the unreality of much of our assumptions. But false faith keeps us asleep, from waking up, from realizing the wonders to which the Stream wants to lead us in Love. Waking up may be hard, but what a world awaits!
* * *
So, Rinpoche is right. We need a practice that opens us to natural confusion. That confusion is already all around us. The world is ambiguous. If we do not see all that, then, that is evidence we are asleep. We miss the beauty of confusion and the elegance of ambiguity if we are asleep to their true nature. For, truly, salvation, enlightenment, heaven and nirvana, yes, moksa, are in this energy of confusion and doubt.
This is the irony of a religious seed syllable of confusion: true, very deep faith opens in beautiful splendor by integrating the energy of doubt and ambiguity as one with truth and certainty. Confusion itself becomes a wonderful part of the Journey; ambiguity becomes a welcome part of the Dance. Indeed, we find God in the confusion and ambiguity. God, as Spirit, is right in the middle of reality. God is equally in the question and the answer. We begin to live with God in all the apparent opposites. We welcome the Sacred into this life of ours, the one we did not want, and find the Divine is waiting for us already, right there.
Jesus, as all great teachers, led his disciples through the crucible of the severe testing of their assumptions into a new life of vibrant and deep certainty, that in some ways appears much unlike most religious faith and spiritual theory. The Buddha did the same some 2500 years ago.
Truly, the deepest knowing is in unknowing. Yes, the deepest unknowing is in knowing. God will take care of us, in leading us to an amazing faith deeper, purer, and truer than we ever dreamed possible in this life. The more amazing is always the next step; trust allows us to go there.
Responding
For one meditation sit, place the mind on a specific area of confusion in your life. Rest in acceptance of the confusion, feel the energy - give thanks for the confusion.
|
