Humility and Christian Yoga
Even among the saints he has the air of a sort of eccentric, if one may use the word of one whose eccentricity consisted in always turning towards the centre.
I have had a recurring dream for many years, and I recently told my brother Anthony about it.
I have to play a football game, and it is about to start. As I approach the field, my shoulder pads go missing, or sometimes it's my helmet, sometimes my cleats. I go off to the sideline, and then much further, looking for the missing piece of equipment. The game begins without me, and, whatever it is I’m looking for, I never find it.
“Just walk on the field,” he told me. I’m surprised and impressed. This is the exact same advice a therapist told me a couple of years ago, and it works, at least whenever I can remember to do so. The missing shoulder pads or helmet will reappear as I walk on the field. I’m able to play the game again with my friends and follow the lead of my coaches.
I told him this, and asked how he knew. “The helmet disappears because you do not want to play the game,” he told me. “The moment you do want to play the game, it will reappear. You are making up reasons not to play the game, and this is signified by the missing helmet.”
“Does real life work like this too?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. Then he took a bite of his breakfast sandwich.
“You go on so many side quests,” my friend said to me.
“The side quests are the main quests,” I told him, incorrectly.
Each of the above deals with divinely ordained vs arbitrary actions (i.e., God’s will vs. self-will). God’s will is found in turning to the centre, in playing the game. Arbitrary or self-will emerges when I lose my shoulder pads or seek other reasons or (easily justifiable but ultimately misleading) rationale to not play the game, to turn away from the centre.
Only recently have I been able to discern the centre and the periphery.
An excerpt from GK Chesterton’s biography of St. Francis:
When he and secular companions carried their pageant of poetry through the town, they called themselves Troubadours (i.e. Poets of Love). But when he and his spiritual companions came out to do their spiritual work in the world, they were called by their leader the Joungleurs de Dieu (i.e., Jugglers of God).
The particular point to be noted here is not concerned so much with the word Troubadour as with the word Jongleur. It is especially concerned with the transition from one to the other; and for this it is necessary to grasp another detail about the poets of the Gay Science (i.e., the Troubadours). A jongleur was not the same thing as a troubadour, even if the same man were both a troubadour and a jongleur. More often, I believe, they were separate men as well as separate trades. In many cases apparently the two men would walk the world together like companions in arms, of rather companions in arts. The jongleur was properly a joculator or jester; sometimes he was what we should call a juggler… Sometimes he may have been even a tumbler; like that acrobat in the beautiful legend who was called “The Tumbler of Our Lady,” because he turned head over heels and stood on his head before the image of the Blessed Virgin, for which he was nobly thanked and comforted by her and the whole company of heaven. In the ordinary way, we may imagine, the troubadours would exalt the company with earnest and solemn strains of love and then the jongleur would do his turn as a sort of comic relief… If there is one place where the true Franciscan spirit can be found outside the true Franciscan story, it is in that tale of the Tumbler of Our Lady. And when St. Francis called his followers the Jongleurs de Dieu, he meant something very like the Tumblers of Our Lady.
Somewhere in the transition from the ambition of the Troubadour to the antics of the Tumbler is hidden, as under a parable, the truth of St. Francis. Of the two minstrels or entertainers, the jester was presumably the servant or at least the secondary figure. St. Francis really meant what he said when he said he found the secret of life in being the servant or secondary figure. There was to be found ultimately in such service a freedom almost amounting to frivolity. It was comparable to the condition of the jongleur because it almost amounted to frivolity. The jester could be free when the knight was rigid; and it was possible to be a jester in the service which is perfect freedom. This parallel of the two poets or minstrels is perhaps the best preliminary and external statement if the Franciscan change of heart.
Francis, at the time or sometime about the time when he disappeared into the prison or dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind; which was really like the reversal of a complete somersault, in that by coming full circle it came back, or apparently came back, to the same normal posture… The man who went in the cave was not the man who came out again; in the same sense he was almost as different as if he were dead, as if he were a ghost or a blessed spirit. And the effects of this on his attitude toward the actual world were really as extravagant as any parallel can make them. He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands.
If we apply this parable of Our Lady’s Tumbler to the case, we shall come very near to the point of it. Now it really is a fact that any such scene as a landscape can sometimes be more clearly and freshly seen if it is seen upside down… Thus, that inverted vision, so much brighter and quainter and arresting, does bear a certain resemblance to the world which a mystic like St. Francis sees every day. But herein is the essential part of the parable. Our Lady’s Tumbler did not stand on his head in order to see flowers and trees as a clearer or quainter vision. He did not do so; and it would never have occurred to him to do so. Our Lady’s Tumbler stood on his head to please Our Lady.
Recently, I was walking home after meeting up with some friends in Georgetown. As I passed many strangers on the street, it dawned on me that I was actually equal in status, not better or worse, than all of them. I actually felt, not just understood intellectually, that all of humanity was on equal footing. It was understood in my body, not just my mind.
Finally, finally(!) my root and my crown centers opened simultaneously. I was actually grounded. I think this was true for the first time in my life. It was the best I had ever felt.
An excerpt from Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism:
Dear Unknown Friend,
As set forth in the preceding Letter, the Magician is the arcanum of intellectual geniality and cordiality, the arcanum of true spontaneity. Concertation without effort and the perception of correspondences in accordance with the law of analogy are the principal implications of this arcanum of spiritual fecundity. It is the arcunum of the pure act of intelligence. But the pure act is like fire or wind; it appears and disappears, and when exhausted it gives way to another act.
Geniality – the quality of having a friendly and cheerful manner.
Cordiality – sincere affect and kindness.
Fecundity – a measure of the number of offspring produced by an organism over time.
The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whiter it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (John iii, 8)
The pure act in itself cannot be grasped; it is only its reflection which renders it perceptible, comparable and understandable or, in other words, it is by virtue of the reflection that we become conscious of it. The reflection of the pure act produces an inner representation, which becomes retained by the memory; memory becomes the source of communication by means of the spoken word; and the communicated word becomes fixed by means of writing, by producing the “book”.
The second Arcanum, the High Priestess, is that of the reflection of the pur act of the first Arcanum up to the point where it becomes “book”. It shows us how Fire and Wind become Science and Book. Or, in other words, how “Wisdom builds her house”.
As we have pointed out, one becomes conscious of the pure act of intelligence only by means of its reflection. We require an inner mirror in order to be conscious the pure act or to know “whence it comes or whither it goes”. The breath of the Spirt – or the pure act of intelligence – is certainly an event, but it does not suffice itself alone, for us to become conscious of it. Con-sciousness (con-science) is the result of two principles – the active, activating principle and the passive, reflecting principle. In order to know from where the breath of the Spirit comes and where it goes, water is required to reflect it. This is why the conversation of the Master with Nicodemus, to which we referred, enunciates the absolute condition for the conscious experience of the Divine Spirit – or the Kingdom of God:
Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of the Water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God. (John iii, 5)
“Truly, truly”-the master refers here twice to “truth” in this mantric (i.e. magical) formula of the reality of con-sciousness. By these words he states that full consciousness of the truth is the result of “inbreathed” truth and reflected truth. Reintegrated consciousness, which is the Kingdom of God, presupposes two renovations, of a significance comparable to birth, in the two constituent elements of consciousness – active Spirit and reflecting Water. Spirit must become divine Breath in place of arbitrary, personal activity, and Water must become a perfect mirror of the divine Breath instead of being agitated by disturbances of the imagination, passions and personal desires. Reintegrated consciousness must be born of Water and Spirit, after Water has once again become Virginal and Spirit has once again become divine Breath or the Holy Spirit. Reintegrated consciousness therefore becomes born within the human soul in a way analogous to the birth or historical incarnation of the WORD:
Et incarnatus est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine. (by the power of the Holy Spirirt the Word became incarnate from the Virgin Mary).
The re-birth from Water and Spirit which the Master indicates to Nicodemus is the re-establishment of the state of consciousness prior to the Fall, where Spirit was divine Breath and where this Breath was reflected by virginal Nature. This is Christian Yoga. Its aim is not “radical delivaerance” (mukti), i.e. the state of consciousness without breath and without reflection, but rather “baptism from Water and the Spirit”, which is the complete and perfect response to divine action. These two kinds of baptism bring about the reintegration of the two constituent elements of consciousness as such – the active element and the passive element. There is no consciousness without these elements, and the suppression of this duality by means of a practical method such as that inspird by the ideal of unity (advaita – non-duality) must necessarily lead to the extinction not of being but rather of consciousness. Then this would not be a new birth of consciousness but rather its return to the pre-natal embryonic cosmic state.
Again, from MOTT:
Yet what is the full significance of the adoption of the primacy of being, instead of that of good, or according to St. John, that of love?
The idea of being is neutral from the point of view of the moral life. There is no need to have the experience of the good and the beautiful in order to arrive at it. The experience solely of the mineral realm already suffices to arrive at the morally neutral idea of being. For the mineral is. For this reason the idea of being is objective, i.e. it postulates, in the last analysis, the thing underlying everything, the permanent substance behind all phenomena.
I invite you, dear Unknown Friend, to close your eyes and to render an exact account of the image which accompanies this idea in your mental imagination. Do you not find the vague image of a substance without color or form, very similar to water in the sea?
Whatever your subjective representation of being as such, the idea of being is morally indifferent and is, consequently, essentially naturalistic. It implies something passive, i.e. a given or an unalterable fact. In contrast, when you think of love in the Johannine sense or of the Platonic idea of good, you find yourself facing an essential activity, which is in no way neutral from the point of moral life, but which is the heart itself. And the image which accompanies this notion of pure actuality would be that of fire or of the sun (Plato compared the idea of good to the sun, and its light to truth), in place of the image of an indefinite fluid substance.
Thales and Heraclitus have two different conceptions. The one sees in water the essence of things and the other sees it in fire. But here, primarily, it is so that the idea of GOOD and its summit — LOVE — is due to the conception of the world as a moral process, whereas the idea of BEING and its summit — the God QUI EST — is due to the conception of the world as a fact of Nature. The idea of good (and of love) is essentially subjective. It is absolutely necessary to have had experience of psychic and spiritual life in order to be able to conceive of it, whilst — as we have already indicated — the idea of being, being essentially objective, presupposes only a certain degree of outward experience … of the mineral realm, for example.
The consequence of choosing between these two — I will not say “points of view”, but rather “attitudes of soul” — lies above all in the intrinsic nature of the experience of practical mysticism which consequently derives from this choice. He who chooses being will aspire to true being and who chooses love will aspire to love. For one only finds that for which he seeks. The seeker for true being will arrive at the experience of repose in being, and, as there cannot be two true beings (“the illegitimate twofoldness” of Saint-Martin) or two separate co-eternal substances but only one being and one substance, the centre of “false being” will be suppressed (“false being” = ahamkara, or the illusion of the separate existence of a separate substance of the “self”). The characteristic of this mystical way is that one loses the capacity to cry. An advanced pupil of yoga or Vedanta will for ever have dry eyes, whilst the masters of the Cabbala, according to the Zohar, cry much and often. Christian mysticism speaks also of the “gift of tears”—as a precious gift of divine grace. The Master cried in front of the tomb of Lazarus. Thus the outer characteristic of those who choose the other mystical way, that of the God of love, is that they have the “gift of tears”. This is in keeping with the very essence of their mystical experience. Their union with the Divine is not the absorption of their being by Divine Being, but rather the experience of the breath of Divine Love, the illumination by Divine Love, and the warmth of Divine Love. The soul which receives this undergoes such a miraculous experience that it cries. In this mystical experience fire meets with FIRE. Then nothing is extinguished in the human personality but, on the contrary, everything is set ablaze. This is the experience of “legitimate twofoldness” or the union of two separate substances in one sole essence. The substances remain separate as long as they are bereft of that which is the most precious in all existence: free alliance in love.
And further:
The distinction between substance and essence, between reality and the ideal, between being and love (or the idea of good), or between He who is and AIN-SOPH is also the key to the Gospel according to John:
“No one has even seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known. (John i, 18)
“No one has ever seen God”, i.e. no one has ever contemplated God face to face while maintaining his personality. For “to see” signifies “to perceive while being in the face of that which one perceives”. Before Jesus Christ there were, without doubt, numerous examples of the experience of God — being “seized by God” (experience of the prophets, being “immersed in God” (experience of the yogis and mystics in antiquity), or seeing the revelation of His work, the world (experience of the sages and philosophers in antiquity), but one ever saw God. For neither the inspiration of the prophets, nor the immersion in God of the mystics, nor the contemplation of God in the mirror of the creation by the sages is equivalent to the new experience of the “vision” of God — the “beatific vision” of Christian theology. For the “vision” takes place in the domain of essence transcending all substance; it is not a fusion, but an encounter in the domain of essence, in which the human personality (the consciousness of self) remains not only intact and without impediment, but also becomes “that which it is", i.e. becomes truly itself — such as the Thought of God has conceived it for all eternity. The words of St. John, when thought of in this way, render intelligible those of the Master in the Gospel of St. John:
“All who came before me are thieves and robbers”. (John x, 8)
There is a profound mystery in these words. Indeed, how may they be understood alongside numerous other sayings of the Master referring to Moses, David and other prophets, who were all before him?
Now, it is a matter here not of theft and robbery, but of the principle of initiation before and after Jesus Christ. The masters prior to His Coming taught the experience of God at the expense of personality, which has to be diminished when it was “seized” by God or “immersed” in God. In this sense — in the sense of the diminution or augmentation of the “talent of gold” entrusted to humanity, the personality, which is the “image and likeness of God” (Goethe: Das hochste Gut der Erdenkinder ist doch die personlichkeit. i.e., The highest treasure of the children of earth is surely the personality) the masters prior to Christ were “thieves and robbers”. They certainly bore testimony to God but the way which they taught and practiced was that of depersonalization, which made them witnesses (“martyrs”) of God. The greatness of Bhagavan, the Buddha, was the high degree of depersonalization which he attained. The masters of yoga are masters of depersonalization. The ancient philosophers — those who really lived as “philosophers” — practices depersonalization. This is the case above all with the Stoics.
And this is why all those who have chosen the way of depersonalization are unable to cry and why they have dry eyes for ever. For it is the personality which cries and which alone is capable of the "gift of tears”. “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (Matthew v, 4).
And finally:
According to the point of view of the operation of the work of salvation, one could summarize mankind’s spiritual history describing its stages from the first opening of the closed circle of the serpent to the advent and blossoming of the “reign of God” within this circle. The stages in question are, therefore, the opening of the closed circle, the path of exit and entrance through this door, and the Incarnation of the Word. The first stage, that of the opening of the closed circle, makes way for the entrance of faith into incarnated mankind; the second brings it hope; the third kindles love within it, which is the active presence of divine life at the heart of the circle of the serpent. All that mankind had been believing, had been hoping, has become reality in the present — this is the essence of the whole spiritual history of mankind in a single phrase.
But this summary comprises a world of events. it includes: the first awakening of memories of paradise in souls immersed in the darkness of the struggle for existence; the institution of worship (cult) to guard these memories and to protect them from being forgotten; the arising priests charged with this cult, and of seers and prophets who keep it alive and develop it; the arising of schools of individual effect aspiring to trans-cerebral experience; the glorious news that such endeavor is not in vain, that there is a path of exit; the teachings of the Buddhas, the masters of this path; the revelations of the Avatars, Rishis, great masters and “men of God” — demonstrating the reality of the path of entrance, manifestation and incarnation; the spiritual preparation in the whole world, and the real preparation in a chosen people — Israel — of the Incarnation prefigured by the incarnations and manifestations of Avatars and Boddhisattvas (on the path to “Buddhahood”); then the Incarnation itself, and lastly all that is implied in St. Paul’s words:
“Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of our religion: He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated in the Spirit, seen by Angels, preached among the nations, believed on in the world, and taken up in Glory.” (I Timothy iii, 16).
