Duality or Non Duality ... which is best? ;o)

Well how have the past few days of discovery panned out. In between gardening and more gardening (which I thoroughly enjoy) I have been doing some research. Having been so enamoured with my latest discoveries along the esoteric road - not least Eckhart Tolle I decided to backtrack. I am never too comfortable in throwing myself 'hook line and sinker' into things without stepping back and looking more objectively. However I reckon I have immersed myself into Tolle's philosophy enough to understand experientially where he is coming from. Definitely I conclude that Tolle and other modern day mystics have alot to offer in terms of finding the present moment and the fulfilment contained therein. However I  am not sure that I would agree with the religious interpretations and applications. The present moment is given to all ... we miss out in using it as a means to the future or living in the past ... but we do not have to spiritualise it anymore than we should spiritualise anything else we have in common ... an arm or a leg. The present moment is a given fact which Eckhart and others have kindly enabled us to see. How we interpret that fact and what we choose to do with it is another matter ...

Now my little web discoveries. Thanks to Fr Thomas Keating for whom I have alot of respect (3 books I recommend: Open Heart open Mind and Invitation to Love and Intimacy with God) I ended up giving my email address to Integral Life, Ken Wilber's big project. An email with a list of the latest posts lead me to (at long last!) a thinking Christian's contribution to non duality holding both the value of Buddhist concepts of non duality as a meeting point and also holding forth the Christian distinctiveness in a sensitive manner. Check out his post and the responses he was given: The role of Jesus in inter-spiritual dialogue by Cameron Freeman. Check out another of his posts entitled Good Friday: The impossibility of Nirvana. Excellent stuff! I must quote two of his references:

G. K. Chesterton “That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever... In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss... a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt... When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. [Mt 27:46 quoting Ps 22:1] And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt... Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” [cf The Everlasting Man CW2:344]

“A Cross is a blunt and graceless form. It has not the completeness and satisfying quality of a circle. It does not have to grace of a parabola or the promise of a long curve... A cross speaks not of unity but of brokenness, not of harmony but ambiguity, it is a form of tension and not rest... The cross is the symbol because the whacks of life take that shape... And unless you have a crucified God, you don’t have a big enough God.” Joseph Sittler  quoted in Westhelle, V. “The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross” Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2006.

Check out also Cameron's blog with an interesting article entitled 'Zen and the paradoxical language of Jesus' Thanks to this guy I have decided to carry on reading Jurgen Moltmann's The crucified God. It is not easy reading but I realise in order to dig deeply into the richness of conscious awareness and not simply indulge myself therein I must also keep in focus the raw reality of the sufferings of Jesus on the Cross. This is where the Christian mysticism (seems to me at this point) takes leave of other paths. This contrast is graphically notable in that between the smiling Buddha inwardly blissful with eyes closed to the world and the suffering Saviour arms outstretched embracing the world. Perhaps we have another paradox to consider. The promise of peace as we become present to all that is and the promise of suffering through being part of this groaning creation ...

I also checked out Eckhart Tolle’s critics. One argued that all his stuff is borrowed not least from Schopenhauer’s ‘The emptiness of existence’. I read that and conclude that it is not true … there are vast differences. However another Christian I have somehow linked up with (can’t remember how) is Fr Richard Rohr … check out an excellent article entitled ‘Living a life less ordinary’. Relevant to this blog I quote:

The act of contemplation helps us to observe the “unobserved” or false self, and by so doing, to gradually detach ourselves from it. But it is not something that comes naturally in our culture. “We are a capitalist society, into accumulation, not detachment,” Fr Rohr says. “That’s why people are attracted to Buddhism. Buddhists have kept their vocabulary and their honesty about the need for detachment up to date, whereas we’re just people who have invested heavily in our own opinions and rightness, with disastrous results.” The secret to detachment, he suggests, is to learn how to live more fully in “the now, not the past or the future”.

He has a book coming out in September The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See … Think I just might get it … anyway time for my 20mins listening prayer!

Centering Prayer

I have spent 20 minutes this morning and 20 minutes this evening being simply still in God's presence. Many distracting thoughts and feelings overtook me but the wonderful advice given by Thomas Keating is that we should not be phased by this. I find that thoughts and feelings are as imposing as we allow them to be. If we allow ourselves to be frustrated by them the more imposing they become. So the secret is to 'Let them be' ... accept them. When I do I find a detachment takes place. There is a space between the me that is thinking/feeling and the 'true self' that seeks to focus on God .. a releasing takes place and I am able to as TK suggests consent my will to the love of God.  We are never to evaluate our time with God as good or bad, successful or unsuccessful. Just being with Him is sufficient. I use my mobile phone as a timer so I dont keep having a quick peek to see how time is going.

Intro

Hi!

This is the beginning of my first real blog although I did make my own using dreamweaver but it got so inundated with SPAM that I have had to resort to this with all the bells and whistles that keep the spammers away! It is a kind of personal experiment with the whole idea of blogging. I understand that a general theme would be fitting and I will choose the word 'spirituality' ... I will be sharing my explorations and developments along the way and welcome feedback.

Why Urban Mystik and why the wrong spellink? Well ... Urban Mystic had been taken so I plumbed for the closest I could find. My belief is that spirituality should not be reserved for those who may be considered to be the elite ... the cloistered ... surrounded with nature's resonating language of God's handiwork. (I say 'considered to be' because i am sure that they themselves do not regard them selves as'elite' - furthermore God is a rather loaded word I know but rather than unpacking it I hope it will 'unpack' itself along the way.) ... hence the idea of a mysticism which is on street level available to the most ordinary and the most unassuming in the least expected places.

I will stop there and in my next post tell you a bit about myself and where I come from and where I have travelled. (spiritually speaking)

(24/8)I am 56 years old (yesterday!). More than 30 years ago I remember my spiritual search beginning having left the repressive confines of a boarding school and launching into a drug fuelled few years at University - they were good times and bad times. I took LSD which disorientated me but also awakened me to an altered state of consciousness. Recognising the damage such drugs could do I determined to seek the same experience without the use of drugs. I took up Buddhist Practice and meditative techniques using the I Ching for guidance. While my usage of such things was as much to do with being trendy than anything else there was a genuine search taking place. Total acceptance was key and I remember being perturbed by the fact that Jesus Christ while being someone I admired was at the same time someone I could not accept. Furthermore (how I dont know) I recognised that to accept Jesus was more than just to value his teachings or even his historical activities but to accept him as the centre of my life. After much trepidation and persuasion I finally accepted him in this way.

My experience of God at this point was so great my life was turned around. I gave up the drugs immediately and started to attend church. It seemed to me reasonable at the time that all relations to my past life were to be rejected which included my whole mode of seeking prior to this experience. 'Be here now' was one of the catchphrases I embraced prior to becoming a Christian. I labelled that concept with the passivity / existentialist tag and left it behind. Being still and being 'present' were ideas which I had left behind with the old life.

It is only over the past few years that I have begun to re embrace some of these ideas and considered them consistent with my Christian experience. It is thanks to books such as 'Practicing the Presence of God' by Brother Lawrence and 'Cloud of Unknowing' as well as techniques such as 'centering prayer' introduced by Father Thomas Keating that have enabled me to discover new Christian areas of prayer not too inconsistent with my previous approaches.

Further down the road I have looked into teachers such as Eckhart Tolle and the 'Sedona Method' with Hale Dwoskin. Under which label I would put these I dont know (If a label is necessary)- Esoteric, New Age, Buddhist - I dont know but I have found them extremely helpful in my spiritual growth. I am now asking such questions as: How distinctive is the Christian revelation from modern spiritual approaches to God? Where is the overlap? Is there room for dialogue? Can we afford to use new concepts to define God, sin, salvation etc without compromising the central tenets of the faith thus becoming more relevant to the present modern spirituality? I hope that this blog will contribute to research into this .... who knowzzzzz