Using the tools of science and psychology to deepen your spiritual growth.
Please Note: These newsletters are meant to be read in order.
30: The Invisible Trap of Judgment
Edition #30: Inside the Invisible
Today I want to explore a concept that I call positional thinking. I am basing my thoughts on some original work by Dr. David Hawkins. Dr. Hawkins, to my knowledge, originated the concept of positionality. For the longest time, I have had difficulty wrapping my head around this label. I just didn’t understand it, or rather, I would understand it briefly, and then the idea would slip away.
At some point, I realized that Hawkins was discussing a particular way of thinking, and this opened up the idea for me. Positional thinking involves making a judgment about something. The seduction of a judgment is that it maintains
the illusion that we understand what’s going on, when in fact we don’t. By making these judgments, we hide ourselves from the truth. We also assume that, by means of our judgment, we now have some control over the object of our judgment. These are wonderful delusions that reinforce our ego and our spiritual stuck-ness.
Let’s start by examining the concept of judging. For example, I might say, “It’s too dark in here, so let’s turn on a light.” This is the kind of judgment that we all engage in on a daily basis. We look at a specific phenomenon and then make a variety of judgments about our experience. On the surface, this seems absolutely ordinary and unremarkable, but just below the surface, we find an amazing error.
We have assumed that light and darkness form a continuum, with various degrees of light and darkness. In actual fact, there is no such continuum. Instead of a continuum, we are actually observing a unipolar phenomenon – light! Darkness does not exist as an entity that can be labeled. I know this sounds weird, but bear with me for a moment.
When have you ever seen somebody flip a wall switch and turn on the darkness? That never happens, does it? It doesn’t happen because only light exists. What we call darkness is actually the absence of light. Here is a clear example of our tendency to not see reality, to not see what is actually before our eyes. We think we see darkness; we label what we see as darkness, but in actuality, we are seeing the absence of something, not the existence of an entity we call darkness.
If this were an isolated example, we could easily ignore it. Unfortunately, our perceptions are riddled with this kind of error. Let me give you some examples. Let’s take hot and cold – two apparent polarities that are very important to us every time we step into a shower. However, cold doesn’t exist. Cold is the label that we give to the absence of heat.
“Okay,” you say. “But what about good and evil? Surely you are not going to say that evil doesn’t exist!” Once again, let’s look at this carefully. When have you ever seen a measure of evil? The only measurements of evil that exist are in our subjective judgments. When you examine the writings of the great thinkers who have explored this issue, philosophers such as Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Baruch Spinoza, they universally conclude that evil is simply the absence of good. Once again, we have a unipolar phenomenon – only good exists. Evil, as we understand it, is simply the absence of good.
So, what are we doing here? In essence, we are mistaking our perceptions for reality. We have created a series of collective delusions – by assuming that something exists when it actually doesn’t – and we’ve enshrined these delusions in our language. Because of these shared delusions, we have changed our behavior to accommodate them.
I know all of this sounds terribly abstract and difficult to comprehend, so let’s try to create an example. Imagine that there is a spot in your living room where you imagine a very special chair rests. Everyone in the family honors this imaginary chair by walking around it. Nobody is allowed to sit in this chair except for honored guests. So far, so good. This shared delusion is relatively innocuous right up until the moment that special guest arrives.
Can you imagine that guest’s consternation when invited to sit in this special but imaginary chair? The guest might comment, “But there’s nothing there – I don’t see a chair!” The family insists and says, “Not only is there a chair, but it’s a very special chair and reserved for special guests just such as yourself.” You might wonder what would happen if this guest actually tried to take a seat in this very special chair.
It’s the story of the Emperor’s new clothes, isn’t it, but set in a different context. And like the Emperor’s new clothes, this imaginary chair can lead to catastrophic consequences. This is what happens with positional thinking. It seems to work just fine, right up until the point that it stops working.
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Not only does positional thinking lead us to misperceive the reality around us, it also impacts us in other ways. For example, by assuming a continuum between good and evil, we have created an illusion that we understand the nature of these two categories. But when we assume that they exist on a continuum, we have actually turned our back on the reality of the situation. It means that we assume evil has some objective existence, and therefore some sort of validity. Nothing could be further from the truth! Of all of the distortions that we might engage in, making mistakes about the true nature of good and evil might be the most dangerous.
A case in point is the rise in Satanism in Western cultures. If you mistake evil for something that has an independent existence, it seems logical, and perhaps even reasonable, to worship the God of evil, Satan. You would simply see Satan as one of many gods, and thus, as a powerful entity. Once you realize that evil has no independent existence, however, then Satan is revealed as a chimera, the figment of our overheated imaginations.
Sadly, the damage doesn’t stop here. When we use positional thinking and make judgments about things or behaviors, we have created for ourselves the illusion that we have some control over these mental objects. This harkens back to the magical thinking of our forebearers – that if you can name something, having that name gives you power over that which is named. This is simply not true.
The sad part is, by not reflecting on this matter so that we can discern the truth about it, we waste time and energy. We situate ourselves at the center of a delusional fantasy, a kind of ‘pretend’ situation, all the while thinking that we have mastered the matter. When reality knocks on our door, our fantasies disappear in a poof of smoke, and we are heartbroken.
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There is yet another critical aspect to our mistaken beliefs. While believing that we control something as a result of our positional thinking, we are actually being controlled.
Our positional thinking – our judgments – lock us into a fixed position. By engaging in positional thinking, we have bound ourselves to a particular position. For example, by saying things like, “I’m a Democrat,” we have locked ourselves into whatever being a Democrat means to you. The same with saying you are a Republican. For example, you may support the political position of having secure borders for our country, but be appalled at the way the current administration is treating immigrants. By locking yourself into a particular political position, however, you are identifying yourself with something you don’t actually support. We take a position, thinking that we are defining ourselves. We don’t typically see it as a process whereby we sacrifice our freedom.
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So, what does all this mean? In effect, we are creating a prison for ourselves by our positional thinking. Here’s how it works. What we believe is what we experience. Using the light/dark example above, we have always thought of darkness as a thing-in-itself. Because we believed it to be a separate thing, that’s exactly what we experienced – we saw darkness as a separate thing, even though careful analysis shows us that it isn’t.
Now, let’s take a step back and look at what is driving our thinking. It is our ego. Your ‘I’ is what is generating your thoughts. For example, we commonly say, “I think (fill in the blank.) While our ego is necessary to get along in the world, it actually is in business to gratify itself. It is about Me-Me-Me. And ultimately, our ego becomes an obstacle in our search for the Divine.
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Has your head exploded yet? If it has, don’t worry. Your ego will soon put it back together again. But hopefully, I have started you on a road that will lead you to question our conventional reality. What is actually real is radically different from what we have assumed, and careful analysis helps us peel away the deceptions so that we can get to the Truth. And it is the Truth that will set us free!
This week, you may find it helpful to read this newsletter several times. The material we are covering is very difficult to understand. It is also very important as it bears heavily on the success of our spiritual journey. So hang in there, and remember to meditate every day.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
29: An Introduction to Unitive Consciousness
Edition #29: Inside the Invisible
When you dig deeply enough, when you open your eyes and leave behind the preconceptions you have been taught about religion, you realize something extraordinary. You realize that the goal of all of the major world religions is virtually identical! Despite the vast differences in their theological understandings, each religion has created a path that results in the unification of the spiritual aspirant's consciousness with the Divine. Given this information, it may be reasonable to say that there is only one religion, and this religion has a variety of pathways, each of which leads to the same ultimate goal.
This is a truly amazing finding. When you consider the vast quantities of blood that have been spilled in the religious wars throughout the centuries, this finding is almost unbelievable. Each of the major religions, in one way or another, has asserted its primacy. Each has proclaimed that they are the only true religion; each has asserted that their path to God is the only true path. Yet, when we compare the paths to God described by each of these religions, we find they are identical.
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Today, I thought it might be useful to explore the goal that our religious beliefs have in common – the notion of unitive consciousness. Each of the major religions talks about the goal of a spiritual life as a process that unites our conscious awareness with the Divine. What does this notion refer to? How might we describe it? The easiest way to explore this topic is to describe how each of the major religions understands the goal of spiritual striving. From these data, we will be able to stand back and see what they actually have in common.
To accomplish this, we must disregard the numerous schools of thought within each of the major religions. The major religions have been around for thousands of years, and it is natural that there would be some variability of understanding about the spiritual path within each religion. As a result, I have chosen one mystic from each of these religions – a mystic regarded as authoritative within their own religion. (You can find a fuller exposition of this material in my recent book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transformation.)
So, what does the goal of the spiritual path look like in each religion?
Hinduism
Hinduism describes a series of spiritual states that culminate in a state called Dharma-Megha-Samadhi. In this state, the aspirant's mind has relinquished all attachments and, as a result, it has established itself in its real nature, which is pure Consciousness. To attain this state, the spiritual aspirant has had to focus attention to such a degree that there is no longer any individual content left in awareness. This process typically takes a very long time and is often described as spanning multiple lifetimes, as the individual is reincarnated over and over again.
Buddhism
The Theravadan school of Buddhism, the earliest in the historical record, describes the goal of the spiritual life as the attainment of Fruition Consciousness. This is the final stage of Enlightenment, where the spiritual aspirant has finally relinquished all desires, and all grasping at the objects of desire. To reach this state, the aspirant has progressed through a series of meditations that have developed one’s concentration to a very refined degree. In the process, the aspirant perceives that all objects of awareness are impermanent and painful, and as a result, the aspirant disengages from all objects of awareness. There is a unification of consciousness with itself, and the aspirant enters into Nirvana.
Daoism
In Daoism, the spiritual aspirant engages in a series of extended meditative exercises. As a result, outward actions gradually diminish and the mind rests in a deeper and deeper peace. All desires are relinquished, and the mind becomes utterly detached from them. From this detached state, the aspirant is able to distinguish between what is real and what is not; the mind becomes utterly empty and reaches a stable state of serenity. In this state, the aspirant reaches Dao within the mind, and insight into the true nature of reality emerges. When the mind and Dao are fused into one, the body and spirit are also fused together in a unique way, and one is no longer limited by the usual constraints of space and time.
Judaism
Hasidic Judaism understands this unification to take place as the result of a series of ever-more refined states of concentration while contemplating the Divine. The conclusion of these exercises is a full and open communion with God, such that the essence of the soul is attached to the essence of God. Here, there is only one will – the will of God – and one’s whole being is absorbed into the Divine, so that nothing of the individual self-consciousness remains. In this unitive state, one has no self-consciousness. There is only the limitless love of God.
Christianity
In the Christian view, the spiritual aspirant progresses through a series of meditative exercises designed to focus and sharpen one’s concentration. As this occurs, the soul experiences a union with God such that all faculties – the senses, will, imagination, and memory – are suspended and one no longer has awareness of anything but God. At the end of the spiritual journey, the soul is fully united with God and experiences the immediate presence of the Trinity in every moment. The spiritual aspirant no longer experiences intense raptures but a different kind of pleasure that is extreme and indescribable. There is a sense of inner peace and a return to activity in the world.
Islam
The spiritual aspirant goes through a long progression of concentrative exercises, which result in the abandonment of sin, a renunciation of the world, and the abstention from blameworthy acts. Out of this arises a remembrance of God and finding Him. Ultimately, this results in a union with God and an expansion of wisdom. One is liberated from all needs and attachments, and there is a peace which God pours into the heart so that the spiritual aspirant tastes freedom. This is an acceptance of God’s guardianship. One becomes free from all attachments and finds intimacy and love in the Divine rather than in oneself. One becomes free from the self and returns to God.
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As you can see by this aggregation, the major world religions have much in common when they describe the path to God. In every case, there is a series of meditative exercises designed to sharpen the focus of one’s concentration. It’s important I think to ask, why is this necessary. Only by probing these data will we come to understand the rationale behind them.
I have come to understand the rationale for this emphasis on concentration through a strange and peculiar parallel. (This is probably because I’m a strange and peculiar guy. After all, how many priest/psychologist folk do you know?) The parallel that came to mind as I struggled with understanding this has to do with women in stilettos. If you have ever had your foot stepped on by a woman wearing high heels, you immediately experience excruciating pain. All of her weight is focused on a point about ¼ of an inch square. If this same woman happens to step on your foot while wearing flats, there is no pain at all.
Here’s the parallel. When her weight is focused, it has the ability to punch through things – namely, your foot! In the same way, when your attention is highly focused and concentrated, it has the ability to “punch through” the observable reality in front of us so that we are able to see the Ultimate Reality which lies behind it.
As we draw closer to the Divine by developing our concentrative abilities, we begin to experience some unusual phenomena. We find ourselves relinquishing our grasping at things, and ultimately, we relinquish our desire for those things altogether. Instead, by focusing our desire on God, we find ourselves drawing closer and closer to the Divine.
Ultimately, as we find ourselves standing next to the Divine, we even relinquish our self, our ego identity. Instead, we find a deeper and truer identity in God. This is the pathway that the saints from all religions have followed. As they have gotten closer and closer to the Divine, their self-consciousness has disappeared, and the limitless love of God flows through them and into the world. It is from this spiritual place that the miracles, apparent in all of the religions, have occurred.
We have a clear example of this process in the Christian Scriptures. As St. Paul said in his letter to the Galatians, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”
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I hope that you have found this newsletter interesting and helpful in your spiritual journey. While each religion covers up the actual process for spiritual growth with its own doctrinal understandings, I believe we can learn a great deal when we aggregate this information.
Historically, each religion has presented itself as the only true path. Rationally, we know that this can’t be. If one is true, then the others must be false. But what if we simply accept that they all are true? What if we accepted the hypothesis that each religion, to the best of its ability, is speaking the truth?
For example, if six different people saw the same tree, each from different vantage points, we would expect six different descriptions, wouldn’t we? Why would we not expect the same about six different descriptions of something far more complex – the path to God? When we remove the conceptual blinders we have been taught by our various religious authorities and examine the data on its own merits, we start to see the things they have in common. This, I believe, enhances our understanding of this most complex of human processes – that of walking the spiritual path, that of entering into a life wholly devoted to God.
* * *
That’s all for now. I hope I have disturbed you a little and shaken up your view of what constitutes the Truth. I hope today’s newsletter has given you a glimpse of the path in front of you. Typically, we who tread the spiritual path have had little knowledge of what lies ahead. We have had to travel on faith. I hope these newsletters provide you with solid knowledge. Knowledge that you can verify for yourself through your own experience as you engage in these concentrative exercises we call ‘meditation.’
Next week, we will start to tackle something even more fascinating, so stay tuned. And may our Lord continue to bless you as we walk the Way together!
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
28: Achieving Peace of Mind
Edition #28: Inside the Invisible
Have you ever longed for more peace of mind? I certainly have, and I had a very interesting conversation with Mike this week about just this topic. Mike is an old friend from Southern California who is now a subscriber. He said some things that made me stop and reflect on what we are doing here with the newsletter.
Mike’s background is in marketing, so he sees the world from that perspective. He said, “What you are selling, Ken, is peace of mind.” I had never thought of it in those terms. From my perspective, I’m not selling anything. This newsletter is free; if anything, I’m trying to give it away! Mike insisted, “No, the product you’re selling – whether you get any money for it or not – is peace of mind!”
On reflection, I realized Mike was right. What I’m trying to do is to give you the tools that will enable you to connect with your own deepest, most innermost self. In my experience, people who have realized this deep connection also experience extraordinary inner peace. They are people who radiate joy. It’s not happiness they have – happiness comes when something is added to you from the outside. No, what these people have is access to a deep current of joy that freely streams in their depths. And it streams through every moment of their life.
You have undoubtedly noticed by now that I keep promoting meditation. The reason I keep encouraging you to meditate is that I believe this is the most efficient way to connect you with your deepest being. It is a way for each of us to tap into that deep peace and joy in our depths.
We typically stand at a remove from ourselves. We are bombarded from all sides with an overload of information, so we have learned to tune out the noise that comes from outside. Sadly, though, we seem to have internalized all of these streaming channels. As a result, our minds give us more streaming, and it’s not so easy to shut these thoughts off. You know, all the inner chatter about the political uproar and the changing economic situation, the uproar of friends losing their jobs, and the fear that surrounds all of us today.
There are two things you can do to connect with your deepest being. The first is meditation, which, over time, will help you diminish and ultimately relinquish the inner chatter in your head. The second thing you can do, which will help you find peace of mind, is to change your outward behaviors. And this is where a second conversation came in.
I was talking with Zilvinas, who is a subscriber on the other side of the world, in Lithuania. We are able to talk thanks to the magic of video calls, and we were focusing on how we make behavioral changes in our lives. We asked ourselves, How do we become more generous? We realized that you can’t just jump from our usual selfish ways to a magnificent philanthropy. So how do you make these kinds of changes?
You start with little things, don’t you? You become aware of the needs of others, and you push yourself to give in small ways. Perhaps you begin by seeing something that your partner has left undone, and instead of mentally complaining, you simply take care of it. As you continue to perform these simple acts of generosity, you begin to realize that doing so brings you a sweet kind of joy. It’s not the “wowie-zowie-out-of-your-mind kind of happiness,” but rather a small, quiet sense of satisfaction.
After a time, this new behavior becomes your ‘normal.’ When you began to deliberately become more generous, you had to exert effort. You had to “open your eyes” to see what needed to be done. You had to make the conscious decision to act in a new way. You had to follow through with a change in your actual behavior. After a while, though, these exertions become commonplace and you realize they have become your new normal.
It reminded me a bit of what I experience with gardening. I planted late this year, and I decided to grow some herbs. I planted quite a variety – cilantro, oregano, parsley, thyme, tarragon – and watered them every day. Nothing happened. The dirt just stayed dirt. And then, after a week or so, to my great delight, the oregano seeds began to sprout with these little pinpoints of green – so tiny that they were just barely visible. After a few days, some of the other herbs began to sprout as well, but I noticed that nothing was happening with the parsley. I wondered why, and then reread the seed packet again. Parsley takes 18 to 24 days to germinate. I was amazed that it took so long.
This means that I need to keep watering the dirt where I planted the parsley seeds for a relatively long time – a time when I will see no visible results for my efforts. This seems to be a direct parallel with what happens as we try to change our behavior. You have to put in a lot of effort over an extended period of time for those changes to become established. Once they are established, though, they become our new ‘normal.’
Our conversation led Zilvinas to talk about his wife’s description of her meditation efforts. She doesn’t use the Jesus Prayer or any of the rather fancy forms of meditation. Instead, she simply sits still for 15 minutes or so and lets go of the chatter in her head. She doesn’t have a particular method for doing this; she just lets go. When she gets up from her meditation, she reports that she’s much calmer. She said, “It’s almost like the rest of the day becomes a kind of extended meditation.” When asked about this, she said, “My meditation seems to turn off the streaming in my head, or at least, it turns down the volume quite a bit.” In either case, she finds herself closer to her inner being, and she reports a much greater peace of mind.
* * *
So we see that the most efficient way to achieve the deep inner peace we long for is to work in two parallel channels. The first channel is to change our outward behaviors. The major world religions have agreed that four kinds of behavior change are necessary for inner peace. These include: no lying, no stealing, no inappropriate sexual behavior, and no violence. As you can see, these behaviors are framed as things we should avoid. They do not address the positive behaviors we should cultivate. Behaviors like generosity, kindness, and concern for others.
The second channel is to change our inner behaviors, namely the thoughts that stream through our heads. Let’s face it, most of our thinking is superfluous. It’s a way of gossiping to ourselves about every little thing we experience. It doesn’t move us forward, it doesn’t advance the many projects we are involved in, it’s just a lot of noisy extraneous chatter. Its only function, if you can call it that, is entertainment. That’s right – we constantly talk to ourselves just to entertain ourselves. It’s like Netflix for free! But it is not without cost. The cost is increasing our anxiety, our depression, our loneliness, and our pain. I don’t know about you, but for me, this cost is frequently too high to bear.
So I encourage you, this week, to observe the mental chatter taking place in your head. Instead of taking it for granted, see if it helps you in any way. If it does, by all means keep it. But if your mental chatter doesn’t add to your well-being, you may want to let it go. Just ignore it. Let it chatter on… There is no need for you to pay attention to most of it.
Well, that winds it up for this week. I pray that your week is filled with God’s grace, and that you are blessed with the stillness that comes when you simply ignore the internal blah-blah-blah.With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
27: Deepening the Jesus Prayer
Edition #27: Inside the Invisible
As wondrous and powerful as the Jesus Prayer is, there is a way to further enhance its efficacy. To do this, you connect the power of your emotions to the intent of the prayer. Instead of simply reciting the words over and over, you emotionally charge the words, imbuing them with your own genuine longing.
There are two critical elements that need to be addressed here: your intention and your emotional focus and power. Your intention, by using the Jesus Prayer, is not simply to repeat a jumble of words just to hear yourself talk. Your intention is your determination to present yourself to your Creator, your Messiah. Reflect on that for a moment. If you go to your boss with a problem, you might feel a little anxiety. If you go before your city Council, or before the governor of your state, you will probably experience some considerable anxiety.
So what are you going to feel like when you present yourself to the Creator of all that is? The Creator of all humanity and every bit of the planet Earth, with all of its marvelous complexity? How are you going to feel in front of the Creator of the solar system, and not just our little solar system, but the entire Milky Way – 100 billion stars, many of them shining even brighter than our sun? Pretty awesome, isn’t it?
Perhaps more than anything, being clear about our intention to present ourselves to our Creator – to be present to that wonderful Presence that vibrates through and within everything that is – is the most critical element in the Jesus Prayer and in all prayer. This is also something that is commonly overlooked. We often just sit down and pray without really considering the meaning of our prayer. Without considering that we are standing before the Most High. Being clear and focused in our intention is critical to unlock the full power of our prayer.
The second element here – the use of our emotional power – is also a critical factor for enhancing the efficacy of the Jesus Prayer. Our emotions carry this amazing power that enables us to connect deeply with others. Remember what it was like when you first fell in love with someone? You thought about that person all the time and couldn’t wait to be with them again. When you are finally together, it's blissful, and you feel completely seen and understood. As a result, you did everything in your power to be with the person you loved.
Our intention with the Jesus Prayer, and with all prayer, is to connect with the Divine in just this loving and all-consuming way. Sadly, the emotional component of prayer is often overlooked or disregarded. We don’t use our innate power for connection to further deepen our connection with God. By tapping into this innate capacity in our prayer, we enhance its efficacy many times over.
That being said, this enhanced practice is not for those who are just starting to learn the Jesus Prayer. It is enough, for those who are just learning, to develop a focused attentiveness to the Lord. After approximately six months or so of continuous practice with this prayer and the attainment of some interior stability, you may wish to enhance the power of the Prayer by being clear about your intention and connecting your emotions to the Prayer, enlivening it with your emotional energy.
A brief note about the following instructions: You will remember, from previous newsletters, that the Jesus Prayer is not about the words used, per se, but about using words as a vehicle to enter into the Being of God. Despite the plethora of words used to describe this enhancement, please remember that the Prayer is not about the words. The words used below are intended to guide you toward those interior movements that will help you deepen your prayer.
Enhancing The Jesus Prayer
1. Position your body comfortably, spine erect, on a chair or cushions.
2. Become aware of the physical sensations that flow through you. Close your eyes and experience the streams of sensation that course through your physical body. No need to change them. No need to judge them. Simply let yourself feel deeply the multitude of sensations cascading through you. Gently focus on the sensations in your head...in your neck and shoulders...your elbows...your wrists and the palms of your hands...the sensations in your knees...your ankles and the soles of your feet.
3. Now open your awareness to feel God's Presence right here with you. Feel that Presence all around you...within you. Let yourself rest in this Presence.
4. Be aware of the sphere of energy around your head. Let this sphere of energy begin to get heavy and drift downward toward your heart center, until your head rests in your heart.
5. In your heart and from your heart, say the words, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me...Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me." Let your heart repeat these words over and over again, feeling God's Presence right here with you.
6. After the words have stabilized, begin to feel the words. Instead of just saying the words, feel their meaning. Feel what it means to acknowledge Jesus as your Lord. Historically, a lord has had the power of life or death over his subjects. As you acknowledge Jesus as your lord, let yourself fully experience your absolute dependence on your Lord. Feel your need for his favor, his generosity, his willingness to give. Your life, your continued existence, all depend on his good will towards you.
7. Be aware of the difference between yourself and your God. You are small and limited in power. Your Lord is not just large but without limits. As you experience the difference, use this as an opportunity to let go of your self-centeredness, your constant cry of “Me-me-me.” Rest in the Immensity that is your Lord.
8. In your Jesus Prayer, you have named him as your Christ, your Messiah. The Messiah is the one who saves us from our selfishness, from our ego-driven limits. He is the one who invites us to open to our true nature as children of the Divine. Acknowledge Jesus as your Christ. Feel what it is, to be saved from your own drivenness, your own neediness. As you acknowledge your Savior, feel yourself letting go of that which separates you from Him.
9. In this great Prayer, you are asking your Lord, "Have mercy on me." Repeat these words with all of your emotional power. Let yourself explore the depths of your need for God’s mercy. This is not a time for blaming yourself, but a time for acknowledging your genuine neediness and your profound need for mercy and divine assistance.
10. Rest here, in the Presence of your Lord.
(To close your meditation)
11. When you are ready, let yourself come back to this place. Let the feeling return to your feet, your hands, and your face. Take a deep breath, and open your eyes.
Connecting your emotions to your prayer is one of the great contributions that Christian contemplatives have made to the development of prayer. Our Christian heritage is full of emotion: from Christ, the Messiah, being born in a stable, to the bloody crucifixion, and then the sweetness of Jesus' resurrection. It is natural for us to use the strong feelings that are aroused in us as we read the narratives of our Savior's work, and to apply these feelings to our prayer.
To state the obvious, our emotions move us. There is a powerful force within our emotions that can transport us to different places. So too it is in prayer. When we find ways to connect our emotions to our prayer, then that power to move us is unleashed and channeled into spiritual pursuits. In this way, our emotions can become a great force for our interior development.
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The Jesus Prayer is one of the great spiritual tools that the Church has developed to aid us in our walk with the Lord. It has been developed and refined over virtually the entire scope of Christian history, a period spanning approximately 2,000 years. Over this period, those elements of the Prayer that were not efficacious in producing spiritual transformation have been pruned away. What is left is the pure essence.
The Prayer is like a powerful vehicle, waiting only for us to use it. Because of its power, it should not be used lightly. This is not a toy for children to play with. It has the capacity to provoke the most profound kinds of spiritual change in our hearts. So we should not use this prayer until we are quite ready, in our own minds, to move into the depths of God.
The Prayer will lead us, as directly as possible, into a direct encounter with the Divine. The benefits which accrue from this encounter are impossible to enumerate. There is such a sweetness, such a joy that arises from this direct encounter, that language is simply too gross a vehicle to adequately describe the experience. This, of course, has not stopped people from trying to describe what has happened to them. Let us close this chapter with a description of the effects of this Prayer, as described by the anonymous Russian pilgrim of the nineteenth century.
The Prayer of my heart gave me such consolation that I felt there was no happier person on earth than I, and I doubted if there could be greater and fuller happiness in the kingdom of Heaven. Not only did I feel this in my own soul, but the whole outside world also seemed to me full of charm and delight. Everything drew me to love and thank God: people, trees, plants, animals. I saw them all as my kinsfolk; I found on all of them the magic of the Name of Jesus. Sometimes I felt as light as though I had no body and was floating happily through the air instead of walking. Sometimes when I withdrew into myself, I saw clearly all my internal organs and was filled with wonder at the wisdom with which the human body is made. Sometimes I felt as joyful as if I had been made Tsar. And at all such times of happiness, I wished that God would let death come to me quickly, and let me pour out my heart in thankfulness at His feet.
Have a great week, and remember that if you have any questions about your practice, please don't hesitate to contact me at ken123kaisch@google.com.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
26: Do You Have Enough Love in Your Life?
Edition #26: Inside the Invisible
Over the past month or so, many of you have been asking about love. The questions have ranged from “Why are you not talking about Christ’s love in your newsletters?” to “How can I get more love in my life?” So today, I thought we might turn our attention to what our Lord says about love and how to get more of it. To do that, though, we have to start at a place that might seem a little strange.
We need to begin with several of Jesus’ comments about how we are to live our lives. “Love your enemies,” he says, “Do good to those who hate you,” and then a bit later, he says, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you…. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.” It is this last statement that sums up his thoughts on the matter.
“Love your enemies.” My God, how many times have we heard that? And not just in church. You hear people paying lip service to this over and over, in context after context, and it gets to the point that it just runs in one ear and out the other. Blah blah blah blah! Why bother with this – it just doesn’t make sense.
Your enemies are people who hate you! They have it in for you. They want to see you suffer; they want to see you diminished. What possible good could come of being kind to those who hate you?
When somebody tells me to do something, I’m one of those guys who wants to know ‘why.’ Why should I do that? And underlying that question is another – a question that I often conceal from myself. Namely, what’s in it for me? I’m not so proud of this question, so I tend to avert my eyes and conceal it, especially from myself.
“What’s in it for me?” That’s a question that comes up a lot for all of us, isn’t it? “How am I going to benefit?” As if he had supernatural hearing, Jesus answers this question for us, albeit a little harshly, if you ask my opinion. He says, “Do not judge and you will not be judged.”
“Do not judge, and you will not be judged.” I judge all the time, and I’ll bet you do the same. Oh, these judgments don’t always leave my lips, but in my head, I’m keeping score. “This is good, this is better, and that over there is really wonderful! And what those folks over there are doing, (head moving in a disapproving shake) that’s just terrible!”
We have a constant stream of this, don’t we? We're judging all the time, and it’s even kind of comfortable in a strange way. When I put you down, I have the illusion that it makes me superior. I feel “better than you,” or “holier than thou.” I get to put on that wonderfully traditional Christian garment of smugness. “Look at me, I’m special!” And Jesus wants me to forgo these traditional Christian pleasures? How dare he!
And why would he want to do that, anyway? Why does he want us to forgive? Why does he want us to give? He supplies the answer in the following sentence: “Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you.” Right there – that’s where the rubber meets the road, isn’t it?
* * *
I had a strange but fascinating experience last month. A group of us were talking with a priest who has a ministry in Africa, and he was asked if he was going back to Ghana this year. He allowed that it has been increasingly difficult for him to return. He said, “It always confronts me with an impossible choice. If I have $1000 to give, I have a terrible choice to make.”
“I can buy a water well, and that will transform an entire village. Right off the bat, we take out all of the waterborne illnesses, like cholera and dysentery, which kill half of the children before age 5. They now have water to irrigate their crops, so everyone eats better and gets healthier. And when I go back a year later, I can see the results of this. It’s an astounding change! And the women no longer have to walk eight hours a day to fetch and carry water. Can you imagine, walking miles and miles just for water to drink and cook with? Water that is filthy and often contaminated with bacteria. This frees the women up to start small businesses so they can now contribute to the economic well-being of the village. Everything is transformed with that water well.”
He paused, and I asked, “So what’s the other choice? This one sounds like a no-brainer to me!” He looked down and away, and then he said in a quiet voice, “Or I could buy five children out of a lifetime of slavery.”
I was shocked! Considering this choice, my eyes just filled up with tears. Buying five little ones out of slavery? Now I understood why the choice he faces is so daunting and so terrible.
* * *
I thought about this wretched choice for weeks afterward. I’m ashamed to admit that one of the questions that came to mind was, “Why do I care?” The strange fact is, I do care, but why? I will never meet these children. I will never meet these villagers. So why do I care?
That question has bothered me to this day. I know why I care. I care because these are hurting human beings, and somehow the hurt they experience on the other side of the world is felt by me, in my own skin, my own flesh, right now.
Logically, this makes no sense. You can talk all you like about the brotherhood of man, but why should I give a hoot about somebody I will never meet, and whose life will never affect mine? Regardless of the logical nonsensicalness of this, my eyes still filled with tears. The truth is, they filled with tears before I ever had a chance to consider the logic of it. These tears revealed to me a deeper truth – a truth that is deeper than all of our logic.
Let me try to explain. Quantum scientists who have been exploring the fundamental nature of matter have been uncovering strange and even bizarre things about the world we live in. (Like the fact that the electrons on which you are currently sitting are actually moving about 64 million miles per hour.) One of their findings is directly relevant to this strange experience of simpatico I felt. Moreover, it is directly relevant to experiences we all have on a daily basis.
Quantum scientists – weirdos who live in ivory towers like Ernst Planck, David Bohm, and others – have found at the most minute level that two particles can get entangled with one another. For example, if you shoot one of these entangled particles off to the right, the other one will instantaneously go off to the left. Even more frightening to a non-mathematician like myself, they have developed equations that describe these entanglements.
What we are seeing at the cutting edge of scientific exploration is this dawning understanding that everything is connected with every other thing. You and I can look around at each other, and we understand that we are connected. We show up here, once a week, in this newsletter space. Clearly, there is a connection that binds us together. What is not so clear is that this connection binds us with every other thing in the universe.
Now, all of a sudden, Jesus’ words start to make sense. “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. Give, and it will be given to you. For the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”
Because our lives are entangled with the lives of every other human being, these words of Jesus are just a simple statement of truth. They invite us to take complete responsibility for all of our actions. If you don’t want to forgive, that’s okay. But expect that you will not be forgiven either. On the other hand, if you want love, then you will get back the very measure of love that you give. Reminds us of the words of the old Beatles song, doesn’t it? “The love you take is equal to the love you make.”
Jesus’ words invite us to take a real hard look at our own behaviors. Instead of aiming our judgment out there, we’re invited to look inside. We’re invited to examine and judge our own behaviors. So, let me ask you: Do you have enough love in your life? I don’t. When I reflect on this, I realize it’s because I have closed off my heart. I close it off by judging and criticizing others. When I reflect further, I realize that when I open my heart up, not only am I able to give more, but I’m also able to receive more.
This, my friends, is the key for us. You see, our judgements have an unseen consequence. When we judge, we act as if we know the real meaning of an action or behavior. The truth is, we don’t know that much – we know what we observe, but we rarely know the full reasons behind another's actions, and we hardly ever know the ultimate consequences. Never mind these stunning limitations, we still judge and feel quite satisfied with our judgements, don’t we?
Despite our obvious limitations, we have been setting ourselves up as gods. This is the ego again, and it has the unseen effect of hardening our hearts against. By hardening our hearts in this way, we literally block the love of God from touching us. So, if we don’t have enough love, it is almost certainly because we ourselves are blocking that love by means of our ego-derived judgements of others. The bottom line is simple: if we want more love in our lives, we need to stop judging others.
So, if you want more love in your life, start to notice all of the judgments you are making of others. Once you start noticing, you are likely to be horrified. I certainly was! However, the good news in this situation is that by being aware, we can now start to rein in our too-frequent judgments. We can now start to surrender this part of our lives to our Lord. As we do so, we will find more and more love entering into our lives.
* * *
That’s enough for this week. I encourage you to spend some time observing the conversations you have in your head and paying special attention to the many ways you judge others. Then, to the best of your ability, pull back your judgements. After practicing this for even a little while, I have found that I have more love in my life, a greater understanding of others, and the way forward seems easier. Give it a try for yourself…
I hope you have a grace-filled week. Remember to meditate every day. With the spiritual exercises you have been learning about in these newsletters, you certainly have a lot to choose from. Find what works best for you and tap into the transformative power of these spiritual exercises for yourself.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
25: You Are Not What You Think You Are! Part II
Edition #25: Inside the Invisible
Last week, we continued our exploration of Reality by focusing on what we actually are. If we are to take the investigations of our foremost scientists seriously, we have to conclude that all Reality is fundamentally an idea in the mind of God. Contrary to our conventional notions, that human consciousness is derived from our brain functioning or from inert matter, we find the reverse. In actual fact, our leading-edge physicists tell us that we are fundamentally consciousness, awareness, Beingness.
Talk about a wild and crazy idea! But now get ready for the Ginsu announcer because, “Wait, there’s more…”
Let’s focus on our own consciousness today. As we have seen over the last several weeks, we don’t really see reality. We think what we perceive is the actual “stuff” that makes up the reality in and around us, but as we have seen, this “stuff” is not real in the sense that we think it is. For example, while the chair that you’re sitting on appears to be solid matter, we know from our scientific investigations that it is actually a few units of energy rotating at extremely high speeds. In fact, the apparently solid chair on which you are sitting is mostly empty space.
Despite this clear understanding of the chair's true nature, you still perceive it as solid, and you still trust that it will support your weight. So, what are we actually seeing?
This is where it gets really strange. What we are seeing 99.9% of the time is not reality, but rather our ideas about what reality is. Psychological research has shown that we project our ideas onto the sensory data we perceive, and we then mistake our ideas for the actual reality. Let me give you an example from my own recent experience.
I was driving north on the 101 freeway the other day, in an area I have driven countless times before. Throughout my past experiences, there has been a rather large hole in the blacktop at a certain spot in the number one lane. The other day, as I came down the hill, I could see what looked like a large black rectangular box ahead of me in the number one lane. As I got closer, the box got larger and larger, and I prepared to move to the number two lane to avoid it. As I approached this large, black object, I realized it was actually a rectangular patch that had now covered the hole I had previously seen. From 100 yards away, from 50 yards away, from 10 yards away, I was certain it was a large black box in the middle of the road. Why?
I expected to see the hole in its usual place, so that’s what I saw, even though it wasn’t there this time. This time, there was a large rectangular black asphalt patch filling in the hole. I literally did not see the patch that was actually there. Instead, I saw my idea —a large, rectangular, black box — sitting dangerously in the middle of the number one lane. Not only did I see the box, but I also changed my behavior to accommodate this illusion. In brief, this is what we all do, almost all of the time. We don’t see reality; we see our ideas about reality
I know, it doesn’t seem like that, does it? It seems like we are functioning in a world full of objects – objects that are, for the most part, customary and familiar. If you think about this, even a little bit, it should scare the wits out of you! It means that we are living on a planet with 8 billion others just like ourselves, and no one is seeing what is actually there. Instead, we are all wandering around the planet, inhabiting 8 billion different delusions! If that doesn’t scare the bejesus out of you, I don’t know what will…
If we are not seeing reality, but instead seeing our ideas about reality, you have to wonder where this comes from. Once again, we circle back to our understanding of the ego. Our egos are socially constructed defense mechanisms that have enabled us to survive in this complex universe. Why would we have evolved in this seemingly strange fashion?
Have you ever watched a toddler being scolded? Their ego defenses are not well-formed; their defenses are flimsy, and when criticism comes their way, they are often completely devastated. Think of what it would be like to sustain a massive attack that says you are WRONG. While the adult intends to say, “This behavior is wrong,” the toddler often receives the message that “I myself am wrong, bad, and ineffective, and I can never be good enough.” They take the criticism as a massive rejection of their being. This is too painful for any of us to experience. We have to put up defenses against this massive rejection. As a result, our egos have erected an amazingly clever defense.
If I can’t tolerate being rejected because the hurt is too painful, what if I erect a barrier between myself and the rejection? What if I could put up a wall so that I didn’t have to feel the pain, or at least, didn’t have to feel the pain directly? This is what humanity has learned to do, but it comes with a terrible cost.
So we put up a wall – a wall of ideas. That way, when criticism is directed at us, it’s not really a criticism of me, myself, but a criticism of this idea of myself that I have put up as a kind of mask between my true self and the rest of the world. This means that I have erected a barrier between me and you, between myself and everything else. While I am protected (kind of), I am now alone. Sadly, loneliness is perhaps the most corrosive and destructive of all our emotions.
And while we hope our walls will protect us from the hurt of rejection, in my experience, that hurt somehow manages to slip through our guard and wound us anyway. Despite all the effort we put into erecting and maintaining these protective barriers, they are not very effective.
So, the ‘me’ that I think I am isn’t really me. It’s my ego, a mental construct that I built as an infant to protect myself from rejection and hurt. My true self, and yours, lies underneath the ego and is hidden by it. Our true self participates in the Divine. While the ego can be characterized by fear, our true self is characterized by the limitless love of God. It is a love, like that of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, that sees beyond the apparent ugliness and cruelty of other human beings. It is a love that sees the hidden soul deep within, the child that God created and loves.
This is our heritage as spiritual beings. It is a heritage that transcends belief systems and every mode of thought. It is the heritage of our true being, a being that we share with all creation, that we are sons and daughters of the Most High. It is a heritage of limitless love.
It is this heritage, the birthright of every human being, that we are attempting to recover by means of our spiritual journey.
* * *
I think I will end our conversation here for today. I expect that I have given you more than enough to ponder for the week! Next week, I want to explore a topic that several of you have been asking about, namely, how we might open our hearts to love our God more fully.
Once again, I want to encourage you to meditate daily. Meditation may be the most significant tool we have to loosen the chains that our ego has wrapped around us. How will we step into the love which God has created for us? We will only be able to do that as we step out of the too-narrow constraints that keep us bound and in chains.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
24: You Are Not What You Think You Are! Part I
Edition #24: Inside the Invisible
I would like to begin this week by expressing my gratitude to Father Chris, a Catholic priest and professed friar, and Canon Doug, a retired Anglican priest, for their words of encouragement. Both report that they are using these newsletters in their teaching and spiritual direction, and they are commending them to others. This affirms that I’m on the right path in sharing these understandings with you. Thank you both so much! I would also like to encourage all my readers to share the email addresses of those they think might benefit from these teachings. Please email them to ken123kaisch@gmail.com
Last week, we concluded our conversation with the extraordinary formulation of the world-renowned physicist Max Planck, who said, in essence, that the universe is looking more and more like an idea in the mind of God. The conventional understanding is directly opposite: that consciousness comes from matter. Planck, David Bohm, and other major figures in the field of physics have stated the opposite: that the phenomenal universe we perceive around us is the result of consciousness.
In 1994, D.J. Chalmers first formulated what he called the hard problem of consciousness. In a nutshell, the hard problem asks, How did consciousness evolve from inert matter? Specifically, Chalmers asked, “Why and how do brain processes give rise to subjective experience?” Up to this point, physicists had ignored what is, for you and me and everybody else, our subjective experience of being aware and conscious. This omission is quite extraordinary!
Prior to Chalmers’ radical question, scientists had assumed that consciousness is a negligible phenomenon that can be summarily discarded from any serious scientific inquiry. Since Galileo in the early 1600s, scientists have come to understand that the world around us can be described using the language of mathematics. In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton provided definitive proof of this notion in his groundbreaking work, Principia Mathematica. Since then, consciousness has been described at best as an epiphenomenon – some odd quirk of the natural world, which was probably caused in some unknown way by natural forces we don’t yet understand, but it’s not really all that important.
This was the situation when I began my graduate studies in clinical psychology in 1980. The “hard science” branch of psychology viewed consciousness as an epiphenomenon, not worth the bother of studying. That this flies in the face of our ordinary understanding made no difference at all to those “hard scientists.” (I suspect that at least part of this omission was due to psychologists’ corporate sense of inferiority, because at that time psychology was understood as a “soft science” and not really worthy of being labeled a science at all.)
Despite consciousness being overlooked as an appropriate field of study, there was one huge and unmistakable fact about scientific progress. While extraordinary advances were being made in the applied sciences – witness the development of computers, space travel, lasers, artificial intelligence, and the like – there were no corresponding developments in pure science. There were no real breakthroughs in our understanding of the world around us or our own human nature. (Yes, I know that string theory was formulated over the last 40 years, but string theory is inherently unprovable. As a result, we have no way of knowing if this formulation is accurate.)
So where does that leave us? The one thing that all human beings have in common is the experience of consciousness. We are all self-aware entities. When you match our self-awareness with Max Planck’s understanding, that the universe is an idea in the mind of God, all of a sudden, all of our previous ideas about Reality seem to explode!
* * *
Let’s now shift gears and look at a parallel line of inquiry, that of religion. Religion shares with science a curiosity about the nature of Reality. The most significant difference between these two lines of inquiry lies in the ‘assumption,’ on the part of religious adherents, that God exists. As a result of this difference, these two lines of inquiry have reached very different conclusions.
Mystics from all the great world religions have universally found that there is no difference at the deepest level between our consciousness and God’s consciousness. Perhaps the clearest verbal formulation of this is found in Hinduism, the oldest of the major world religions. Hindu mystics universally say, “Thou art That.” Unpacking this short sentence, we find that they are referring to our limited human consciousness being fundamentally identical with the Divine. You, yourself, are identical with That for which you search.
This understanding is repeated many, many times by the mystics of all religions. In Christianity, perhaps the clearest statement of this is found in the gospel of John. Here Jesus said, in effect, “I am in my Father and my Father is in me. In just the same way, I am in you and you are in me.” In case his listeners did not understand what he was saying, Jesus said it again in different words in the next chapter, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”
Within Christendom, this message is repeated over and over again through the centuries. Meister Eckhart stated, for example, “the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” St. Catherine of Genoa said, being quite clear about the matter, “My being is God, not by simple participation, but by a true transformation of my being.” In essence, she is saying that “My me is God.” St. Seraphim of Sarov, in the early 1800s, stated that the ultimate goal of the Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit. By this, he meant that our task is to realize that the Holy Spirit is already residing deeply within each of us.
Yet, despite all of the affirmations that come from those who actually know God intimately and personally – that we are fundamentally identical with the Divine Consciousness – this is not our experience. We have to ask, why not?
* * *
What are we? What is this self-awareness that makes us what we are? And how are we connected with the rest of the universe?
In prior weeks, we have explored the nature of the self – that fundamental sense of self-identity. That part of us that says, “I am myself and not someone or something else.” We have seen that this self is composed of at least two elements. There is the ego, that sense of being a separate self, and there is something deeper, which I will get to in a moment.
We have seen that our ego begins by taking in the values of our parents. They teach us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that certain behaviors are good, other behaviors are acceptable, and still others are not good at all. This serves as the initial scaffolding for our sense of self, which each of us builds, moment by moment. Essentially, our ego is an instruction manual for getting along in the world.
This means that our ego is fundamentally a survival mechanism. It is that part of us that helps us survive from birth through early adulthood. As such, our egos are essential to human development. We cannot do without them. That being said, our egos come with significant limitations. While they function to keep destructive events away from us, they also keep us from accurately understanding both the world around us and within us. In addition, our egos tend to keep our negative thoughts and feelings inside of us, where they often wreak destruction. How many times, for example, have you found your mind repeatedly going over a negative situation or conversation, until you’re just sick of it?
So you can think of your ego as constructing a wall. While that wall keeps negative things outside of itself, when negative things do get in, it holds on to them. We can see here that the ego is a two-edged sword: it confers benefits and, at the same time, burdens us with negative consequences.
The most profoundly debilitating consequence of an adult ego is that it keeps us from realizing our essential nature. We tend to identify with our bodies or with our minds but our actual identity is that we participate in the fullness of the Divine. The Christian mystics and indeed, the mystics of all religions, clearly state that we are one with God. They clearly state that God dwells within our hearts. Yet, because we identify with our bodies or our minds, we are unable to perceive the great treasure within each of us. Jesus himself says, “The kingdom of God is within you.” Due to the ego's limiting effect, we fail to perceive this profound truth.
As a result, our primary spiritual task is to let go of our ego’s constraints so that we can experience our true self. Our true self is not limited to this body. It is not limited to the ever-changing play of emotions we experience. It is not limited to our thoughts or our ideas. Our true self participates fully in the Divine and has no limits. Indeed, one way to understand the salvation that Christ brings to us is to recognize that he is freeing us from the too-narrow constraints of our ego so that we can participate fully in the love of God.
* * *
Let us circle back now to that amazing notion, that we are best understood as ideas in the mind of God. Let us also remember one of the most hideous stories in the Bible, that of Jacob and Esau. In this story, Esau, who was famished, came upon Jacob, who was cooking a meal, variously described as a mess of pottage or gruel. In order to obtain immediate relief from his hunger, Esau foolishly sold his birthright to Jacob for a meal. This appears to me to be a metaphor for what each and every one of us has done. We have sold our birthright as children of the Most High in exchange for next to nothing.
We have mistaken our egos – which are nothing more than a set of tools for survival in this world – for our ultimate reality. As such, we have limited ourselves to an extraordinary degree. Most of us have come to believe that we are nothing more than our thoughts, our emotions, and our physical bodies. We have mistaken who we are for what amounts to a set of fantasies or delusions about ourselves.
The Divine – however you conceive or perceive that – dwells inside of you, in your innermost being. Not only that, but paraphrasing the words of St. Paul slightly, “you live and move and have your being with in Christ.” As a result, there is no way that you can ever be separated from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
* * *
I think I will end our conversation here for today. I expect that I have afflicted you enough for a while! Next week I want to go more deeply into our human experience and explore how we have used our egos to erect protective barriers.
Once again, I want to encourage you to meditate daily. Meditation may be the most significant tool that we have to loosen the chains that our ego has wrapped around us. How will we step into the love which God has created for us? We will only be able to do that as we step out of the too narrow constraints that keep us bound and in chains.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
23: Reality Is Not What It Seems!
Edition #23: Inside the Invisible
Today I think we have come to a place where we need to begin exploring the nature of the reality in which we find ourselves. I’ll give you fair warning, if you continue reading this material, you are highly likely to be upset by what you learn. I am going to shake the very foundations of what you think is real.
Let’s start with stuff. You know, the ordinary stuff that everything is made of. We all learned in high school that matter is composed of atoms, which in turn are composed of electrons, neutrons and protons. The assumption is, these materials are little bits of “stuff.” All of this is false.
Matter is not solid: it is little bits of energy and mostly empty space.
Even the term “bits” of energy is deceptive. Energy doesn’t come in bits. Imagine, for example, a bit of sunlight, or a bit of electricity. It doesn’t make sense.
Think for a moment about what this means. It means that the chair you are sitting on, while it appears to be solid, is mostly empty space interspersed with tiny units of energy.
In actual fact, you are sitting on rapidly rotating bits of energy. These bits are rotating at a mind-boggling speed. To give you a rough equivalent, in terms that we commonly use, the electrons in your chair are rotating at 64,000,000 mph. That’s right – 64 million miles per hour!
The reason your chair appears solid is the same reason that a rotating fan blade appears solid. When you crank the speed up fast enough, the blades of the fan look like they are one solid piece.
I said a moment ago that you are mostly sitting on empty space. Let me give you something to compare that with. If you removed the empty space from all the atoms in the bodies of all 8+ billion people currently living on the planet, you would have an object roughly the size of a sugar cube. Perhaps human beings are not as significant as we thought we were!
Let’s look at Time, shall we? Everybody knows what time is. It’s composed of the past, the present, and the future. Actually, these wonderful ideas about time are completely false! Let me explain:
It’s pretty clear that the past doesn’t exist. Once upon a time (perhaps!) it did exist, or so we think, but right now, the past is over and done with. The past clearly has no existence right now, except as a memory.
In the same way, we know that the future doesn’t exist because it hasn’t happened yet.
That leaves us with “now,” the present moment. There’s a lot of buzz about the “now.” People talk about living in the present moment – they say that that’s where the real life is. On the surface, this seems like a plausible idea, but sadly, this too is false.
When we talk about “the now,” we are distinguishing ‘now’ from other times. But we have just shown that the past and the future don’t really exist. They are simply ideas, fabrications, fantasies that we have that we use to try and make sense of the world. But if there is no past or future, then the concept of ‘now’ must also be a fabrication.
So, what is left to us? If we are to speak accurately, we have to say that time as we have conventionally understood it does not exist. What we live in is a state of Being, a state of “Is-ness.”
Just for fun, let’s continue this exploration of our shared delusional reality and look at the three-dimensional world we think we live in. In everyday language, time and distance are interconnected. They are linked by the notion of speed, also known as velocity. The equation that we learned in math and science classes looks like this: Distance = Time X Speed. But if there is no Time, this equation doesn’t work. The equation would be simplified to Distance = 0 X Speed. Which is zero. Which means distance also doesn’t exist. Which means we don’t live in a three-dimensional world because height, width and breadth do not actually exist!
It starts to make you wonder, doesn’t it? These ideas that we have held about the nature of reality begin to appear as they are, simple fabrications or fantasies. Yet, when you drill down into what actually constitutes the reality we live in, these ideas start to fall apart.
* * *
So let’s take a moment and see what we’ve accomplished to this point.
1. We’ve shown that matter as we ordinarily understand it simply does not exist. What we call matter is really little tiny units of energy and mostly empty space.
2. We’ve shown that time does not really exist either. We thought that there was a past, a present, and a future, but it’s quite obvious that the past no longer exists, it’s over and done with. In the same way, the future doesn’t exist because it hasn’t happened yet. That leaves us with the present, the ‘Now.’ But conceiving of a ‘now’ necessarily implies something other than ‘now,’ namely the past and the future which we know don’t really exist. This means that talking about the ‘now’ is a serious mistake. It would be more accurate to say we exist in a state of Is-ness, the state of Beingness.
3. Finally, we’ve shown that if time doesn’t exist, then distance doesn’t exist either. This means that the three-dimensional world we live in is actually some sort of illusion as well.
By now, I suspect that you are thoroughly confused! When I feel confused, I typically shut down and back away. If you are tempted to do the same right about now, let me encourage you to stop for a moment because there’s some good news. The good news is this: if there is no time, then you are not aging, and all those birthdays that you have celebrated are totally without meaning. LOL
* * *
So, what is Real? Here’s what a cutting-edge physicist has to say:
"As a physicist who has devoted his whole life to rational science, to the study of matter, I think I can safely claim to be above any suspicion of irrational exuberance. Having said that, I would like to observe that my research on the atom has shown me that there is no such thing as matter in itself (italics mine). What we perceive as matter is merely the manifestation of a force that causes the subatomic particles to oscillate and holds them together in the tiniest solar system of the universe. Since there is in the whole universe neither an intelligent force nor an eternal force (mankind, for all its yearnings, has yet to succeed in inventing a perpetual motion machine), we must assume that this force that is active within the atom comes from a conscious and intelligent mind. That mind is the ultimate source of matter (italics mine)."
--Max Planck, from his 1944 speech titled "Das Wesen der Materie" ("The Nature of Matter"), delivered in Florence, Italy.
Let me put this in more conventional language. What Planck and other physicists are saying is that the universe is looking more and more like an idea in the mind of God.
And this understanding turns our world upside down and inside out, doesn’t it?
* * *
I’m going to stop here for now, because I have given you more than enough to think about for the week. But just as a teaser, think about what this means for the miracles of Jesus. Water into wine? Healing the sick? Raising the dead? Ascending bodily into heaven? These so-called miracles suddenly seem possible, and perhaps even ordinary, don’t they? If all that is necessary is a change of ideas, then all sorts of unusual events are possible, aren’t they? So ponder on the meaning of all of this, but don’t forget to keep up your meditation practice. I will continue this exploration with you next week.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
22: The Language of God Is Silence
Edition #22: Inside the Invisible
I had a great question from Marianne in Boston about our last two newsletters on the Jesus Prayer. She made a comment that all language seems to divide us, so how could the Jesus Prayer, which relies on words, bring us closer to God? For that matter, how could any meditation that uses words and language allow us to cross the apparent abyss that seems to separate us from the Divine? This is a very profound question, Marianne, and thank you for raising it.
We live in a world of apparent duality, and this duality is inherent in our use of language. In fact, duality appears to be the way we conceptualize most, if not all, of our experiences. Just think about it for a moment: there is up, and its opposite down. There is left, and its opposite right. Almost all of our experiences can be formulated in this dualistic manner. Indeed, this is how most of us conceptualize our relationship with the Divine. “I” am over here, and the Divine is somewhere else. This kind of understanding leaves us forever searching, and the object of our search always appears to be just out of reach. Hence, our constant feelings of restlessness – we are always searching and nothing seems to fill us for very long. Worse, our restlessness covers over our deep feelings of emptiness.
We commonly understand that language is a way of connecting with others. In fact, that’s how we're using language right now, as a way of connecting. There is, however, another and opposite aspect to language. Language also divides. It operates by invisibly separating everything we experience into subjects and objects.
Let’s use a simple example, one that describes what’s happening between us right now. I am over here, and you, my reader, are somewhere else. On the face of it, this appears to be a simple statement of fact: “I” am over here and “you” are over there. While this sentence captures part of our relationship, it misses the most important part. It misses the fact that we are somehow deeply connected. It misses the fact that we are both searching for something deeper in our lives. It misses the deep emptiness within each of us that drives our search. It overlooks the fact that we are deeply connected with one another and with the Divine.
So, what’s more important? The fact that we are in different places, or the deep interconnectedness that hides beneath the surface?
And this takes us directly into the heart of the problem – that our relationship with the Divine and with each otherhas no words that can adequately describe it. Whatever these relationships are, they are beyond the power of language to describe. You see, when you use words, you must employ a distinction between the subject and the object. That’s simply how language works; it channels our thinking into divisions, and thus it keeps us from perceiving the underlying unity. This simple fact has a profound implication for our search. Whenever you employ the subject/object distinction, you can only perceive the separateness, not the unity underlying the separateness.
The great Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, stated that “The language of God is silence – all else is a poor translation.” So how can our words take us into the heart of God?
* * *
The Jesus Prayer uses words. We call upon our Lord Jesus for mercy, for all of us, to one extent or another, are lost in this wilderness that we call the world. We find ourselves cut off from God, and estranged from each other, and even from our own deepest being. Worse, the way to overcome these profound separations is not clear.
We are trapped by our dualistic concepts in a dualistic world. It is as if we have hallucinated a world that, by the nature of the concepts we use, prevents us from discerning the underlying unitive reality in which we live. Not only that, our dualistic thinking profoundly inhibits us from seeing the world and ourselves as we actually are. (I will explore this topic of the nature of reality at length next week. For now, I ask that you trust me on this point.)
So, the question that confronts us, stated as clearly as possible, is how can we use our dualistic tools to escape this gigantic mousetrap that we and our forebearers have created?
The Jesus Prayer is a tool that was developed in the very early centuries of the Christian era. Over the last 2,000 years, it has been used by a wide variety of people from very different cultures, speaking very different languages, but having in common the dualistic perceptions that bedevil us today. This tool has been used because it has been found effective in generation after generation. It is a tool that begins within the common dualistic framework: we are here, and Jesus is somewhere else, a Being from whom we are seeking assistance.
When we employ the Jesus Prayer, we are enjoined to repeat the words of the prayer over and over again. The goal of this prayer is to “pray without ceasing,” as Paul described in his letter to the Thessalonians. When I first heard of the Jesus prayer, I thought this constant repetition was simply stupid. “Why say the same thing over and over again? If God didn’t hear me the first time, what makes me think he’ll hear me on the hundred and first time?”
At this early stage in my spiritual life, I was missing quite a few things about this extraordinary tool. I missed the fact that repetition bores me. My discursive mind was always looking for new and more exciting things to focus on, and the Jesus Prayer simply bored me to tears. So, what happens when my constantly seeking intellect gets bored like this? Ultimately, it gives up and shuts up!
That’s right, when I keep repeating the words of the prayer and force myself to focus here and here alone, my discursive intellect stops searching for new and more exciting things to focus on. If I stay with it long enough, it gives up. When it stops its striving, it stills and moves into silence. And this is the point of constantly repeating the words. We are not really exhorting God, because he heard our petition the first time. We are simply boring ourselves into silence.
So ask yourselves, why would the language of God be silence? Since our words divide, it is only in silence that we can enter into union with the Divine. It is only in the stillness that we are open to the deeper unitive states – the union that takes us out of our separateness and isolation, the union for which we all search.
* * *
“But wait, there’s more!” As our self-talk grows silent, we come into an awareness of a deeper energy buried deep within our hearts. It is here, in the depths of each heart, that the mystics from all the great religions have said that we meet God. As long as our intellects blather on, our dualistic concepts force us into a separation from that great Being which underlies all our apparent divisions. When the self-talk stills, however, we then begin to perceive that underlying unity. In this silence, the language of God becomes apparent.
Remember the first component of the Jesus Prayer, to open ourselves to the Presence of God? When we begin using this prayer, this opening is, for most of us, a kind of pro formaevent. We go through the motions at this point, but we don’t really understand what it means to be open to the Divine. As our discursive intellect quiets, as our divisive self-talk disappears, we then begin to experience what it feels like to be in God’s holy Presence. As long as we blather on, the inherent divisiveness of using subjects and objects keeps us from the actual experience of God. Literally, our languaging is keeping us from our heart's desire!
You may not believe me when I talk about the importance of this holy silence to our spiritual development. Our discursive intellect would have us believe that “real knowledge” can only be obtained by using words. This is hogwash, and your own experience proves it.
Think back to that magnificent sunset you saw, or the tenderness of a father holding his newborn baby. Think back to the moment you first realized that your partner truly loves you. In each of these moments, our intellect stops. There are no words that can adequately describe the experience we have in these moments. How could that be, if our discursive intellects have the last word? Clearly, the deepest and most important experiences we have are those we have in silence. There is a Reality which passes our human understanding. This is the Reality in which we all live. We just pretend it ain’t so…
The Jesus Prayer occupies a very special place for those who seek God. It is a tool that can take us from our ordinary, intellectually-based awareness and move us into stillness and quiet. In the ensuing silence, we will find ourselves open to God in ways that we cannot imagine from our divided and separated states of being.
* * *
Well, that’s it for this week. It has been a joy for me to share these words with you, however divisive they may be! Hopefully you will be able to translate my silly words into silence, and listen for yourself to that still quiet voice in your heart. Next week, we will explore a topic that will shock and amaze you. We will take a deep dive into the nature of reality, and I hope to show you that everything you learned in your high school science classes is wrong.
With that teaser, I hope you have a great week. I encourage you to set aside a regular time to practice the Jesus Prayer, for it can take you into the depths where, with your own eyes, you can see our Lord.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
21: The Spiritual Exercise of the Jesus Prayer
Edition #21: Inside the Invisible
I am delighted to be here with you this week, because we get to explore and practice the Jesus Prayer, one of the oldest forms of meditation and contemplation in all of Christendom. I have practiced this form of meditation for roughly the last 50 years. During that time, it has taken me deeper and deeper, coming to a wordless contemplation of God. It is suitable for almost everyone, from beginners to very experienced practitioners.
Last week we explored a bit about monologistic prayer and the history and development of the Jesus Prayer. This week we will actually start our practice with this very special form of meditation, which has the power to take us deeply into God’s holy presence.
The Jesus Prayer
1. Position your body comfortably, spine erect, on a chair or cushions.
2. Ground yourself in your physical sensations. Close your eyes and slowly become aware of the sensations of your physical body. Feel the sensations as they flow through you. The sensations in your head...in your neck and shoulders...your elbows...your wrists and the palms of your hands...the sensations in your knees...your ankles and the soles of your feet.
3. Now open your awareness to feel God's Presence right here with you. Feel that Presence all around you...within you. Breathe in the Divine with every breath. Breathe God out. Let yourself rest in this Presence.
4. Be aware of the sensations in and around your head. You probably are aware of a sphere of energy around your head. This is where most of us 'live.' Let this sphere of energy begin to get heavy and drift downward toward your heart center. When you begin this, it may be a little difficult. We are so accustomed to having this energy in our heads that we don't know what it would feel like somewhere else. But let that sphere of energy gradually grow heavier and heavier. Let it sink down into your heart. If you have trouble with this, imagine that with each inhalation this sphere of energy is pushed down about an inch or so. With every breath, your head energy is moved downward, until your head rests in your heart. Anchor yourself here, so that you are able to perceive through your heart.
5. Now, in your heart and from your heart, say the words, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me...Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me." Let your heart repeat these words over and over again, feeling God's Presence right here with you.
6. When your attention wanders, be patient with yourself. Gently bring your attention back to the three operations of this meditation: feel God's Presence; put your head in your heart; and say the words, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me."
(To close your meditation)
7. When you are ready, let yourself come back to this place. Let the feeling return to your feet, your hands, and your face. Take a deep breath, and open your eyes.
The Interior Movement of the Jesus Prayer
The practice of the Jesus Prayer will take us on a predictable interior journey. At first, we are likely to have difficulty engaging in the three operations of the prayer simultaneously. While each of these operations is relatively simple, the first two are unusual for us in this culture. We seldom try to experience the Presence of God in a deliberate way. And we never strive to put our attention into our heart! So there will be a period of some frustration, as we try to keep each of these three things going at once. It can feel a bit like juggling, trying to keep three things in the air at the same time. Once you get the hang of it, though, the experience seems quite natural and enjoyable.
During the initial time of frustration, you will find yourself distracted, as with the previous practices. Your attention, while strengthened, is still not a focused tool. As you become aware of your distractions, the initial impulse will be to punish yourself: to engage in the punitive internal dialogue which emphasizes how inadequate you are to accomplish even the simple tasks of this prayer. This sort of inner dialogue is basically garbage! It is your ego, fiercely defending itself and its control over you. The best way to view this negative self-talk is to see it as just another distraction. You obtain no benefit from it, so simply withdraw your attention from these distractions, and re-engage in the three operations of the prayer.
The complexity of the Jesus Prayer, with its three specific and simultaneous operations, is actually a substantial aid toward the development of a stable attention. These three operations place such a load on conscious awareness, that it rather quickly moves beyond distraction. You notice I said 'rather quickly.' I mean this in relationship to other meditations which do not have this loading effect. Your progress may still seem slow to you. After continual practice, two things begin to emerge. First, you are more and more able to do all three operations of the prayer simultaneously. Second, the number and intensity of distracting thoughts and feelings seem to diminish. There is a gradual quieting of the mind, as if the intellect becomes content with the discursive activity of the prayer, while deeper changes are occurring in you beneath the words.
The Arising of Spiritual Phenomena
As your practice continues, several phenomena may arise that are important to understand. While there is no specific order to their occurrence, in my experience, they tend to follow the order described here.
First, there is the arising of internal heat. You will be sitting in meditation and you will become aware that your body is very warm, sometimes it even feels hot. You may begin to perspire profusely. This is one of the spiritual fruits of the deepening of your interior prayer. It is the action of God within us, burning away the subtle interior obstacles which keep God veiled from our awareness. You may find this warmth so intense that you become frightened of it, thinking that something is wrong. Don’t worry. You are simply tasting the first fruits of the interior life. As this experience comes, you may need to loosen your clothing before you meditate, or even wear lighter clothing, so that you are not too distracted by the heat.
The second phenomenon which frequently occurs is known as the gift of tears. This is the experience of inner grief and compunction, which seems to arise spontaneously as you explore your interior depths. This experience is cause for rejoicing, because it signifies a deepening of the interior cleansing which usually begins with the experience of interior heat.
The gift of tears may begin with a feeling of grief or sadness, centered in the heart or the throat. You may find tears beginning to trickle out of your eyes. On occasion, there is full-blown weeping, but more often it is just a sweet-sad grief which causes these tears. When this occurs, don’t be surprised if your tears continue, even beyond the period of your meditation. You may find your eyes 'gently leaking,' producing very small amounts of moisture throughout the day. Usually no one will notice this but you.
A third phenomenon, which is more rare than the first two, and which typically follows after a long period of practice, is the experience of interior light. There arises within your heart an interior light that carries with it such tender sweetness that you will marvel at its intensity. This is your first clear sight of that great Light that is Christ the Lord. Words do not suffice to describe it, nor the interior feelings which accompany it.
These three phenomena cannot be sought after. This is very important for you to understand. These phenomena accompany the deepening of practice in a natural way. So do not strive after the phenomena. Your striving after these 'markers' of experience will only serve to keep you from them. Instead, strive to be present to God at all times. As our Lord says, "Do this, and all else shall be added to you." As you continue your practice, you will find that your mind begins to quiet down. There is a gradual dawning of interior stillness. This occurs both within the practice of the Jesus Prayer and between the formal periods of practice.
Within the practice, your recitation of the words will be broken, from time to time, by a vast stillness. It is as if you have been traveling along a heavily wooded road in the mountains, where you cannot see anything because of the thick forest. Then suddenly the road breaks out of the forest and a stunning vista opens before you. You stand, dumbstruck with awe, held suspended in the vastness of all that you survey.
This is what interior silence is like. Your recitation of the words of the prayer will, at times, spontaneously cease, and you will stand in the Presence of God in awe. There are simply no words, only stillness. This deep experience cannot be achieved by 'wishing' it, by imagining it, by striving for it, or by promoting yourself beyond the reach of your own experience. It lies within you, awaiting your discovery. You can do nothing to hurry it. You can only open your heart to God, and fix your attention there. God will give you His grace in His own time, not in yours.
With the arising of this deep inner stillness, you begin to approach contemplation. The contemplative process is different in character than all the spiritual exercises that go before it. We will explore the contemplative process at a later time.
* * *
Let’s bring our meeting to a close for now. You have received the basic instructions for one of the most powerful meditative prayers that has ever been developed. It has the power to take you deeper and deeper into an intimate relationship with the Divine.
I encourage you to set aside time to practice the Jesus Prayer on a daily basis. I typically practice in the morning, on arising, and in the evening before I go to sleep. This form of practice provides me with spiritual bookends for my day, and this practice seems to make my days go more smoothly. I would encourage you to enter into this interior space throughout the day as well, even if it is just for a moment or two. The ultimate aim of all spiritual practice is to dwell in the house of the Lord, so why not move in today? LOL
Have a great week, and remember, if you have any questions about your practice, please drop me a line at ken123kaisch@google.com.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
20: The Jesus Prayer
Edition #20: Inside the Invisible
First, I need to apologize to you. I have been planning to show you a new spiritual exercise for some time now, but I finally realized that I have not prepared you for this more advanced practice. So please forgive my enthusiasm. In my excitement to share this new exercise with you, I forgot that many of you are not regular meditators. I’m afraid that if I share this new practice with you now, you may be a bit overwhelmed. So, out of the abundance of caution, and out of my concern for your spiritual growth and well-being, I’m having to walk back my promise to you.
Monologistic Prayers
In its place, I would like to introduce the Jesus Prayer, the oldest, commonly-used monologistic prayer in Christendom. Monologistic prayers are similar in many ways to the mantras of the Eastern religions. The word “monologistic” refers to the short prayers (mono logos = one word) developed within the Christian faith, which are continuously repeated during one’s meditation practice. These prayers are suitable for both beginning and advanced meditators, and they offer many benefits. Examples of these kinds of meditation include the Jesus Prayer, the prayer described in The Cloud of Unknowing, and the more modern Centering Prayer.
For beginners, monologistic prayers are great tools for learning to focus your attention. As we have said previously, a focused attention, capable of being sustained over long periods of time, is an absolute requisite for the kind of spiritual progress we are exploring. As you develop more and more comfort and expertise with these practices, these prayers can take you deeply into a profound inner stillness. This stillness is the precursor to those unitive states that signal we are reaching the conclusion of our spiritual journey.
The Jesus Prayer, in its several variations, holds the distinction of being the oldest continually-used monologistic prayer in Christendom. Furthermore, it has probably been used by more people, and in more varied circumstances than any other. It is one of the great treasures of the Church.
The Jesus Prayer has three parts which are practiced simultaneously. First, the practitioner opens to God's Presence, using one of the practices of Recollection. Second, the practitioner places his attention in the region of the heart. And third, he begins to repeat the words from the heart, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me."
The Development of the Jesus Prayer
The roots of this Prayer extend back to the time of Christ Jesus. From the earliest times, devotion to the name of Jesus has been a part of the Church. This devotion is embodied in two central references in the New Testament. The first, from St. Paul, says, "God...bestowed on Him the name above every other name, so that at Jesus' name, every knee must bend in the heavens, and on the earth, and under the earth." The second reference is in St. John's gospel: "Whatever you ask the Father, he will give you in my name." These texts form a powerful rationale for praying using the name of Jesus. The Jesus Prayer refines this by focusing directly and exclusively on the name of Jesus. In this way, the prayer functions as a tool through which divine grace is channeled into the heart of the believer.
The second element of the Jesus Prayer, embodied in the words, "have mercy on me," appeals for God's mercy and forgiveness. Here the one who prays focuses on their relationship to God, and asks for grace. In practice, as the meditator prays in this way, there frequently arises a deep sense of grief and an outpouring of tears. These tears seem to cleanse the soul from the passions which separate us from the Divine.
The third element, the frequent repetition of the prayer, is an attempt to follow St. Paul's injunction to "pray without ceasing." We hear mention of this practice of constant repetition throughout the surviving writings of the Desert Fathers. By this means, these early monks and nuns strove constantly to remember God, and to live and move in an awareness of God's constant Presence.
The fourth element, the quest for inner stillness, is the hallmark of non-discursive prayer, and the beginning of contemplation. Evagrios of Ponticus, who lived with the Desert Fathers, states that "prayer means the shedding of thoughts." Another translation renders the passage, "Prayer is the rejection of concepts." Evagrios' concern was to still the restless wanderings of the intellect so that the essential unity of the soul with the Divine can stand revealed. In most people, their mental turmoil obscures the Presence of God. Only through focusing our attention can we go beyond conceptual thinking into those unitive states where we dwell with the Divine.
The History of the Jesus Prayer.
While the four elements of the Jesus Prayer were clearly recognizable by the fourth century, it was not until Bishop Diadochus in the fifth century unified these elements into one recognizable prayer that the Jesus Prayer, per se, came into being. Diadochus was the first to bring these elements together for the purpose of entering into the state of non-discursive, imageless prayer. He states that the intellect is inherently “restless,” and needs some activity to satisfy its needs. He engages the intellect with the ceaseless repetition of the name of Jesus, which ultimately leads to quieting the discursive mind. Of importance is Diadochos' instruction to "give [the mind] nothing but the prayer, 'Lord Jesus'." This unvarying repetition brings the restless intellect into stillness, "reaching out beyond language into silence, beyond discursive thinking into intuitive awareness."
From this essential catalyst, the Jesus Prayer appears again in clear form in the deserts of Egypt, Sinai, and Palestine. St. John Climacus, who lived in the Sinai and wrote the core work, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, recommends the prayer. Due to the widespread influence of his writings, the Jesus Prayer spread throughout the Orthodox churches. St. John's followers, St. Hesychius and St. Philotheus, are even more explicit in extolling the virtues of the Jesus Prayer.
Thus, between the fifth and eighth centuries, the Jesus Prayer emerges as a recognized spiritual way, sanctioned by the church hierarchy and widely practiced by both monastics and the laity. In later centuries, as the Eastern churches declined in spiritual vigor, the practice of the Jesus Prayer fell into disuse. In each of the several revivals which have swept through the Eastern Orthodox churches, the Jesus Prayer has played a significant role. In Greece in the fourteenth century, and then again in the eighteenth century when the Philokalia was compiled, the Jesus Prayer was the central practice which fueled and sustained the revival. Again, in Russia during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Jesus Prayer plays a now-familiar and significant role in revitalizing the faith of an entire people.
The Russian Pilgrim
We in the West are familiar with this last revival through the works of the anonymous Russian author of The Way of a Pilgrim. This anonymous author tells a fascinating story of his adventures during the decades before the freeing of the serfs in 1861. An orphaned peasant from the province of Orel, he was raised by a grandfather, along with his older brother. This brother was a drunkard and injured him repeatedly, first crippling his hand, and then burning his house down. Crippled and widowed, with no ties to keep him, the younger brother began his wanderings.
The pilgrim's spiritual journey started in a church, when he heard a reading of the words of St. Paul, "pray without ceasing." He began to wonder how this was possible, and asked every learned clergyman that he encountered. No one gave him a satisfactory answer. He kept looking for a method, but all he received were pious platitudes which begged the question. Finally the pilgrim found a staretz, a wise old spiritual guide, who taught him the following:
The continuous interior Prayer of Jesus is a constant uninterrupted calling upon the divine Name of Jesus with the lips, in the spirit, in the heart; while forming a mental picture of His constant presence, and imploring His grace, during every occupation, at all times, in all places, even during sleep. The appeal is couched in these terms, 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.' One who accustoms himself to this appeal experiences as a result so deep a consolation and so great a need to offer the prayer always, that he can no longer live without it, and it will continue to voice itself within him of its own accord.
In addition, the staretz read to the pilgrim from the Philokalia, a compendium of writings from the early Fathers which describes the "detailed science of constant interior prayer." Various postures and other details about the Jesus Prayer were explained by reference to this work, introducing him to the writings of the early Church Fathers. As the pilgrim began to progress in the prayer, his psychology started to change. After a summer of practice, he reports:
I felt an absolute peace in my soul. During sleep I often dreamed that I was saying the Prayer. And during the day if I happened to meet anyone, all men without exception were as dear to me as if they have been my nearest relations....All my ideas were quite calmed of their own accord. I thought of nothing whatever but my Prayer, my mind tended to listen to it, and my heart began of itself to feel at times a certain warmth and pleasure...My lonely hut seemed like a splendid palace, and I knew not how to thank God for having sent to me, a lost sinner, so wholesome a guide and master.
The Three Operations of the Jesus Prayer
The Jesus Prayer, as it was taught in Greece and Russia, has three mental parts or operations, and all of these need to be present for the Prayer to be effective. All too often the Jesus Prayer has been taught as if it has only one operation, that of saying the words. This is the most misunderstood point in the practice of this great prayer. The spiritual giants who have used this prayer are unanimous in stating that the words are the least important of the three operations of the Jesus Prayer. The first and most important operation is the Recollection of God's Presence, opening ourselves to the immediacy of the Divine right here and right now. This is the first and most important part of the Jesus Prayer.
The second operation of the Prayer is to put the 'head in the heart', which means to move our attention from our head, where it usually resides, into our heart center, and to pray from the heart. In the words of St. Theophan the Recluse, a major figure in Russian mysticism in the nineteenth century:
In order to keep the mind on one thing by the use of a short prayer, it is necessary to preserve attention and so lead it into the heart: for so long as the mind remains in the head, where thoughts jostle one another, it has no time to concentrate on one thing. But when attention descends into the heart, it attracts all the powers of the soul and body into one point there. This concentration of all human life in one place is immediately reflected in the heart by a special sensation that is the beginning of future warmth....This warmth then holds the attention without special effort....From this there follows a rule of spiritual life: if you keep the heart alive towards God, you will always be in remembrance of God.
This means that if we keep our attention focused in our hearts, our hearts will always be oriented towards the Divine.
This mental operation of putting the attention into the heart is quite unusual for Western Christians. We tend to think of attention as something fixed in the head. Our reasoning goes like this: 'the brain is the organ of thought, so our attention must be physically rooted in the head.' If you have ever stubbed your toe or barked your shin, you know this is untrue. When one of these accidents happen, our entire attention is instantly unified at the location of the injury!
Actually, we can place our attention anywhere in the body that we choose. Placing our attention in the heart feels strange at first, and many wonder whether they get it right. But you will become more comfortable here as the practice becomes familiar.
The third, and least important of the three operations of the Jesus Prayer is the repetition of the words: "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me" over and over. If our minds are particularly unsettled in our meditation, we may need to repeat this phrase quickly, to drive out the distractions. If our attention is collected and focused, we may adopt a more receptive attitude, and say the words slowly, with pauses in between the phrases.
Putting the three operations together looks like this. First, open yourself to feel God's Presence with you. Then feel the sphere of energy that surrounds your head. This is your attention. Move that sphere of energy slowly down into your heart. From your heart, not from your head, repeat the words of the prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me". "The essence of the whole thing is to be established in the remembrance of God, and to walk in His presence."
The Jesus Prayer is not a visual meditation. You should not make pictures of the Lord or of yourself in this practice. Simply engage in these three operations. When your attention wanders from them, gently bring yourself back, and reestablish each of these three operations. If you notice, during the course of your practice of the Jesus Prayer, that you are no longer doing one of these operations, gently reestablish that part of the Prayer and then continue.
"The main thing is to stand before the Lord with the mind in the heart." Eventually, even the words of the prayer will disappear, as we begin to venture into the realms of contemplative prayer. This is the experience of hesychia, or inner stillness. When the words and thoughts of the Jesus Prayer disappear of their own accord, the one who prays has entered into the stillness of the Mind of God. This experience is one of sublime peace and tranquility. When this occurs, do not force yourself to continue repeating the Jesus Prayer. Let yourself dwell in stillness.
In summation, the purpose of the Jesus Prayer is to collect and order the attention, and to focus this attention on God in such a way that we are gradually drawn into the deepest awareness of the Divine Presence in all things and manners of life.
* * *
That’s all for this week. I know this newsletter is a bit lengthy, but I felt it important to review the history and practice of the Jesus Prayer before we begin to use it in our meditation practice. Over the last two thousand years, it has been a central prayer practice for much of the Christian Church. This is such an important practice, that you need to understand where it comes from and how our forebearers have used this meditation to journey into the Divine.
This week, I would encourage you to prepare for the practice of the Jesus Prayer by remembering that you are walking in God’s holy Presence. As you move through the events of your week, simply remember that God is with you. Remember that God’s holy Presence surrounds you and makes its dwelling within you. Next week, I promise, we will go into the actual practice of the Jesus Prayer, and I will show you several variations that you can use.
Thank you once again for your faithfulness in exploring this material with me. Let us pray for one another, that we can let go of everything that separates us from that wondrous love of God, so that we can fully enjoy that magnificent Presence.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
19: The Goal and Function of Meditation
Edition #19: Inside the Invisible
I have received several questions this past week about meditation. As I looked at them altogether, I realized that I had been assuming things and not everyone had the same understanding that I did. As a result, I thought I better pause our essay series once again and attempt to address some of these questions. In many respects, they are very basic questions, and for that reason, they are important to address. The questions included: Is meditation really that important? What will meditation do for my spiritual life? Do I need to practice every day? So here is my attempt to address them. This is for those of you who have ever wondered about the purpose of meditation, or how it functions in our inner world.
On the face of it, meditation is a very strange process. You are supposed to sit completely still for long periods of time in order to what? See God? Have a spiritual experience? Heal some dread disease? Calm your anxious mind? What exactly is the purpose of meditation?
This is not unimportant. If you are not clear about the purpose of your meditation practice, you are likely wasting your time. Knowing why you are doing something – the purpose of it and the goal towards which you are aimed – gives you a clear focus and the ability to self-correct when your practice starts getting wonky. So, let's start with a bit of background.
We live in a divided world, and we ourselves are frequently of two (or more) minds. According to the great spiritual masters of all the major religions, this division is artificial in nature. Our true nature is to be in union. This union is variously understood, depending on the practitioner's belief system. It may be a union with God, a profound union within your own self, often described as self-realization, or a communion with the Divine. The purpose of meditation is to facilitate our perception of this underlying union.
The Importance of a Clear Target
One of the requirements for success in any endeavor is having a distinct and measurable target. If you don't know what you are trying to achieve, how will you know if you have achieved success? Perhaps more importantly, how will you self-correct if you don't know where the target lies? You simply don't know if you are left or right of the target, whether you are north or south of it. In this essay, I hope to provide some clarity regarding the target of the spiritual life.
Each of the six major world religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, teaches some form of deep, wordless prayer. Each religion has its own name for this process, but for our discussion, we will lump all of these terms together under the label ‘meditation.’ Each religion has various practices that fall under the general label of meditation.
There are two common problems for those trying to implement these practices. First, there are too many targets. I am most familiar with Christianity, and there are literally hundreds of different prayer practices that are commonly called 'meditation.' If you are to be successful in your spiritual quest, having multiple targets is just not helpful. If there is one clearly defined target, your chances of hitting that target go way, way up.
If you add to this problem within Christianity the hundreds or thousands of practices described by Hindus, Buddhists, and so on, the situation goes from really difficult to impossible. Which practice should you follow? Perhaps more importantly, why should you follow this method and not that one? Or any method at all?
That brings us to the second problem. None of these methods give us a clear target for which to aim. They say, in effect, “Do this practice and enlightenment, or salvation, or communion with the Divine will occur.” While that may be all they can say, it leaves the spiritual practitioner with precious little to go on. I've noticed that there are very few enlightened or realized spiritual masters roaming around. You may have noticed the same thing. So, how do we know that we are practicing in the correct fashion? How can we self-correct if we don't know what the target is?
Accepting this lack of clarity as the normal state of affairs seems wrong. In our era, we have actually gathered a considerable amount of information about the spiritual journey from the perspectives of the different world religions. What we haven't had was a compilation of this wisdom. We have tended to see these different religious systems as competing with one another. We have yet to understand them as simply having different perspectives on a common problem. This seems inexcusable given the wealth of spiritual knowledge available to us from these multiple sources.
The Unitive State
The end state of the spiritual quest is variously described as union with God, communion with God, enlightenment, and self-realization. While these descriptions appear to describe different phenomena, my research into the major world religions leads me to believe that these differences are simply matters of perspective. If you view an object from the left side, from the top, and the back, you are highly likely to get three different pictures, resulting in three different descriptions of the same object.
In our case, regarding the goal of spiritual practice, the different perspectives are provided by the theologies and worldviews of the different religions. Each of the major world religions views spiritual matters through the lens of their particular revelation. For example, the multiple gods and goddesses of the Eastern religions are markedly different from the one God described by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Supporting this notion – that a common process underlies these apparent differences regarding the ultimate spiritual goal – are the descriptions of the end states of the spiritual journey as described by these different religions. In my book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence, you can explore this in-depth.
All six describe a unification that takes place during and at the end of the spiritual journey. Not surprisingly, these religions describe this unification somewhat differently, given their theological differences. For example, Advaita Hinduism and Dzogchen Buddhism speak of this as an interior unification of the personal self, the ego, with itself. This is congruent with their particular theologies. Christianity and Islam describe a union with God as the end state of the spiritual quest. Judaism, because of its belief that G_d is totally Other, believes that the closest a person can come to the Divine is a deep communion.
The point here is to look beyond their apparent differences and notice that they all speak of a unification of some kind. This has some interesting implications, both for the spiritual journey and for the practice of meditation.
To have a unification, especially a unification of this kind, indicates that there must be a profound underlying separation. Most of us, and most of the time, are unaware of any kind of spiritual separation. We go about our typical day without thinking about God or noticing any separation from the Divine. This merely shows how profound our separation is. We don't even know that there is one!
Of course, this is not surprising. We don't typically notice the presence of God as we go about our daily round, do we? It is as if we are blind to our spiritual life most of the time. This is a separation of the most profound sort! The practices of meditation are designed to overcome this felt separation.
How Does It Work?
All forms of meditation are ultimately aimed at helping you achieve stillness. This is the ultimate goal of meditation. From birth, our minds are involved in constructing our reality. We don't notice this construction process because so much of it happens before we have language. One of the more interesting findings of recent psychological research has been that almost all of what we remember is mediated by our language. Have you ever wondered why you don't remember things in your first few years? Because you didn't have language yet, you could not lay down long-term memories. Hence, no early memories.
The goal of meditation is, first, to get you to stop talking to yourself. Notice what happens as you begin to meditate. Your mind rumbles around for a bit, and then you finally settle down into a brief stillness. That stillness ends when you notice it and comment to yourself, “Ah, I think I've got this now.” It usually takes a while for a novice meditator to recognize this comment as just another thought and that you are back constructing your artificial reality again.
This stopping of thoughts cannot be any kind of suppression of thoughts because that is just more of the same – it's just a fancy kind of thinking. The stopping – the acquisition of stillness – will first come in little moments, interspersed among your thoughts. Then, it will gradually lengthen as you are able to maintain your focus. When this happens, you start to make true spiritual progress.
As you continue your practice, your stillness deepens and lengthens. As this happens, you begin to perceive the reality which underlies our multiple separations. You start to see how your self-talk constructs your reality. You begin to perceive the subtle, unitive reality that lies underneath all of our mental busyness. Your perception will continue to deepen and finally unite you with the Ultimate.
To learn more about this journey, you can read Inside the Invisible where I describe this journey in detail.
So How Do You Achieve Stillness?
It is one thing to say that the target or goal of meditation is the achievement of stillness. But for anyone who has ever tried meditation, you know how difficult stillness is to achieve. So, to end this essay, let's focus on achieving this interior state.
Most of us have a constant stream of chatter in our heads – our self-talk. As I understand it, there are two main ways of achieving stillness, and you are likely to choose one or the other based on whether you prefer to process cognitively or emotionally.
The cognitive path involves letting go of your self-talk. While this sounds easy, it is most certainly not! You let go in this moment, and in the very next moment, you are off chattering about something else. Almost always, I find that my self-talk during meditation is of earth-shaking importance – things like remembering to pick up some eggs and milk when I finish my meditation. Perhaps you have had similar experiences?
As a result, the 'letting go' process is constant. You let go of this thought, the next one, and the one after that. Sometimes this is so arduous that you get up from meditation more tired than when you sat down. If you can step back for a moment and look at the whole process, you will see just how undisciplined our minds are. At times, this whole business of trying to achieve stillness reminds me of herding cats.
In addition to the 'letting go' process, there are other approaches. These different approaches involve the same kinds of processes as 'letting go.' Some people describe it as the process of surrender. You surrender your passing needs and the self-talk accompanying them to draw closer to the Divine. Still others, notably the anonymous mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing, describe a related process that he calls humility. Humility, as our anonymous author describes it, is the process of seeing yourself as you actually are, not as you imagine yourself to be. So humility, as it is understood here, is not some mental self-flagellation but rather a cultivation of self-observation that results in a recognition of our deepest self – a self already profoundly connected to the love of God.
On the other hand, the emotional path involves the internal cultivation of qualities like love, compassion, gratitude, etc. This path typically pulls attention away from the intellect and moves it into your heart center, sometimes called the heart chakra. This spiritual center in your chest is the place that the spiritual masters of all the major religions say is the place where it is easiest to encounter the Divine.
Let's take the cultivation of gratitude as an example of this process. You sit in your meditation, letting go of the initial distractions and minor discomforts. Then, you move your attention from your head into your heart center. This movement is not always clearly understood. Many think that their attention permanently resides in their head – a kind of fixed feature like your nose or mouth. Anyone who has ever stubbed their toe or barked their shin knows the fallacy of this. When this kind of trauma occurs, absolutely ALL of your attention is directed to the point of injury! This shows that attention can be placed wherever you need it to be.
What people haven't known is how to move their attention out of their heads in a more gentle manner. You begin by feeling the sphere of energy that surrounds your head, the energy we typically describe as our ‘self’ or our ‘ego.’ Then, slowly, move this energy down your spinal column and into the region of your heart, taking several minutes or so to complete the journey. Just feel that sphere of energy getting heavier and heavier until it comes to rest in your chest. Then, when your attention is rooted in your heart, begin to cultivate gratitude.
When I say, 'cultivate gratitude,' I do not mean that you make up a feeling about some false thing that you think you should be grateful for. Instead, think about those aspects of your life for which you really feel gratitude. For example, I have had a knee problem since childhood from playing sandlot football. When my knee is not hurting, it is easy to feel gratitude for that. I often start here, with my not-hurting knee, and I generate feelings of gratitude for that. Then, my mind turns to other things I'm grateful for. Some days, it is quite a list.
As these feelings of gratitude multiply, I find a kind of quiet developing – the stillness we talked about earlier. If I stay with it, this stillness gradually deepens until I find myself floating in a wordless ocean of gratitude. It is here, in the stillness, that the emotional and the cognitive practices of meditation flow together and become one.
As you can see, with both the cognitive and emotive approaches to meditation, entering into stillness takes time and constant practice. To achieve genuine stillness, daily practice is required. For most of us, this means daily practice over a period of years. As my own practice has deepened, I find that I am learning to live within this inner stillness, so that its cultivation is becoming a constant feature of my inner life. It is a deeply peaceful place; and when I can enter this state, it often feels like I am coming home.
Conclusions
We have covered a lot of ground in this essay. We discussed the importance of making a clear target for our meditative practice. We have identified the pre-existing and underlying unitive state that is not perceptible by our ordinary consciousness. We discussed that the goal of meditation is stillness because it is through our inner stillness that we can pierce through our apparent separation and perceive what is ultimately real. It is through stillness that we can perceive the Divine. Finally, we talked about two different meditative methods that can take us into stillness – a cognitive-based method and an emotional one.
As one of my seminary professors encouraged me, I would encourage you to "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" this material. It will serve you well on your spiritual journey.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
18: Letting Go of the Ego
Edition #18: Inside the Invisible
Last week, we took a stab at letting go of our identification with our ego, our small sense of self. Using the Dis-Identification Exercise, we explored letting go of our body, our emotions, and our intellect to see what happened. Since I haven’t received any reports of people’s heads exploding or a sudden mass vanishing of readers of this newsletter, I have to suspect that everyone survived this.
You see, we are like the ugly duckling in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairytale of the same name. We think of ourselves as beings that are much smaller in stature and capability than we actually are. In the fairytale, a swan’s egg was put in a duck’s nest. When the baby swan hatched, the mother duck and her little babies all looked at this interloper as ugly, awkward, clumsy, and somehow defective. Since all the baby swan heard were these horrible things about himself, he believed them. He concluded that he was a defective duck. He only realized the truth about himself when he saw a flock of beautiful swans soaring overhead. At that point, he realized his true identity. He was not a duck; he was, in fact, the most beautiful and graceful of birds.
This story accurately depicts our human situation. We think of ourselves as limited, and often defective or lacking. This is a grotesque misunderstanding. It completely overlooks the fact that the Divine dwells within us. Within the Christian faith, it overlooks the astounding message found in John 14. Here Jesus says, in effect, “I am in my father and my father is in me. In just the same way, I am in you and you are in me.”
Let me state this as clearly as possible: God lives within you. Whatever you have been told about yourself, if this is not central to your understanding, then your understanding is incomplete. As a result of all of the misinformation we have received over our lifetime, we have identified with the limited, small self and have been unaware of the larger Self that is within us. The purpose of our work here is to let go of that small self so that we can participate fully in the Self, which is our true nature as human beings.
If this understanding were only found in Christianity, we might have to dismiss it as delusional. Unicorns, after all, don’t really exist except in our imaginations. But this Christian understanding is echoed in the scriptures of every major religion around the world. I especially like the Hindu formulation of this truth, “Thou art That.” In this formulation, ‘That’ refers to God, that Other that we all are searching for.
Think about this with me for a moment. We have searched over and over in so many different ways to find a valid path to God. Feeling separated from the Divine, it seems like there is an abyss that surrounds us – an unbridgable chasm that keeps us from our goal. But when we look carefully, this abyss is actually something we have created with our own thoughts.
Jesus tells us there is no abyss. Our minds tell us there is. So, who are you going to believe?
Most of the time, we believe ourselves. We fashion the truth about ourselves with our thoughts and our emotions. We decide we’re pretty or ugly, smart or stupid, good or bad, healthy or unhealthy. And then we put our trust in our own decisions, often with terrible results, and always with self-limiting results.
Our egos have created a protective envelope around us. The original purpose of these envelopes was to protect us from hurt. Sadly, hurt is an arrow that pierces all of our defenses. Our efforts in this regard, as you have no doubt noticed, are both ineffective and inadequate. Even though we recognize these inadequacies, we have not suspected that there was anything else, so we continue to hang onto that small self that we have created.
At this point, I need that crazy announcer for Ginsu knives to shout, “But wait, there’s more!”
The “more” is God. You are not the little self you have created and held onto all these years. You are a child of God, and God himself lives within you. When you
let go of the little self you have created, when you explore what is beyond that little self, you will experience the Divine.
So, how do we let go of this little self?
We will probably be more successful at this letting go if we understand more about the ego, so let’s look at the components that make up our little selves. What exactly is this ‘I’ composed of? Certainly, it contains all of our thoughts and emotions. As such, it contains all our value judgements, all our understandings about ourselves and the world around us. Using the image of the protective envelope that we developed above, it is as if this envelope serves as a movie screen, and we are projecting all of these thoughts, emotions, and judgments onto the screen. Then comes the sleight-of-hand! We identify with our projections. We think we are those projections.
This description sounds abstract, even a bit otherworldly, like it can’t really be real. Well, let me give you a real-life example. Back in the 1970s, before ethical considerations were considered important, one of my psychology professors conducted a study at a nearby elementary school. He gave an individual intelligence test to all of the fourth-graders towards the end of the school year. He then told the teachers who would have them for fifth grade that certain students were bright and others were kind of slow. Unbeknownst to the teachers, he was lying.
In actual fact, he had randomly assigned students to the bright group or the slow group. He returned to the school at the end of the students' fifth-grade year and interviewed the teachers. The teachers, believing that he had given them accurate information, confirmed the information he had given them the previous year. The ones he said were bright had, in fact, been generally perceived by the fifth-grade teachers as bright, and vice versa.
On the basis of his authority as a psychologist and as an expert in testing students' intelligence, this professor created a false reality for the teachers. Sadly, on the basis of the teachers' interactions with their students, I suspect the students also began to perceive themselves in this false manner. This experiment shows how we create false realities for ourselves with the thoughts that others have about us and with our own thoughts.
The message that most of us have received all of our lives is that ‘God is far away in the heavens,’ and we are down here on earth, and the only way that we will meet God is after our death. Because we have been told of this by people we have trusted, we have come to believe it. Once again, who are you going to believe? Are you going to believe your parents and all of those who gave you this information, or are you going to believe Jesus and the great avatars of all the major religions who say that God is within you? The choice is always ours, isn’t it?
To counter this mistaken identification, this mistaken programming, I have come across a spiritual exercise, found in many religions, which invites us to let go of these identifications. It is one of those exercises that can be a bit frightening because it is something that most of us have never done before. That being said, it also offers us the great promise of freedom from our projections, and freedom from the tyranny of our small self. As we let go of the small self, which effectively blocks our perception of the Self, we open ourselves more and more to that wonderful Presence that lies within us.
Spiritual Exercise #4
Letting Go
1. Position your body comfortably, spine erect, and ground yourself in your physical sensations. Close your eyes and slowly become aware of the sensations of your physical body. Feel the sensations as they flow through you. The sensations in your head… In your neck and shoulders… Your elbows… Your wrists and the palms of your hands… The sensations in your knees… Your ankles and the soles of your feet.
2. Move your awareness to the region of your heart and establish your attention there.
3. Observe the flow of thoughts and feelings from the perspective of your heart center. No need to chase after these experiences; just be aware of them.
4. As you become aware of each object-of-awareness, let it go. Simply release it, and refocus your attention in your heart center.
5. Continue this process of letting go. Let go of your thoughts over and over again. Let go of everything that comes into your field of awareness. When fear or other emotions come up, let go of them as well.
6. After doing this for some time, you may become aware of the “self” who has these contents of awareness. It is as if you step back from the moment-to-moment flow of data and become aware of the larger context in which this data flows.
This awareness will come to you naturally, in its own time. When it occurs, view the “self” as just another content of your awareness. Let go of this “self.” And let go of what comes after the sense of self. And let go of what comes after that as well. Continue this process of letting go.
(To close your meditation)
7. When you’re ready, let yourself come back to this place. But the feeling return to your feet… Your hands… Your face. Take a deep breath and open your eyes.
I want to encourage you to practice this exercise on a regular, daily basis. Like many new things, it takes a bit of getting used to and a bit of practice. Let’s face it, most of our lives have been aimed in the opposite direction – towards acquiring things, not letting go of them! So this will likely feel very strange and unfamiliar when you first try it.
That being said, how else can we get to that expansive Self that lies hidden behind our ego, our small self? We have to find ways of letting go, and that is exactly what this exercise facilitates. Please remember to email me at ken123kaisch@google.com when questions arise about your practice.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
17: Cracking the Ego
Edition #17: Inside the Invisible
Over the past several months, we have spent considerable time exploring our human nature. We have looked at the nature of the mind and the nature and stages of spiritual growth. This week, I would like to return to a more practical matter and share a spiritual exercise designed to break through the hard shell of our selfishness, the obdurate ego.
You may think, at this point, that I have a rather negative view of the ego. That would be a significant misunderstanding. I believe that God created the conditions under which our sense of self is formed, and like all of his creations, when he looked on them, he found them good. I also have come to believe that our sense of self – our ego – is an intermediate step in our spiritual development. If we are to follow the Divine, we need to find ways of bursting through the ego’s constraints.
Let me try to explain what I mean by this, and to do so, we need to look at our early developmental stages. A newborn has no ego, no sense of self. She is simply open to experiencing everything. There are no filters to screen out certain events, and there are no thoughts because she does not have language yet. There are simply streams of sensation that pour through her consciousness. Adults who find themselves in the presence of a newborn soul are often struck by the innocence and the purity exhibited by these beautiful babies.
As the child acquires experience in this new body, she finds certain things are uncomfortable and others give her joy. As she learns language, she begins to incorporate into her growing sense of self those instructions which the adults give her. She learns that it’s okay to smile and laugh, but not okay to cry and fuss. She learns how to cooperate with the person who is feeding her. On the other end, she learns that bowel movements can be repugnant to the people around her. From these early beginnings, she learns the full repertoire of human behaviors.
Each of the instructions that she takes in from outside sources ultimately becomes a part of a relatively enduring sense of self – that part of us that we call the ego. Many of these instructions are helpful for her survival. They help her avoid adult anger. They teach her to avoid dangers and the fears that accompany threats to her person. If you will, the ego becomes the basic toolkit necessary for survival in human society. All of this is good and appropriate, but there is a darker side to this as well.
Let me illustrate how this works. The child is taught to be a good little boy or girl, and this establishes and reinforces certain patterns of adult–approved behavior. It also defines bad behavior, which is all the stuff that isn’t considered ‘good.’ So what is the developing child supposed to do with all the behaviors that are not considered okay? Behaviors that are ‘bad?’
The great Swiss psychiatrist, C.G. Jung, stated that all of these rejected parts of the self, the parts that we call negative or bad, don’t just disappear. Instead, they formulate a shadow self, embracing the so-called dark side of our human nature. Our shadows are composed of all of the parts of ourselves that we reject – the ‘not-me’ parts of us. You know, the angry, hateful, depressed, fearful parts that we have such a hard time accepting. These are the parts that we would like to have magically disappear.
So our ego is fundamentally a survival mechanism. It is that part of us that helps us survive from birth through early adulthood. As such, our egos are essential to human development. We cannot do without them. That being said, our egos come with significant limitations. While they function to keep destructive events away from us, they also keep us from accurately understanding both the world around us and our own selves. In addition, our egos tend to keep our negative thoughts and feelings inside of us, where they can wreak destruction. How many times, for example, have you found your mind repeatedly going over a negative situation or conversation, until you’re just sick of it?
You can think of your ego as constructing a wall. While that wall keeps negative things outside of itself, when negative things do get in, it holds on to them. We can see here that the ego is a two-edged sword: it confers benefits and at the same time burdens us with negative consequences.
The most profoundly debilitating consequence of an adult ego is that it keeps us from realizing our essential nature. We tend to identify with our bodies or with our minds when our actual identity is that we participate in the fullness of the Divine. The Christian mystics and indeed, the mystics of all religions, clearly state that we are one with God. They clearly state that God dwells within our hearts. Yet, because we identify with our bodies or our minds, we are unable to perceive the great treasure within each of us. Jesus himself says, “The kingdom of God is within you.” (Luke 17.21). Because of the ego's limiting effect, we fail to perceive this great truth.
Our primary spiritual task is to let go of our ego’s constraints so that we can experience our true self. Our true self is not limited to this body. It is not limited to the ever-changing play of emotions we experience. It is not limited to our ideas. Our true self participates fully in the Divine and has no limits. Indeed, one way of understanding the salvation that Christ brings to us is to understand that he is freeing us from the too-narrow constraints of our ego so that we can participate fully in the love of God.
So this is the task that is before us – to let go of our self so that we can experience our true nature as full participants in the Divine. To assist with this task, I have found the Dis-Identification Exercise developed by Roberto Assagioli to be extremely useful. Assagioli was an Italian psychiatrist who was a pioneer in inner spiritual work. He developed this exercise to help his clients let go of their false identifications so that they can experience the truth of their true nature.
This exercise works best if you can have someone read it to you. We have not yet found someone who can help us embed MP3 files in our text. If you have these skills and are willing to help us with this, please contact me at ken123kaisch@gmail.com. If you cannot find someone to read this for you, I suggest that you record it, since the exercise is much more effective if you can simply listen.
To begin this exercise, sit comfortably in your meditative position. Then slowly read the Dis-Identification Exercise adapted from Assagioli , or record the exercise and listen to the tape. Let yourself quietly affirm the truth of these words.
Spiritual Exercise 3
The Dis-Identification Exercise.
I have a body, but I am not my body.
My body is a precious instrument of experience. All that I can experience is mediated by my body, my senses. Through my body, I come to know the world outside of me and the world within me. Through my body, I act and do things in the world. But I notice that my body may find itself in different conditions of health or sickness; it may be rested or tired, but that has nothing to do with myself, my “I.” The changes my body goes through do not change my “I.” From this, I realize that I have a body, but it is only an instrument. Therefore, I affirm that I have a body, but I am not my body.
I have emotions and feelings, but I am not my emotions.
My emotions are a wonderful, many-colored palette that I use to value things and experiences. When I say I love someone, I am describing how I value that person. When I say that I’m angry at someone, I am describing another kind of value. I use this rich variety of valuing to order and understand my experiences. But I noticed that though my emotions change, sometimes swiftly and sometimes slowly, the “I” that has these emotions does not change. I noticed that I remain myself – in times of hope and in times of despair, in moments of calm and moments of irritation, my “I” is the same. From this, it is clear that my emotions are not myself. Therefore, I affirm that I have emotions and feelings, but I am not my emotions.
3. I have an intellect, a mind, but I am not my intellect.
My intellect is my instrument for wrestling with the world. Through my intellect, I take big things and divide them into smaller parts so that I can understand them. Then I recombine those small parts into a larger whole. I use my intellect to grapple with the vast complexity of things, so that I can master them. But I notice that though my thoughts change frequently, the “I” that has those thoughts does not change. I can think of many things, but I don’t become those things. As a result, I realize that I have an intellect, but it is only an instrument. Therefore, I affirm that, while I have an intellect, I am not my intellect.
4. Instead, I affirm that I am the center of pure awareness. When I go inside my self, my “identity,” I experience a vast space, open and without limit. My awareness is free to move in any direction, as quickly or as slowly as I would like. There is no limit to my movement. There is only this wonderful, vast awareness that I am…
5. Let yourself continue to explore these depths within. Take some time, perhaps five or ten minutes, and go wherever you please. If you find yourself distracted, simply bring your attention back to the vast spaciousness within yourself, and continue your inner journey.
(To close your meditation.)
6. Let yourself come back to this place. Let the feeling return to your feet… your hands… and your face. Take a deep breath, and when you are ready, open your eyes.
I would strongly encourage you to record this exercise and play it back for yourself many times. It is one of those great tools for opening our perception of what really is, as opposed to something that we think it might be. Just reading this over will not give you the necessary result. You have to open yourself to it’s deep truths for this spiritual exercise to be effective.
Because of our deep identification with our bodies, emotions, and intellect, we are often afraid to let go of those parts that we believe to be the whole of us. Mistaking these parts for the whole, we wonder what will become of us if we release them. Will we simply disappear? Will something terrible happen if we find ourselves without the partial self with which we identify?
Most people experience a great sense of freedom when they practice this exercise. It allows us to address our fears and our self-imposed limitations quite directly. As a result of doing this exercise multiple times, you begin to see that we are much more than we have thought ourselves to be. Here we begin to understand what participation in the Divine truly means. It means that we are, at our deepest levels, identical with the Infinite.
Once again, the Biblical story of Jacob and Essau comes to mind. We, like Essau, have forsaken our birthright for a bowl of gruel. This is not what God created us for!
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
16: What Is Salvation?
Edition #16: Inside the Invisible
I was asked a great question by John from Nebraska this past week: what is salvation? This is such an important question that I put aside the essay I had been working on so that I could answer it fully.
In our era, there is much confusion about the notion of salvation. Many Christians seem to delight in asking others, “Are you saved?” To some degree, this seems just a part of the general combativeness and aggression that we’re living in. But unless you know what salvation really is, you’re in no position to address this question. So, let’s look at this issue carefully.
To start such an examination into an old theological issue is always fraught. There are many established positions on the matter, and it is very easy to find yourself getting lost in minutiae. To circumvent this, I prefer to start by examining the term ‘salvation’ in more ordinary contexts. So let us begin.
There are two parties involved in every saving act. For example, if someone is saved from drowning, the two parties are the savior and the one who is saved. In the same way, there are two parties in the Christian notion of salvation. There is God, in the person of Jesus, who is saving the person in need.
This leads us to the next question: What is the person being saved from? The traditional theological answer is that we are saved from sin. Our Eastern Orthodox brethren even have a graphic depiction of this. Many of their crucifixes – both painted and sculpted – show the cross of Jesus being planted over a skull. This skull represents the skull of Adam, the vehicle through which sin entered into our consciousness. This graphic depiction is intended to show clearly that Christ died to redeem the sin of Adam.
So, what exactly was Adam’s sin? His sin was disobedience. At that very early point in humanity's development, there was only one rule: don’t eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam clearly disobeyed this and was cast out of the Garden of Eden, and as a result, became subject to pain, suffering, and death. In traditional Christian theology, Adam’s sin was seen as a kind of mass infection. Every person since Adam has been similarly infected with the consequences he bore: pain, suffering, and death.
In my view, this is a pretty good explanation of salvation, but when you look closely, it has a number of flaws. For one, it violates our current sense of fair play. Why, for example, do you have to suffer and die for something someone else did? A someone you don’t even know who lived thousands of years ago! Kind of hard to swallow, isn’t it? Looking at the matter more deeply, this is not consonant with the New Testament notion of a loving God. The God who would condemn the entire human race for one person’s mistake is cruel and sadistic, not loving.
Second, how does Jesus’ death make up for Adam’s mistake? I’ve heard a number of explanations over my lifetime, but none of them hold up in the face of scrutiny. Again, was Jesus’ torture and death really the action of a ‘loving’ God? It seems cruel, mean-spirited, and sadistic to me. And how, exactly, does torturing a man to death lead to the commutation of Adam’s mistake? I mean, all humanity is still subject to pain, suffering, and death, so what did Jesus’ sacrifice really accomplish?
The traditional theology that informs Jesus’ death is lacking on several fronts. It is based on the Old Testament’s version of the Divine – harsh, judgmental, and even cruel. It is clearly not the Christian understanding of God. Second, it misunderstands the true nature of the infection by not understanding the true nature of Adam’s mistake. And believe me, it was a massive mistake, although you could also argue that it was necessary for humanity's development. And finally, the traditional understanding omits a crucial part of the human psyche – our proclivity towards guilt and self-blame. On these grounds, I believe, we need to reformulate our understanding of salvation.
***
So let’s begin by looking at the crux of the issue – Adam’s mistake. God told Adam that he was not to eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which, along with the Tree of Life, was situated at the center of the Garden of Eden. Prior to eating the forbidden fruit, Adam appears to have been in a very primitive state of consciousness. Without the dualistic conception of good and evil, everything would appear to Adam as acceptable. Indeed, God told him that he could freely eat from every tree in the garden except that one. And after Eve appears in the narrative, they are both naked and without shame, again indicating a primitive state of consciousness with little or no differentiation between good and bad. This is in stark contrast with virtually every human culture since that time, with our massive taboos regarding sex and appropriate dress.
In a strange way, Adam's state of consciousness sounds like the consciousness present in my dog, Maggie. Maggie approaches each new object with curiosity and interest. If there is a sharp sound or a sudden movement, she will typically recoil. On the other hand, if there is an interesting smell, she typically moves towards it. There is no a priori judgment of good or evil; everything is evaluated on its own merits, after first experiencing it.
Prior to eating the forbidden fruit, Adam appears to have no ego. If he has a sense of self, it seems very primitive, at the level of an animal's consciousness. Maggie, for example, responds to her name and seems to have a kind of rudimentary sense of self. With both Maggie and Adam, there is a sense of timelessness here, with no urgency because they are living in each and every moment. There appears to be no sense of the future and no sense of the past. As a result, there can be no planning. This is a devastating handicap because virtually every human endeavor relies on planning. You cannot hunt or gather without planning to go where the food sources are. You cannot have a community of individuals who live together without extensive planning.
When this biblical story is examined with a critical eye, Adam's so-called mistake begins to seem necessary for human development. From a psychological perspective, Adam’s mistake marks the beginning of the development of an ego – a separate sense of one’s self. This ego could be described as the very beginning of humanity. Of interest, Adam’s ego developed in response to an outside influence, God’s demand that he not consume the forbidden fruit.
When humanity lived in an animal’s state of consciousness, we were simply another species: just one among many. But once we formulated an ego, we became radically different. This difference is clearly apparent if you take a moment and look around you. You live in an elaborately constructed house, with a varied and interesting diet of food sources that have been derived from many different countries and delivered to your local supermarket. You leave your house and get in your car, bus, or taxi, and are driven to your supermarket where you choose from a wide variety of tasty foods. What other species has created such amazing complexity? The answer, of course, is that none have.
***
With the appearance of an ego – due to the influence of an external force, in this case God, – duality has entered into human consciousness. Suddenly, there are an array of new conceptual tools: the notion of good and bad, of right and wrong, and many others. Along with these tools comes the notion of time, differentiating the present moment from past and future. Suddenly, humanity is able to plan by using past experiences to predict and prepare for the future. If you will, the appearance of the ego appears to have spread throughout all humanity as a kind of massive infection.
At first glance, these new tools confer astounding advantages to the human race, but on closer examination, we quickly discover a dark side. We begin to apply the notion of good and bad to ourselves, and in the process create the emotions of guilt and shame. We find that planning can also be used for destructive ends. Initially, human beings would fight person to person, but with the ability to plan, we became able to gather larger groups to fight battles and wars with horrific consequences.
This is the state in which we find ourselves today. We are each driven by our egos. This means that we live in a state of almost perpetual dualism, and we find ourselves constantly looking for ways to enter into unity. We long for the peace that Adam and Eve enjoyed before the Fall. We long to quiet the constant back-and-forth chattering in our own minds. We long for deeper connections with one another – connections made elusive by our constant judgments.
This is the state of humanity when Jesus appeared. We, who are so internally divided by our conflicting judgments and the demands placed on us by others, experience a vast abyss between ourselves and the Divine. Not only do we experience this abyss with God, we also experience it with each other. Perhaps even more debilitating, we experience it within our own minds, within our own sense of self. Thus, we are fragmented, both internally and externally.
Psychologically, we tend to blame ourselves for these vast chasms, which lead to our isolation and loneliness. This infection is passed from parent to child every time the child is praised or blamed for an action. This infection is passed through our social institutions, through churches and schools and governmental institutions in the same manner. On every side, the developing ego is bombarded with messages to “do this” or “do that” in order to gain somebody’s approval.
Spiritually, this has greatly stifled our development. Instead of being free to explore our own innermost nature, we avoid anything that smacks of deep reflection. This avoidance has hindered us spiritually. Jesus and all the great saints have consistently pointed to the Presence of God that is always within us and immediately accessible. Because of our guilt, however, we avoid exploring this most intimate of connections. And this is what Jesus came to save us from.
With the entrance of God’s Son into the world, we are assured that God’s condemnation of Adam has been lifted from humankind. As a result, there is no actual abyss between ourselves and the Divine. The only abyss that exists is the one in our own minds, the one we hang on to. This means that we are now free to plunge into unitive states or to hold back. To enter into God’s embrace, or to hold ourselves apart as separate egos. Free choice – God’s ultimate gift to humanity – is restored to us once again.
It’s important to note in all of this that the salvation given by Jesus is free. Nothing is required of us. We don’t have to believe in a certain way. We don’t have to perform propitiating rituals. As a result, that often–asked question, “Have you been saved?” turns out to be simply ridiculous. Of course, you have been saved! And it doesn’t require anything of you. It doesn’t even require that you adhere to the Christian faith. The Son of God, in his infinite generosity, has destroyed that felt sense of separation from God that we have. The hidden gift here is that we are now free to heal all of the other separations we experience – the separations from each other, and the separations within our own psyche. Now we are free – truly free – to enter into union.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
15: Stages of Spiritual Growth – Part II
Edition #15: Inside the Invisible
Last week, we started our examination of the stages of spiritual growth as they are described by all of the world’s major religions. In effect, collating that massive amount of data gives us a map of the territory ahead. And I have always found it easier to get to where I want to go if I have a map. How about you?
We started last week by looking at the first two steps of the Way: faith formation and the necessary behavioral changes for traveling the Way. Today, we will start with the third step, learning to concentrate our attention, since our attention is the fundamental tool necessary for this journey.
We have a structural problem that is largely invisible to most. The primary tool that we have for the spiritual journey is our attention. While we think that we can control our attention, very, very few of us actually can. Instead, our attention chases after this and that, and everything under the sun. If, by chance, we have a moment's calm, our ego will make up stuff for our attention to go chase. You see, the ego understands that it is under assault when we begin to walk the spiritual path. It understands this far better than we do, because at this stage in the journey, our ego is the primary obstacle to union with God. And our ego is a fierce opponent!
So, to make progress, we need to learn how to maintain a constant and focused attention on a single subject. When we begin, it makes virtually no difference what that subject might be. It could be something spiritual, like the image of a cross; it could be something mundane, like a small stone. (In actual fact, the small stone might be better as a meditation object because you are unlikely to make up ideas about that stone, where you will undoubtedly start making up ideas about the cross.)
It’s like learning to lift weights: it doesn’t matter if you start with a fancy, expensive set of barbells or if you start lifting with a soup can. The package the weights come in makes no ultimate difference to your success or failure. What matters is that you keep your focus on lifting, and gradually lift more and more weight.
You see, the moment you sit in meditation, your ego-driven mind starts racing around to distract you. The funny part about all of this is that we think we are in control of our mind. This is manifestly not true! Let me demonstrate. If you were actually in control of your mind, when you tell it to “Stop!” it should stop, right? So go ahead and try stopping your mind. Try stopping the ceaseless flow of ideas. It doesn’t work, does it? This is pretty clear evidence that we do not control our minds. Instead, our mind, driven by our tiny ego, actually controls us.
More than that, our ego actively fights us when we start aiming our attention towards the Divine. Think of it this way – when you start on the spiritual journey, you are actually engaging in combat. Our foe is that invisible entity we call the ego. This ego constantly generates content for us – content that we label ‘ideas.’ We think these ideas are important, but how many of them over the course of the average day actually are important? I can’t speak for you, but very few of my ideas have much importance at all. What is more, many of these ideas are rather nasty. We criticize everybody under the sun, including ourselves. As a result, our ego typically creates a rather negative environment for us, and because this environment is rarely looked at, we take it for granted. It’s as if our ego actually hates us.
And look at what happens with our thoughts. Because they are “my” thoughts, they become precious, valuable beyond measure. If you doubt this, just listen to the current political debates going on around us. People take sides, often with little understanding of the issues, and then they fight to the death to prove their side is right. Reason often disappears in these debates, and all manner of foolishness is put forward in support of “my” position. And why is this position so important and valuable? Because it is mine!
When you draw back a little and watch this kaleidoscope of shifting content in our minds, you realize that ‘you’ – your self – are not in control of this. We stream a constant blather of random comments and observations in our heads, but we have very little to do with its generation, content, or cessation. While we have identified with the content flowing through our awareness, we actually have no real control over it. We can’t even get it to stop.
Once you realize this, you start withdrawing from this ceaseless, nonsensical ego-generated content. You start to notice the context of this content – the field in which this content appears and dances around for us. In other words, you start paying attention to the larger Self, not the ego-self. Our spiritual development, then, consists of learning how to pay attention to this wider field, and this is where focused attention comes in.
The more we learn to live in the field of the Self, the deeper and farther we go spiritually. However, our intention to live in the Presence is not unopposed. Our egos give fierce battle to our intentions. “Look at that bright shiny object! OMG, there it goes again!!” Over and over again, our ego throws up powerful seductions to pull our attention away from our quest. And if this content doesn’t pull you away, then the ego generates another seductive bit to grab your attention.
Rather than focus on the content of the mind, it is far more fascinating to look at the process that lurks invisibly behind all of these seductions. To move forward spiritually, we need to shift our focus from content to observing the process that underlies all of the content. The best metaphor for this is the movies. When we watch a movie, we see the flickering images on a silver screen. We are so captivated by the images that we fail to see the screen on which they are projected. We focus on the shifting patterns on the screen, but fail to see the actual object itself, which is the screen.
That’s all for this week. Next week, we will continue to explore the stages of spiritual growth. As I said last week, I am also working on a new focus for meditation that is extraordinarily powerful. So stay tuned in the coming weeks. There is some great stuff in the works…
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
14: Stages of Spiritual Growth – Part I
Edition #14: Inside the Invisible
Over the last several months, we have been focused on some of the rudiments necessary for a truly spiritual life. We have introduced a number of concepts which were, no doubt, rather a surprise to you. If you were raised Christian, you probably learned that Satan was the enemy. How strange it must have been to hear that our own egos, that Desire–Beast within us, was the true enemy. And yet, even that Me–Me–Me part of us was created by God as the motive force that can carry us closer to God. At least, it can carry us for a time. But then, like all tools, it outlives its usefulness and needs to be discarded. We have talked most recently about how to measure spiritual progress. That carried us into a radical understanding of the kind of changes that we need to make. It is no longer enough to tell the truth; now we must so identify with the truth that we become the Truth. This means developing an integrity of the highest order.
This seems like a perfect place to put a pause on our interior work so that we can look ahead and see the full scope of the spiritual journey. I’ve always found it easier to get somewhere new if I have a map. The same principle works in the spiritual life. If we have some idea of where we’re going, if we have a map of the ground ahead of us, it seems far more likely that we will achieve our goal of drawing closer to the Divine. So, let’s spend the next several weeks going over what lies ahead. Much of this material is covered in depth in my book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transformation. But for those of you who have not yet read the book, these next few weeks will give you an idea of the journey that is ahead of us.
Most of us start this journey lost in a wilderness of conflicting claims about God and confusion about who and what to believe. We are brought up with the understanding that chasing after our own desires is the sum total of human life. If we are lucky, there is someone in our lives who challenges this notion. Perhaps someone took you to a church, a temple, or a mosque when you were a child. Perhaps an exceptional teacher challenged you to look beyond your own needs and to consider the needs of others. However this happened for you; something changed in your outlook, and you began to consider that there was more to life than just taking care of your own needs.
As your outlook expanded, you began to develop a faith. ‘Faith’ is a churchy kind of word that is used to describe trust. You began to develop a growing trust that there was something greater than yourself. As this trust developed, you may have begun to sense a Presence – a Presence that was different in kind than anything else you have ever experienced.
Perhaps this sense of Presence came after you experienced a great loss. Perhaps it came through the love and kindness of someone in your life – a grandparent, a mentor, or your best friend's mom – you saw that there was more to our humanity than just following the dictates of our selfish egos. At that point, you really didn’t know what that Presence was, but you knew there was something more to this life. However, you came to this, you began your search, and step by step, you became open to those great but invisible truths that all point to the existence of God.
I find it fascinating that it is often a great tragedy or loss that brings us to this understanding. This is how it happened for me, many years ago. When I was in college, in my sophomore year, a dear friend of mine was killed in a car wreck. It was winter, and he spun out on a patch of black ice and collided with a tree. He died before the volunteer fire department could cut him free. This was my first encounter with a tragic death, and the pain of my loss turned my world inside out. That night, I couldn’t sleep. I wandered around the streets of our little town, raging inside, asking God why did Bert die. Why did you take this gentle and gifted man away from us in such a horrible way? Why? Why? Why?
I walked by a church and thought I might go in to pray. Of course, at two in the morning, the church door was locked. I thought of this as an apt kind of metaphor – that here is this remote and uncaring God doing terrible and arbitrary things to his creatures, and we are his helpless victims shut out from grace and love. I was in a terrible state, raging with a surprising force. And then, out of nowhere, the sky in front of me opened up.
Two winged angelic creatures took hold of the sky and parted it as if parting a theater curtain. In the space that was created, Bert appeared to me, head and shoulders, serene and gently smiling. (As I write this, tears fill my eyes as I remember seeing him again.) He spoke to me and said, “It’s okay, Ken. I’m in a much better place. You don’t have to grieve for me.” It was like I was suddenly seeing into that vast Presence, experiencing in my own flesh the love and kindness of the Divine. And then the angelic beings let go, and the curtain fell back into place. Everything was the same as it had been before – the night sky and the black tree branches against it. But for me, everything was completely altered. There was a certainty in Bert’s words to me, and with that certainty, my grief turned to joy. My loss was no less, but it was transformed. I had seen the Truth, and it was the complete opposite of what I thought had been true. God was not some uncaring and vicious monster, and my loss was only a tiny part of the full reality – the reality that I had just glimpsed.
I believe that I experienced a special grace in those moments. The depth of my pain and loss somehow transcended the abyss of death, and once again, I was able to see and be with my dear friend. But what do you do with an experience like this when you’re 19 years old? When your friends look at you strangely as you tell them the story?
This put me on the road, a road I’m still traveling. In a strange way, this experience allowed me to jump the stage of faith development. After this experience, I knew that God was real and that I was cared for and loved. I still didn’t know what to do with that, mind you! After all, I was just a 19-year-old kid. But it began my exploration in a very deep and serious way. It gave rise to questions like, What is the purpose of this life that we are leading? Perhaps more importantly, what is my purpose, and how can I realize the richness, the fullness, the gentleness that Bert showed me on that dark and gloomy night?
* * *
But my story takes us away from my purpose today – to talk about the stages of spiritual growth, from the very beginning to the end, which is a realization of the Presence of the Divine in everything we do and experience. What all of the great religions say comes next is behavior change. “If you wanna get to heaven, you’re gonna have to change,” to paraphrase the words of an old folk song.
When you compare the writings of the great spiritual teachers of all the major religions, they all agree that four behaviors must be changed if we are to be successful in our search for the Divine. They include: 1) no lying, 2) no stealing, 3) no sexual improprieties, and 4) no violence. At first, I didn’t understand why these four misbehaviors, out of all the possibilities open to human beings, were singled out. Further thought soon made it clear.
In each case, we engage in these behaviors to gratify our own selfish desires. Instead of working for the good of all, we engage in behaviors that result in the good for ME. Let’s go back to Newsletter #4 and review how this works. Let’s take stealing, for example. Imagine that someone points a gun at your chest and says, “Give me your money, or I will blow you away.” The thief is saying that, in effect, his needs are more important than yours. This is the essence of self-centeredness, isn’t it? “My needs are more important than you or your life.”
Me-me-me!
In effect, the thief has drawn an impenetrable boundary around himself of Me-first, and that boundary blocks him from uniting with God. How can you be on a spiritual path, which is God-centered, while refusing to center your life on the Divine? Clearly, the me–me–me part in all of us gets in the way and blocks our spiritual progress.
The same holds for the other behavioral changes that are necessary for a truly spiritual life. When we lie, we do so for self-centered reasons. Once again, our self-centeredness blocks our spiritual movement. Furthermore, since the Divine is often referred to as the Truth, it seems obvious that telling untruths is harmful to us spiritually. When we violate sexual norms, we do so for our own selfish gratification. When we adopt violence to solve our problems, again, we act out of extreme selfishness. In every case, we are choosing self-gratification over everything else.
Take a minute and reflect on the arc of your life with me. Much and perhaps most of our lives are spent gratifying our own desires. We rarely think about God, and we rarely pay attention to the needs of others around us. In truth, our selfish egos run our lives.
Let’s look at what that entails. We work hard in school to get a good job to make enough money to buy all the stuff that marketers say will make us happy. But does it? Does that new car make you happy for more than a moment or two? Or does it magically transform into the burden of monthly payments to the finance company, the car insurance company, and the auto repair guy? When you reflect on it, the ego’s dictates do not bring us happiness. Usually, following our selfish desires results in losing our freedom and finding ourselves in misery. Is this what you want from your life? Even more importantly, is this all there is?
Of course there is more, but with the constant barrage of others exhorting us to follow our own selfish needs, it is hard to discern those small, still voices echoing in our own hearts. You would not be here, reading this, if you had continued to ignore that whisper within. But you are here, and you are listening. Even more importantly, you want to be able to hear more. You want your heart to be more open to the ever-flowing love that flows from God and sustains you day after day.
So let us rejoice and be glad, for the Divine is always ready to welcome us home.
That’s all for this week. Next week, we will continue to explore the stages of spiritual growth. As I said last week, I am also working on a new focus for meditation that is extraordinarily powerful. So stay tuned in the coming weeks. There is some great stuff in the works…
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
13: Spiritual Transformation
Edition #13: Inside the Invisible
In my heart of hearts, I would like just one simple old-fashioned miracle – just one. And what would that miracle be, you might ask? Well, it would be the same miracle that you want too. We all would like the Divine to touch us and to completely transform us. We want to be made whole. We want that deep peace that flows so freely from God. And thiswanting defines our problem. If we look closely enough, it even shows us the way forward. The way to that spiritual transformation for which we all long.
Put bluntly, I want God to transform me. Here again, we see plainly the actions of our selfish ego. “I want this special spiritual goodie for myself.” I want–I want–I want! ME-ME-ME. The more we put our energy into our selfish wanting, the more we distance ourselves from our goal. To put it as clearly as possible, it is like we make a goal for ourselves and then turn our backs and run as far away from that goal as we possibly can.
Yes, we want to be holy. We want to be more open so that we can hear clearly what God is trying to teach us. But unless we conform our actions to our goal, we will never attain it. We have to do something different if we want to BE different.
* * *
Let me give you an example. This morning, as I was reading the news, I came across the story of a mailman who found a $10 bill lying in a driveway on his route. Rather than pocketing the money, he went to the home, rang the doorbell, but no one was home. He then wrote a note describing what happened, attached it to the $10 bill, and put it in his customer's mailbox.
This is a very ordinary story about a very extraordinary event. The postman in this story is clearly a man of extraordinary integrity. He is absolutely committed to honesty and right living. I suspect he no longer has to think about doing the right thing; he has transformed his being in such a way that he does the right thing automatically. He has become the INTEGRITY he has practiced. While outwardly he may look like an ordinary human being, on the inside, he is a spiritual giant.
This is the transformation that the great spiritual teachers have all pointed to. They tell us, in a myriad of ways appropriate to their time and culture, to BE the change we are seeking. If you look closely, you’ll discover a startling and fundamental difference between their understanding of reality and our conventional understanding. This difference is what keeps us from realizing our fundamental nature as children of the Divine.
You and I want God to magically transform us. The great spiritual teachers, on the other hand, invite us to transform ourselves. We resist hearing this, of course! But when you get right down to it, who are you going to trust? Are you going to continue to trust God’s power to do magic (which apparently hasn’t worked very well for you), or are you going to get off your butt and do the hard work of changing yourself?
As I write these words, I find myself giggling. I’m giggling at my own stubbornness and stupidity. I’m giggling at my stompy feet and my anger at God for not doing MY will. As if I were the king of kings, whose every wish must be fulfilled. What nonsense! And yet it’s the truth, isn’t it? We try to push off the hard work onto someone else – someone who doesn’t have the responsibility for doing the work. As a result, we push off our own transformation, and then we blame God for the lack of results.
In my talk last week, I spoke about adopting a Rule of Life. This involves adopting a clear precept and then conforming your life to that precept. I gave us an example, one of the four basic behaviors that are necessary for spiritual growth: don’t lie. A simple enough thing to talk about, but extremely difficult to put into practice.
The spiritual transformation we are seeking is a complete transformation. It’s not simply an outward transformation. It’s not like changing a suit of clothes so that you look different. Rather, it is a fundamental change in our being. It is the change from our self-centeredness to being other-centered. It is the change that happens when we truly love our neighbors as ourselves. It is the change that happens when we love God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, and with all of our mind.
As we draw nearer to God, we will find ourselves happier and more at peace. When we find ourselves in conflict, we will be able to look at others with much more understanding. This understanding is a result of compassion because we realize that others very rarely do the wrong thing on purpose. Rather, they are driven by past patterns, by injuries perhaps long forgotten, but injuries which still drive angry and hurt reactions. And why would this expanded understanding make us happy?
The answer is actually quite simple, but you might have to stretch your mind a little to understand it. Once again, let’s look at what the great spiritual teachers have to say about this. For example, one of the Muslim names for God is the Real. Many of the great saints talk about the Divine as the Truth. Jesus, for example, says that he is the Truth. Of note, he goes on to say he is also the Way and the Life. While this is often interpreted as Jesus saying he is the only way, I think it is far more likely that he is saying that this way of the Truth is also the path to total transformation and eternal life.
In other words, when our Me-Me-Me turns into Thee, then we will realize in our own flesh that wonderful spiritual transformation for which we all seek.
* * *
Let’s circle back to where we began today. We began by describing our selfish desire for God to magically transform us. As we explored the differences between our selfish desires and God’s plan for us, we made clear that our efforts to push our own responsibilities off onto God simply will not and cannot work. As you work to integrate these ideas into your own life, you will find that developing a purity of intention is critical to your success.
It’s hard to talk about this purity because there is so little support for this understanding in our culture today. Everything is organized around the gratification of our selfish desires, and very few talk about anything deeper. As I search my own experience, one of the few places that focused on purity and taking responsibility for oneself was the Boy Scouts. All Scouts had to memorize the Scout Oath, which is:
“On my honor, I will do my best:
To do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.”
Notice that there is nothing wishy-washy about this formulation. There is a straightforward commitment to do one’s best at all times. To do one’s best, one must first BE one’s best. This is the kind of commitment that is required to walk the spiritual Way. This is what is required of each one of us. It makes no difference at all that we fail from time to time. Of course, we fail! Clearly, we are in the process of transformation. Just as clearly, we have not arrived at the completion of that transformation. We are still a work in progress, and we are all in need of all the help we can get. So let us pray for one another – for those within our Invisible community, and for all of those around us who are searching desperately for the Truth.
* * *
That’s all for this week. Next week, we will start exploring the stages of spiritual growth as described by the mystics of the six major world religions. I am also working on a new focus for meditation that is extraordinarily powerful. So stay tuned in the coming weeks. We have some great stuff in the works…
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
12: How To Measure Your Spiritual Progress
Edition #12: Inside the Invisible
We are all here because we want to make progress in our spiritual lives. We want to open ourselves to that Magnificence which we call God, and we want to experience that profound peace – that marvelous ‘settledness’ and comfort that only God can provide. So, how do we know if we are making progress? Maybe what we think is a deepening of our spiritual life is really just another illusion, thrown up by our always–inventive egos. To keep ourselves from diving too deeply into dead ends, it seems vital that we develop some method of discernment. So that is our task for this week.
Every generation of spiritual seekers has to figure out some way of measuring what they are doing. As a result, each of the major religions has had to come up with a solution. Within the Christian church, this solution was first developed for clergy and then for those who took on monastic vows. Most people are familiar with the notion of a rule of life when it’s applied to Catholic clergy. Before a man is ordained a priest in the Catholic Church, he commits to a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. These three vows become the standard against which he measures his spiritual progress.
Now, please understand me. I am not suggesting that you adopt these three vows. They are extremely difficult to follow, and failure here often results in a great deal of shame and guilt, emotions that damage us spiritually. Furthermore, we don’t need to maintain an ecclesiastical structure to evaluate our own spiritual progress, so these particular vows are unnecessary for us. That being said, adopting an explicit rule of life does give us a yardstick to evaluate our spiritual progress.
I would like to suggest several possible rules that will enable you to evaluate your own progress. These rules are adapted from Buddhism, and they revolve around the practice of generosity, ethical discipline, and patience. These three areas are familiar to every spiritual seeker, for each of the major religions emphasizes these practices, each in its own way. They are part of the common spiritual heritage shared by all humanity. Let’s look at each of these in turn and explore how we can use them as tools to measure our own progress.
Generosity.
Generosity is the practice of giving freely to others, without expectation of return. This includes sharing material things such as money, clothing, and the like. It also includes sharing knowledge and offering protection.
We have a great example of the principle of generosity in the story of the Good Samaritan in the Christian scriptures. In this story, a Jew is badly beaten, robbed, and left for dead by the side of the road. The people one would expect to help this poor man, fellow Jews and clergy, passed him by without helping. His enemy, a man from Samaria, not only stops and helps but also transports him to an inn and pays for his medical care. Clearly, the Samaritan is engaged in the deeply spiritual practice of generosity, giving both his time and his money, and offering profound protection.
I strongly suspect that this Samaritan had turned the spiritual principle of generosity into a rule that he used to guide his life. It probably went something like this: whenever I see someone in dire need, I will do my best to help them. Let’s look at what this entails. First, it entails putting our own needs to the side. This involves making someone else’s needs more important than our own. It is, in effect, a direct assault on our ego. It is us saying, “There is something more important than gratifying the Me-Me-Me voice in our own heads.”
The spiritual effect of this is an opening of our hearts. This opening allows the love of God to pour into us and to transform us.
Many of us witness or practice this generosity in our daily lives. You see it when a mother picks up a crying child and soothes him. You see it when a father takes on an extra job in order to provide money for his daughter’s education. In both cases, the parent puts aside their ego-driven selfishness in order to care for someone in need. Yet, because there is no clearly articulated rule of life here, these profoundly spiritual acts go unnoticed, both by those who engage in them and those who observe them. Adopting an explicit rule helps us first to see what is happening around us, and then to use these data to evaluate our spiritual growth.
So, how might you adopt generosity as a rule for your own life? First, avoid “heroic” gestures! You know, things like giving all your money to the poor and that sort of nonsense. These kinds of gestures are almost always ego-driven, so instead of diminishing our egocentrism, they actually reinforce it.
So start small. Look for some small way that you can be generous towards others. Perhaps, on Monday mornings, you might get coffee for the people you work with. Perhaps you might volunteer to do the cooking or the dishes. The actual action doesn’t matter so much as your intention, your open heart, and your doing this action on a regular basis.
Let’s talk about that last part a bit. When you do something on a regular basis, sometimes you are in a good mood and sometimes you feel grumpy. If you only get your workmates coffee when you’re feeling good, you are probably not making much spiritual progress. It’s when you feel grumpy – when you really don’t want to do it but you do it anyway and you use the occasion to deliberately open your heart – that’s when real spiritual progress starts to accrue. That’s when you confront your fiercely self-centered ego. It goes something like this: first, you open your heart to serve someone else, and then that heart-opening allows you to be more open to the love that God always and faithfully pours into us.
The purpose of adopting a rule of life is to confront your self-serving ego. It is our egos, remember, that block us from fully enjoying God’s Presence and Love.
Ethical Action
All the major religions of the world state that four behaviors will hinder our spiritual progress. These include lying, stealing, sexual improprieties, and violence. This means that, if we are to make spiritual progress, we need to clean up our lives and eliminate these behaviors. The sad thing is, while we give lip service to these ethical precepts, we rarely change our behavior.
Let’s take lying as an example. It is a rare person who believes that lying is acceptable, and it is equally rare to find someone who lives by this principle. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we lie all the time. We lie to protect ourselves, and we lie to protect the feelings of others. In almost every case, our lying is the result of our ego's need to “look good.”
Ahhhh… Here it is again – that self-centered ego furiously shouting “Me–Me–Me!” It keeps popping up – again, and again, and again, doesn’t it! It’s important to recognize that the ego is not inherently bad or sinful or wrong. It is a tool that the Divine has created and used for our survival. But, like all tools, it has a limited application, and we need to learn to discard it when it has outlived its usefulness. While the ego can keep us alive in this world, it is simply an obstacle to our spiritual progress.
So, how can we use these four ethical precepts to construct a rule of life? As always, it’s best to start small. Pick one of these precepts – lying, for example – and fashion it into a rule for yourself. For example, you might decide to stop your own white lies. No matter the situation, you might decide that you will always tell the truth unless someone’s life is at stake. Then comes the hard part…
To be successful with a rule of life, two things are necessary: truthfulness and humility. To be successful, you need to discern between truth and falsehood. And then, even when it is difficult or painful for you, you must stick to the truth. This is where humility comes in. We need to acknowledge when we break our own rule. We all would prefer to see ourselves as perfect, but none of us is even close. So if we're to make spiritual progress, we have to be real with ourselves. We have to acknowledge when we are at fault and not try to make excuses or “pretty up” the mistake. It is here that we directly confront our ego, our self-centeredness. It is here that we say that God is more important to us than our own self-serving ways. In doing so, we create an opening for God’s love.
* * *
This is pretty heavy stuff, isn’t it? I don’t know if reading about this is difficult for you, but writing it certainly is difficult for me, so I’m going to stop now. The things we are talking about now are the difficult part of the spiritual path. It’s hard to look at what’s required if we are to make progress. It’s even harder for me to
acknowledge my shortcomings publicly as I struggle to share this with you. So let us hold each other in prayer this week, trusting that God is working his will in our hearts. Trusting that the Divine is working even harder than we are to bring us to our true Home.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇
11:The Nature of the Mind: Part III The Function and Importance of Humility
Edition #11: Inside the Invisible
I hope you had some fun with your ego this past week. I find it amusing to push back against its demands from time to time. It has ruled us too long without ever being questioned. I recall a political button on the coat of Alosha, my Russian translator on my 1992 trip to Moscow. It said, “Question Authority!” I was shocked and amazed at his courage back then. The more I reflected on it, the more I have come to understand the importance of pushing back, especially against those unseen forces that are pushing at us and shaping our behavior. There are many kinds of oppression, but the oppression of the unchecked ego is perhaps the most significant I have experienced.
So how can we start pushing back when we feel the demands of our egos insisting that we do this or that? The answer is found in the spiritual literature of all of the major religions. Universally they state that humility is the key to spiritual freedom.
Humility! I can’t think of a single word that is more contrary to the American understanding of “the good life” than humility. Humility is simply not a word that is used in polite conversation. How could it possibly be essential to the spiritual life?
Of course, it only takes a moment’s reflection to see how humility is the exact antidote to the ego's excesses. The ego says, “Me–me–me. I am the center of the universe, and it is MY will that must be obeyed.” The ego whispers to us, “You won’t be successful/acceptable/loved unless you follow my directions.” What we saw in our time together last week was that following the ego’s directions will ultimately lead us to a state of complete isolation. The seduction that drives our egos is the belief that our ego boundaries can protect us from hurt. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. The ego can do many things, but it cannot protect us from being hurt.
So then, what is humility? The best definition that I found in all of my years of searching is the one given by the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing. He said that humility “is… A true knowing and feeling of a man’s self as he is. Any man who truly sees and feels himself as he is must surely be humble indeed.”
To see ourselves as we truly are – that’s quite a tall order, isn’t it? It’s far more common that we see ourselves as we imagine ourselves to be. I, for example, am six feet tall, with a full head of hair, and of course, I’m irresistibly handsome, not to mention incredibly intelligent, blah blah blah. You know this BS well because you have your own version, don’t you?
The world that each of us inhabits appears to be centered around ourselves. From my perspective, you – my readers – exist because you are breathlessly anticipating your next newsletter from me. From your perspective, however, I am, at best, an interesting adjunct to you because, in your world, you are the center of the universe. The truth is, neither of us is the center. In actual fact, there are approximately eight billion of us competing for the center position. Pretty crazy, isn’t it!
When we zoom out and see ourselves from the perspective of everyone else in the world, our presumptions are laughable. Here we are, each competing to be the center of the universe! The sad truth is that none of us are this center. And yet, paradoxically, we carry the true center within each of us. To discover this deeper truth, we need to let go of our presumptions and experience what actually is. We need to experience Reality – the reality that the Divine makes its home in the hearts of each of us.
This brings us to the heart of humility. It involves our letting go of the position we aspire to. It involves accepting our natural limitations and living within those limitations. To do otherwise is an attempt to assume God’s position. Who really is at the center of the universe? It’s not you. It’s not me. It is the Divine. And the major obstacle to our realizing and experiencing this divinity within ourselves is our assumption that we are more than what we truly are.
So, you might ask, why don’t we just let go of this silly assumption? It clearly doesn’t work. So what’s the payoff?
When I let go, when I stop trying to control everything around me, my first experience is one of fear. I am afraid of what will happen if I let go. I’m afraid I won’t be good enough, and everyone in my life will reject me. I am afraid that I will be alone. As a result, I use my ego to put up walls to protect myself from the possibility of this happening.
Paradoxically, the more I put up my walls, the more I am alone. Those who are totally self-centered, those sad people who are consumed by their narcissism, are, in fact, totally alone. Their self-centeredness drives others away. The deep sadness here is that they cannot see they are doing this to themselves. They are creating for themselves the outcome they fear the most.
If we can get over our initial fear – and that’s a big if – what happens next is a feeling of openness. We open ourselves to all that is. In effect we are opening ourselves to the actual reality that we are one small part of humanity. By opening ourselves to what is, we have opened ourselves to Truth. Truth, when it’s used in this sense, is another word for God. It’s another word for Reality.
The limiting factor here is our fear. When we are afraid, we circle the wagons; we put up our boundaries, we hunker in the bunker, and we try to protect ourselves as best we can. So how can we overcome our fear? Ultimately, our fears are existential. We’re afraid that we will be overwhelmed and destroyed by our fears. So, we hang onto them, desperately.
In over 50 years of counseling people, I have yet to see psychology or any of the social sciences provide a clear remedy for this existential fear. I do, however, find a clear remedy in the holy Scriptures of all faiths. In Christianity, the religion most familiar to many of my readers, we find “Perfect love casts out fear” (1John 4.18). In Hinduism, Krishna tells Arjuna, “Simply surrender unto me. I shall deliver you from all sinful reactions. Do not fear.” (Bhagavad Gita 2.3, 18.66). In Buddhism, in the Dhammapada (1.5), we hear, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal law.” I could continue with other citations on this topic, but I’m sure you get the idea.
Our egotism is ultimately a spiritual problem. As a result, it can only be solved by a spiritual means. To make spiritual progress, we have to let go of our fears. That means we need to separate ourselves from our egos and our ego-driven desires. Clearly, we cannot do this by ourselves. Our egos are not going to let go of us voluntarily. That would be a kind of self–suicide.
Thankfully, we have a marvelous ally in this struggle. God is on our side. If we can let go just a little bit, if we can acknowledge ourselves for what we are, if we can be humble, then the spiritual power that is God has an opening. In this opening, God’s perfect love takes hold like a little seed. That seed, if nourished with just a bit of water and sunshine, will grow and crack open that rock, no matter how large, no matter how solid, no matter how tough that rock might be.
This is the importance of humility.
Humility is founded on an honest and balanced perception of yourself. A humble person recognizes both their strengths and their weaknesses. Many in our culture think that humility is about the avoidance of arrogance and that certainly is part of the equation. The other part is avoiding false modesty, that position of falsely deprecating oneself. Humility involves an openness to taking responsibility for your mistakes, and a willingness to learn from them. With humility, you recognize that we are all equal as human beings.
There are many obstacles to the cultivation of humility. First and foremost, our egos keep taking the false position that we are the center of the universe. When you realize that 8 billion other human beings are vying for this position, you realize it’s absurdity. Other obstacles include the fear of appearing weak, a sense of personal insecurity, and low self-esteem. Often times our outward achievements and visible success push us towards arrogance. People who are emotionally defensive focus first on protecting the ego and this militates against humility.
All of these obstacles can be overcome with honest self-reflection. It also helps if you have a circle of friends and colleagues around you who feel free to challenge your self-centered assumptions. Two other practices are also helpful in cultivating a profound sense of humility. First, when you find opportunities to serve others, you’ll find that, as they become more and more important to you, your own self-importance seems to diminish. The other practice that is helpful in this regard is the cultivation of gratitude. We are each the recipient of countless gifts and blessings from the people around us. As we open ourselves to others, both through service and through gratitude, it is we ourselves who experience the most profound blessings.
All of this comes about as we open our hearts: to God, and to the people around us. Our heart opening results in a profound acceptance. This is not only an acceptance of others and their needs and concerns. More profoundly, it is an opening and acceptance of our own needs. Only as we become aware of our deepest needs will we be motivated to turn to God. The most stable and solid motivation for the spiritual journey is the one based on our own loneliness, our own desire for the deep, deep love that only the Divine can provide.
* * *
Well, that’s enough for this week. I want to encourage you to continue observing your self-centeredness. I don’t mean for this to be some kind of exercise in beating yourself up. Instead, just observe yourself as you truly are. With any kind of honesty at all, humility is the natural result of this kind of self-reflection. As always, please keep up your meditation practice. I look forward to engaging with you again next week.
With love,
P.S. Several of you have expressed the desire for an online meditation class. If there is enough interest, I will try to figure out how to hold a group class on the web. If you have an interest, please write me at ken123Kaisch@gmail.com.
Humility as a Tool → Letting go → Fear → Openness → Acceptance & Growth
If you are finding this newsletter course helpful, you may want to consider Dr. Kaisch's latest book, Inside the Invisible: The Universal Path to Spiritual Transcendence.👇