ALL IS ONE

‘As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they be one in us … so they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one.’ That is Jesus, in John 17. 

 

You might think his language has nothing to do with ordinary life, but last weekend I was in Liverpool to see the Champions league final, and as psychiatrist Carl Jung described, it was a pool of Life, all life, one life. At one moment, towards the end of the game, I looked out of the window to see a one legged man in a wheelchair wearing a big red joke wig and a grin, fans waving red flares and air horns and flags, bouncing, singing and throwing beer, hen party women letting it all hang out, beggars drinking, and it struck me that in all this ordinary life only one life was being lived through all these lunatics, and I was one of them, of course.

That night, rules did not apply. Cars were driving through red lights and stopping at green, people were shouting from cars, and the next day three quarters of a million people welcomed the team and the European cup home, all pulling each other onto the top of buildings and road signs and traffic lights to get a view. The police were hopelessly outnumbered, but they didn’t mind, in that moment all of us were as One, one pool of life. But you don’t have to be a football fan to know oneness is more obvious as you move from the most important but most disconnected thing in the world, me, to wider concerns, friends, family, team, county, country, continent, cosmos.  Some people say religion is irrelevant to this truth of unity. For such people, here is a story. 

A man prayed “Lord, show me the truth.” The Lord said: “Yes but I am thirsty. Can you fetch some water first?” “I will,” replied the man, and he went. 

A little distance away was a village. He entered in search of water and knocked at a door, which was opened by a beautiful girl. At the sight of her the man forgot his Lord waiting at home for water. He forgot everything and began to talk. All day he did not return to his Lord. The next day he was again talking to the girl. The talk ripened into love. He asked the father for the daughter, and they were married and lived there and had children. Twelve years passed. His father-in-law died, he inherited property. He lived, as he thought anyway, a very happy life, with his work, his wife and his children.

But one night the river rose until it overflowed its banks and flooded the village. Houses fell, men and animals were swept away and drowned, and everything was floating in the rush of the stream. The man had to escape. With one hand he held his wife and with the other, two children. Another child was on his shoulders, and he was trying to cross this tremendous flood to get to safety. After a few steps he found the current too strong, and the child on his shoulders fell to be borne away. A cry of despair came from the man. In trying to save that child, he lost his grasp on the others, and they were lost too. At last, his wife, whom he clasped with all his might, was also torn away by the current. He was left weeping and wailing on the bank.

Behind him there came a gentle voice: “My child, I am still waiting for the water, and you have been gone for half an hour.” “Half an hour!” the man exclaimed. Twelve years had passed in his mind, and people had been born and died. This is the truth behind the unity of nature. As 2 Peter 3 says; “Dear Friends, with the Lord, a day is 1,000 years, and 1,000 years, is just a day.” So….

Even if you do have a good life, which many of us do not, nature, good as it is, makes slaves of us, the natural world swept away before eternity. Without God, we put patches on human nature until it is a hopeless ruin. Who has not felt this?  And yet, a voice inside tells us we are free, and that the truth shall make us free.  This is God’s voice.

Come unto me all that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, said Jesus. In the world you will have trouble, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world. This freedom is why there is struggle, difficulty, competition and cruelty in the natural world, because it is moving us on to freedom, that truth that we really are one with God, not just nature. And I don’t mean when we die.  As President Macron said the other day commemorating the D Day landings, whatever it takes we will stand together, because it is our common destiny.

So Jesus does not pray for us to be nice to each other, to get along, to eliminate difference, to agree a common plan, to be tolerant, to be unanimous, to have consensus, but to be one, just as he and the Father are also one. Jesus’ prayer that we be and live like God means we go beyond the most important thing in the world, me, my body mind and intellect, to friends, family, team, county, country, continent, cosmos, to the ultimate unity in our own soul, boundless being, knowledge, love, oneness with God, so the finite and the infinite are one.

Then life is beyond mere birth and death. Life is not the opposite of birth or death, it transcends both. I was not born, I will not die, because, I am the soul, in God. Oneness means transcending the opposites of birth or death, good or evil, male or female; old or young, rich or poor; gay or straight; conservative or liberal; educated or uneducated; theist or atheist, Christian or Muslim; heaven or earth.  Anything less than eternal life is playing with opposites, like a man in Belfast in the 1970's who feels a gun at his head. A voice says; “Protestant or Catholic?” “Jew” he replies. “I must be the luckiest Arab in Belfast!” says a voice

Jesus, fully divine, fully human, invites us into the same sacramental presence embodied in the flesh of the physical word, which is a shadow of infinite light. Jesus’ prayer echoes the ancient Jewish prayer in Deuteronomy 6:4, Shema Yisrael, “Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD is one. That means nature is a unity behind whom is God and we are created in God’s image, who commands do not worship other Gods, which means there is One, and if we think our idea of God is better than someone else’s it isn’t God at all, it isn't One differentiated consciousness.

The differences and divisions, like us and them, Brexit, America first, the Indian Nationalist party, do not exist out there in the world, but in the human heart. We project fragments to see fragments. Jesus prayed instead we could be One.

Jesus knew Oneness is not eliminating difference but seeing that it is not separation. Jesus told us to Love God, Love neighbour, Love self, and Love enemy, because he knew the one Self we call God is manifested in nature as many personalities. The un-manifest God-likeness is oneness. There is only God. You don’t need to be persuaded to love someone who is also you. People who do not do this have not yet shed the veil of the senses, but it will happen.

In the meantime, they still believe separation is normal, which is what sin stands for.  Wholeness has to be fully realised because it is a practice of letting anything less fall away to reveal the whole which is still waiting for us. Jesus’ prayer that we are one as he is one with God is the very moment we meet the glory of God and know that it is us. So go on, in the name of one Truth, the Father, one Son, his Consciousness, and one Bliss, the Holy Spirit. +

Ascension to you

On April 12, 1961 Soviet spaceman Yuri Gagarin was the first man to enter outer space and orbit earth. It was claimed he said; “I don’t see God up here.” Later it was claimed Russian leader Khrushchev had said “Gagarin flew into space, but didn’t see God up there.”

Whichever it was, both misunderstand. Too often we speak and even live as if God and heaven is “up there” and “out there” not within and among us, which is what Christ came to show. If Gagarin had flown higher would he have seen God? No. John 1;18 says say no-one has ever seen God. 

So, a literal reading of the ascension might leave us looking up as they did in Acts 1;10, which says “Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking into the sky?” I don’t think anyone is waiting for an answer. The question suggests there is somewhere else to look, God in all things. 
 
If we think of heaven as a place, we do not have to be responsible for our own greatness. We are left with a gap between us and God, spirit and matter, heaven and earth.  Rather than looking up, ascension tells us to find Christ everywhere within by being present. 

In the 2018 film Christopher Robin Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin stand on a bridge chatting. Christopher Robin asks Pooh what he loves doing best. “Going to see you,” he replies. Christopher agrees but then says, “What I like doing best is nothing.” “Doing nothing often leads to the very best of something,” Pooh responds. They walk on to sit under a tree. 

Christopher Robin is growing up, and it’s soon time for him to go off to school. “I’m not going to do nothing anymore,” he tells Pooh. “Never?” Pooh asks. “Well, they don’t let you at the boarding school.” This sets up the story of a grown-up who has forgotten how to just be free. Christopher is focused on his work at a suitcase manufacturer, anxiously drilling a philosophy of achievement into his daughter as his boss does to him, reminding him “nothing comes from nothing,” the opposite of Pooh’s first statement on the bridge.
 
But if Christ, the mind and spirit who filled Jesus, has ascended to fill the whole creation, the greatest presence comes from nothing. Genesis portrays the uncreated God as creating the cosmos out of nothing. We are born in God too, the uncaused is an aspect of our being. Genesis says God created humankind in his image, so we are one with God. When we want what God wants, to manifest a communion of Love everywhere, we become like God too, so our work is to accept ourselves as images of God not separations from God.  So Jesus has not left us, he left us his mind. 

Let this mind be in you, which was in Christ Jesus says Philippians 2:5. Christ is all in all, says Colossians 3:11! The ascension is not our removal from earth but our liberation from time & space. But we live in a world in which up is portrayed as better up than down. Singers want to be at the top of the charts, athletes want to be on top of their game, students want to be at the top of the class. We would have an up day, not a down day. So something within us knows that we are more than earthbound creatures. 

Getting high not feeling low is not a comparison, a competition, or a judgment, it is not comparing our lives with other peoples, thinking that for us to ascend the other has to descend, but knowing, “the fullness who fills all in all.” Christ’s fulness is realised not by reaching up and grasping but by noticing what pulls us down and releasing it. 

That might be fear, desire, anger, sadness, resentment, a need to be right, jealous, proud, a perfectionist, an addict.  1 John 4 says whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not, does not. If this is so, there is nowhere to go, nothing to do but respond to the greatness we are in Christ. 
 
There is a story about a bird and a man who use a tree to escape a flood.  The bird stands for the creature in Christ, the man for someone relying only on his body mind and intellect, and the tree stands for the world, and the flood, for the heavy feelings that drown us, so we need to get above them. The bird and the man sit on the branch above them, above the flood, but the bird, the creature in Christ, knows that if it snaps, he will fly, while the man relying only on his own body mind and intellect knows, if it snaps, he will drown. They are both fully in this world, only the spiritual one knows he can rise above its weight.

So, as you begin to look at your life and honestly identify the places of gravity that prevent your experience of rising to heaven while on earth, know that the very things that hold you down point the way to your ascension. Our participation begins by seeing what it is we need to let go of to be able to be free, and no longer to be bound by our little body, mind and intellect. We are in it, not of it, we are risen and ascended, because the uncreated is inside us all.

FSHS +

Who has freewill?

In this interview, given me by Consultant Psychiatrist Dr Peter Fenwick, he questions Contemplative Rupert Spira, who describes Jesus’ kind of consciousness, cosmic consiousness. This isn't thinking, but the intimate awareness in which all thought feeling sensation and matter arises. The universe is made of this awareness so we could call this God, but it is as secular as it is religious. So go slowly with this one, it takes some considerable reflection........................

The contents of human consciousness have had a long evolution, so examination of the source of our personality, or therapy, is necessary. But we also need to be at one with the source of the universe.  Our personal awareness is too shallow for cosmic consciousness, which is to know our true nature is infinite, the divine from which finite fear desire and memory is made (2 Peter 1;4). 

If we only avoid the unpleasant and seek the pleasant, we are attached to fear and desire. Fear is desire to escape, rather than embrace all bodily experiences as temporary. In this insight Rupert “does not know a world out there,” just like Jesus who has “overcome the world.” (John 16;33). As Rupert says, “Awareness has no objective qualities.” Rupert “cannot separate himself as the aware knowing presence from perception,” like Jesus who said “the light of the body is the eye, and if your eye is single, your whole body is full of light.” This means the way we see is what we see, so Christian Desert Father and Mothers taught watchfulness of all thoughts and sensations, and more recently Quantum Physics suggests observation alters the physical world.

To this end Rupert says his experience of the world is “current perception,” like Jesus’ teaching not to be concerned with tomorrow but to let tomorrow be concerned with itself, or what we might call a psychological flow state, but one that can embrace fear and desire and know the spiritual. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” as the King James says (Matt 6;34). 

Jesus taught; “lose your life to find it” (Matt 16;25) and your “left hand not knowing what the right is doing” (Matt 6;3).  This egoless source of body/mind personality is a non-dual ground in which “my father sends rain on the good and evil” (Matt 5;45), or you "love your neighbour as yourself" (Mark 12;31) because your neighbour is yourself.  Rupert says; “There is no separate you to be advantaged, no choosing entity, thoughts just arise unbidden like the weather, and the same power that lifted my hand asked the question about who lifted it.” When Rupert talks of ego-less-ness, and of his teacher of ego-less-ness, Rupert's teacher is not Jesus, but a teacher of Advaita, or philosophical monism.  Nevertheless, Jesus teaches union of the soul with God. 

In the gospels, ‘Rabbouni’ is his name and his teaching is Contemplation, knowing you are a spiritual being having a human experience, that this life is in Eternal life, one-ness with all, a quality like birds and flowers who don’t toil, disciples who rejoice in insults, blessed by grief, light of the world, or, consciousness.  Biblically speaking, I am is the name of God. Rupert says “I am not a person, nor are you and nor is anybody, I am the awareness in which thoughts sensations and perceptions arise,” and this transpersonal awareness features throughout John’s gospel. It is “I am the vine and you are the branches” (John 15;5), and in the opening of Colossians, Ephesians, and 1 John, which say the whole universe is in ‘Christ’, the wisdom embodied in Jesus.

It’s for us temporary body/minds to know this living wisdom, despite apparent blocks caused by attachment to desire and self image. Jesus said; “I and my father are one, may they be one in us,” (John 17;21). When Rupert says; “The world as experienced is made out of our own being,” this is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17;28) This means you are birthless and deathless. “The bus the body and room are real as consciousness, not as matter or mind,” which produce fear and desire.  The time to realise this is now.  As Rupert says “eternity is ever present.” Jesus said “the Kingdom is at hand” (Matt 3;2) “the time is come” (John 4;23).

Desiring happiness is unhappiness

“Blessed are the peacemakers,” says Jesus in Monty Python’s film Life of Brian. Someone in the crowd says; “Cheesemakers? What’s so special about them?” Then someone else replies; “No, he must mean anyone working in the dairy industry.”

A modern-day sermon on happiness would sound more like; “Blessed are you with loads of stuff, the sexy, healthy, respected, popular, productive, growing richer.”

But all this just puts conditions on happiness, and God forbid it would mention God either, while Jesus’ teaching on real happiness, the beatitudes’, the blessedness-es, which Luke, focused on humility, calls sermon on the plain, and Matthew, focused on Moses, calls sermon on the mount,is about our unconditional happiness.

For this, you have to stop wanting anything less than the I am who never changes throughout all the conditions of our lives, the I am who is always here, the I am covered up by the conditions of the world, the body, and the mind, and give up, turn back, repent, surrender all, rest, in One I am.

If I confuse who I really am with I am 32, or I am 54, or I am 76, I am well thought of, or I am tired, I am searching, I am loved, I am lonely, I am scared, I am in an intimate relationship, I am in a special state of mind, I am feeling a substance in the body, all this is to mistake who I am for a passing state, a changing, and a forever fading away. Happiness peace and fulfilment are nothing to do with these.

Jesus said; “Blessed are you who are hungry now, you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, you will laugh,” because he is telling you to dis-identify with changes, and everything changes, it really does, even gender changes nowadays.

I heard Lord Chartres, former Bishop of London explain how at London School of Economics he heard someone advertise what sounded like G&T’S, and thought he would get Gin and Tonic, only to find the adverts for GNT’s, gender neutral toilets.

Jesus’ I am statements, like I am the bread of life, the true vine, the good shepherd, the way the truth and the life, mean I am is unconditional happiness. The prodigal Son admitted defeat and came home from the world body and mind back to the source from which they came, which is religion.  He gave up searching for conditional happiness to submit to our Father, or as one 14^th century mystic once put it; “I travelled so far in seeking God, but it was only when I gave up, and turned back, that I found out there he was, present, in me.” This is awareness.

The Sea of Galilee, where Jesus taught the beatitudes, is a very large still lake in a peaceful fertile place, like our conscious awareness is. Our thoughts are like ripples on the surface, our feelings like currents in the water, but we are not these because a wave cannot find peace and fulfilment in another wave, or a different part of the ocean of consciousness, it must give up and sink into itself, the depth of the ocean where there is no motion, mind and heart silent, still, and we cannot learn this new understanding unless we are humble, so Jesus said; “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Pride doesn’t do it-humility might.

Jesus also said; “Blessed are you when people hate you, exclude you, revile you, defame you on account of the Son of Man, rejoice and leap for joy, surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets." There is a modern prophet in 16 year old Greta Thunberg, inspiring school strikes for climate change. She said at the UN; You speak of economic growth because you are too sacred of being unpopular. I don’t care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet. 200 species a day and our civilisation being sacrificed for a very small number of people to make enormous amounts of money. 

A truly religious man or woman does not rely on approval or react to criticism, reputation isn’t who they are, and only they can turn off their light, but people to whom God isn’t central cannot see this, and they will lash out harder if you turn ever more intensely to God as your source, which is a test, but there is a story about a monk who slept outside with a stone for a pillow and was criticised for needing a pillow at all.  He threw it away and used the earth, then he was mocked for throwing it away just because someone criticised him. So the monk decided to please God alone, not other people’s perceptions of him, and found heaven in his heart and the whole universe. The saint overcomes the tribulations of the world.

I hardly dare say it, even in torture, Jesus said Father forgive them, they know not what they do. The Aramaic Idiom he used when he said blessed are those persecuted for the sake of righteousness means deeply and firmly happy are those in whom the urgent desire for justice and salvation is so strong they cannot sleep at night.  This righteousness such beings are filled with is saving union with God, in a Biblical context, absolute, goodness with no opposite, no form, no limit. Such longing for God is like being in a lake with someone holding your head under water until you gasp for air; the kind of intensity of longing which leads us to realise God by giving up our search. Incidentally this is exactly what John the Baptist did to people, in the Jordan, in the days before the health and safety executive and personal liability insurance, so maybe he was John the Drowner, and he lost a few.  But the others got a near death experience out of it...

So Jesus also said; “Blessed are those who mourn, they will be comforted.” One who mourns loss or loneliness indicates a deep sense of emptiness that can only be filled with One true Self not confined to anybody, to any thought, or to any world. A consciousness in whom all our smaller consciousnesses partake.

Jesus said; “Blessed are the meek, they will inherit the earth.” He didn't mean be a doormat but that the gentle have earth for a heritage because they overcome the delusion of ever being able to possess it, they are free from an idea that anything really belongs to anyone.  Like two aborigines who know arguing over who owns the earth is like two fleas on a dog's back arguing over who owns the dog.  In self surrender, maybe with possessions but not with possessiveness, they lose a sense of ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ God’s servants, entirely dependent, but strangely happy, finding they gain everything in the truest sense.

Jesus said; “Blessed are the merciful, they will be shown mercy.” To find God, be God-like in mercy even for those who are harsh and unhappy. Humans remember hurt, the sin persists in their eyes, but not in God’s.  Mercy is the fruit of an inner calm in which one is an empath who feels and shares joy and sorrow of all beings.

Jesus said; “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” To know who you are, desire and fear must dissolve, pain and pleasure, passion and craving must pass, as St Paul says; “be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” This process purifies, simplifies, calms the mind to attend to God’s purity, your nature.

Finally, Jesus said: “Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called children of God.” His Aramaic idiom makes it more like; “firmly and deeply joyful are the peacemakers,” because a peacemaker does not worship his own human ideas, brainwashing him or herself with a text, but understands different body minds illuminated by One God.

Jesus was a Jew, a teacher, a Rabbi, they called him Rabbouni and he taught them contemplation. In the Jerusalem Talmud, the central text of Judaism, the Rabbis say that every sacred text is written in black fire on white fire, the black fire is the diverse tracing of all our thoughts, and the divine white is the silent inscape of present and immediate experience, an ecstatic reflection of existential reality, the mystical understanding of a faith, any faith, which is trust.

To be happy then stop desiring happiness, which is unhappiness. Let go, let be, accept what is, deconstruct conditions, know we are One being in different conditions, just like Father, Son and Holy Spirit +