And the Greatest of These is Love.

This post is an excerpt from my book, Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West.
 To purchase, click here.

The Power of Love.

On the spiritual path, we will fall short many times. It is easy to become impatient, frustrated, and overwhelmed. That is why love is so important.

Love sees life in everything. It recognizes the life that abides within every creature. This recognition begets respect. Love is patient, kind, and endures all things, as anyone who has attended a wedding knows. Our knowledge, plans, and strategies will reach their wit’s end, but love never tires.

One day, while watching my favorite television show, “The Office,” I heard those famous words of St. Paul’s yet again but this time with new ears because I was holding my newborn son. As I looked at him and heard, “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love,” I understood. For the first time, I understood.

In that moment, I knew: I knew that I could read every book in the world and make plans from now until the end of time, but my knowledge would be exhausted and my plans would fall short. No strategy and no amount of preparation could ever get me to the finish line. The only thing that remained was love.

Only my love for him can bear the hardships and difficulties that our relationship will bring to the surface. Only my love for him can overcome my impatience and arrogance. Only my love for him can guide him without trying to bend him to my will. Only love is humble enough to teach him how to think without teaching him what to think. For only the eye of love sees him as his own person and only love is selfless enough to grant him the space he needs to grow into that person. Love is the only voice within me honest enough to admit that he does not belong to me.  

Truthfully, it is not “my” love and it is not “for him.” Love is the defining characteristic of the Kingdom. I do not create love. I receive it. Love is a gift.

“Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

And as children of God, we resemble God. Love is our birthmark. When freedom from self is realized, the likeness of God is reflected in our actions. The cataracts of fear and expectation are removed and we can see the world as-it-is. When we recover the freedom to see people as they are, we see the life that dwells and sings within them, and love is our natural response.

Love is wild. It has no manners.

It comforts the afflicted, and afflicts the comfortable. Love often defies logic. It would have us embrace our enemies and be uncomfortably honest with our friends. This cannot be taught. Love does not come with a manual. It is the spontaneous expression of our True Nature.

Unconditional Love

As I said before, love is complete freedom—the freedom of God to love friend and foe as our Self. Love is complete and total freedom because it is selfless. Selfless awareness is wide open, agapic awareness. This is the all-embracing quality of Undifferentiated Awareness that recognizes and embraces everything that is real and true, regardless of whether it is comfortable or not.

Self-centeredness is the worst kind of prison. It keeps us chained and shackled to our fears and illusions, reserved to making decisions that serve our own narrow-minded agenda. Love doesn’t see the world or the people in it through the knowledge of good and bad. Love does not see what we stand to lose or gain. It sees things-as-they-are. And when you see things-as-they-are, you see the spark of divinity that lives within all things.

Gratitude

In the embrace of unconditional love, it feels like we are loved into Being. This awareness brings about a phase change. It transmutes the energy of unconditional love into gratitude. Dominion is not control, but responsibility. Gratitude accepts this responsibility. When you are grateful for something, you “tend to it.” When God told Adam to tend to the Garden, he meant love it—love the body, your fellow man, and the earth.

Gratitude is an action, not an idea. It is the act of caring for that which we are grateful. Gratitude doesn’t hang out in the oceanic presence of unconditional love. It reaches out to the world from the deep space of love. It invests, not only in the maintenance of our Self, but through likeness recognizes and welcomes the True Self in others. Likeness is a quality of Basic Sanity. It looks beyond race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and social status to find its kind in others. In this way, likeness gives rise to kindness, which is the foundation of relationship. Having established relationship, love goes through yet another conversion.

Creative Love

At this stage, gratitude and kindness give way to the creative power of love. The principle of Eros or erotic love isn’t limited to “sexual desire.” It refers to the creativity of love. Therefore, sexual union is both an example of Eros and a most useful symbol for its creative nature. We are born out of love and therefore born to love. Love is the Alpha and Omega.

Eros is the desire to make love. It is the creative force that seeks to express love through relationship, art, poetry, music, prayers of devotion, and songs of worshipful silence. Eros articulates love. In fact, creative love is art—it is the aspect of love that lends shape to the unformed inspiration of our inner life. Eros is love Incarnate.

While creative love is the principle that underlies the great works of art, it is not limited to painting, music, or theater any more than it is to the bedroom. In fact, creative love is most active in our daily life. It is the aspect of love that expands the field of practice. It brings our spiritual practice out of our home and into our day.

Love in Daily Life

The Upanishads say, “And then He realized that he was this creation, as it had poured forth from Himself. In this way, He became this creation. Therefore, he who realizes this becomes, in this creation, a creator.” To become a creator is to bring the divine image to fruition. Having discovered an untapped inner wealth, we are no longer dominated by our poverty mentality. We are full. We seek to give back, to create.

Eros transforms our life into an art form. It is the art of living. When we consent to the power of love, it shapes our life in the same way Michelangelo chiseled his sculpture of David from raw stone. This happens in relationship. We cannot wall ourselves off from the world and call it spirituality. Without relationship our practice is incomplete. Commitment connects the responsibilities and obligations of our daily life to the indwelling reality of our True Self.

Committed relationships are difficult because they demand that we give of our Self. This is hard because the false-self is selfish. It wants to avoid discomfort and clings to immediate gratification. Creative love matures us by reminding us that we cannot hope to grow into our True Self without something demanding our false-self in return.

The resurrection of our True Life is proportionate to the death of our inauthentic life.

The false-self is incapable of accepting this truth. It is bound to itself. Love is free to accept this maxim. This is the power of love to endure all things: marriage, divorce, success, failure, friendship, rivalries, heartache, and death. The freedom of love enables us to adapt to life’s changing circumstances. From the point of view of creative love, there are no problems, only opportunities. If the problem can be solved, it is not a problem, just something for you to work with; if it can’t be solved, it is not a problem, just something to accept and move on. Creative love sees everything as workable.

Without struggle there is no growth which is why Shantideva writes, “All enemies are helpers in my spiritual work and therefore they should be a joy to me.” Where there is an enemy, a shortcoming, or an obstacle, creative love sees a gateway. When we are angry, afraid, jealous, depressed, or obsessed, love knows there is an underdeveloped aspect of our Self struggling to be born into the world. Love seeks to cultivate it. It loves our devils into the present moment; it does not reject them. We may be intellectually sympathetic to this idea, but only the power of love recognizes this on a practical level.

What we call spiritual principles live within us as potentialities embedded within the structure of Being, but just as the capacity to walk is a potentiality that has to be exercised by toddlers, these potentialities have to be actualized through the struggle of daily life. In this way, God is born into the world.

Spirituality is about accepting our obstacles as the path, not avoiding them. Only love is capable of seeing the relationships and tasks that present us with difficulty as the plots of land that we must cultivate. In short, what we call obstacles, love calls the path, and all paths intersect.

If we look closely, we will see an intricate web of interdependence emerging. It may appear that we are attracted to this person or that job for one reason or the other, but if we look closer—beyond the veil of the false-self—we will see that the power of love has brought us into this relationship. “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being,” writes Teilhard de Chardin, the brilliant Catholic theologian.

It is as if the universe is working as a midwife, assisting in the birth of our Self. But love is never a one-sided situation. The forces of love are at work in the other person as well. The universe is using us to assist in their birth. There is something deep in the other that yearns to be realized, and it has identified a relationship with us as part of its path. We are there to aid in their birth, just as they are there to aid in ours.

While love may bring us together, it does not chain us to one another. It binds us to the truth in our hearts. So in love, there is solitude. “For the pillars of the temple stand apart,” writes Kahlil Gibran, “and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” Selfish love—which is no love at all—sees the other as an object to be exploited or a hostage to be taken; authentic love recognizes the symbiotic structure of the relationship. A healthy relationship moves back and forth between solitude and communion. It sees both interdependence and independence.

* This is article is excerpted from Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West by    Benjamin Riggs. To purchase, click here.

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Eros recognizes disappointment as part of our path. It doesn’t see tribulation as something to be avoided. The Dalai Lama once said that we cannot view a beggar as an obstacle, if we hope to grow in generosity. This axiom can be applied to all other virtues as well. Patience is an indispensable spiritual principle, but when given the opportunity to grow in patience, many of us reject it. We rail against the person trying our nerves. We label those who try our patience as “assholes,” but without an obstruction or an “adversary” there is no growth. Creative love knows that we cannot grow in patience without an asshole in our lives and binds our actions to this principle.

Individuality in Relationship

"It is true that in relationship we join with others in a common life, but it is a misconception that in relationship we cease to be individuals. 

The common life has its own structure, which distinguishes it from the order of individual life, but that common life is authentic and vigorous, only when it is fashioned after the rhythms of individual life.

A relationship is a transpersonal reference point, a “We” with which a host of “I’s” can identify. For that “We” to be dynamic and useful, it must incorporate the values and customs of its constituents. There are aspects of the human condition that can be realized only in association with others, and relationships enable us to actualize those potentialities that cannot be pressed out in isolation. In short, individuals are individuated in relationship.

The constituent finds completion in association with the whole, but not in the sense that they find parts missing in themselves; rather, in association, unique opportunities to express features of individuality are uncovered. In this way, relationship is a vehicle of maturation, but it sufficiently serves this end only when its members are aware of the rhythms of their life, clearly communicate those needs, and these communiques establish the dynamics of the relationship. Thus, healthy relationships are inherently democratic." 

~ excerpt from my upcoming book "The Triumph of Principles"

The Triumph of Principles

"Spiritual principles are abstractions until they are professed in the details of daily living.

The person who fails to enter the arena, dispels of those details, rendering their moral pronouncements un-true⸺not false, but not yet made real. It is in the details that ideals are tested, tempered, and proven. It is in the run of life that principles become tried-and-true. Relationship is the arena. It is where spirituality unfolds.

She who lives in quiet isolation, though her hours may be spent in prayer and meditation, never submits to the challenges of patience and tolerance that relationship has in store for her. She knows much of spiritual latitude, but nothing of longitude. He who passes the days cloistered may emerge from his hermitage on occasion to distribute insights and wisdom gleaned from solitude and countless pages read, but he never dares to test that insight and wisdom in the trials of relationship, so it is disembodied⸺brilliant, no doubt, but lacking the common sense and mettle forged by the fire of mutual responsibility."

~ excerpted from The Triumph of Principles (my upcoming book)

Practicing Spirituality & Citizenship in the Era of Trump

Erected between the Church and the State is a "Wall of Separation."
But within the envelope of my skin, there is no line of demarcation segregating politics and spirituality. 

We do not live in a totalitarian state. As members of a democratic society, we have a civic duty. Our government is held in check by "we the people." In a democratic system of government, politics is just another aspect of daily living.

Spirituality is not an other-worldly affair. It is a principled worldview coupled with a system of practice that orients our whole being to the world in which we live.

Politics is not a distraction from spirituality, but one aspect of daily life with which spirituality is deeply concerned.

Saying that politics is a distraction from spirituality is like saying relationships or work are obstacles to spiritual practice. They aren't obstacles, they are opportunities for our spirituality to be born into the world. Segregating politics and spirituality is an attempt to closet your spirituality—to shield it from things that push your buttons, rather than turning into your struggles and learning to move beyond stress, fear, and anger.

We are not called to hide behind a vapid smile or to look the other way. Any spirituality that hides behind a distraction is not a spirituality but a defense mechanism. It is spiritual bypassing not spiritual practice. This is true regardless of whether our practice is rooted in Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, or lacks religious affiliation.

Gandhi once wrote, "Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is...Indeed, religion should pervade every one of our actions. Here religion does not mean sectarianism. It means a belief in ordered moral government of the universe. It is not less real because it is unseen. This religion transcends Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc. It does not supersede them. It harmonizes them and gives them reality."

A living spirituality is politically conscious and engaged but not obsessed. And this is the catch.

It is hard to be mindful and politically engaged at the same time. It is difficult to watch the news or read the papers without getting wrapped up in it, especially this day-and-age with a 24 hr news cycle and a controversial President that dominates every minute of that cycle.

Mindfulness and activism often feel mutually exclusive. But uniting the two is our path. We have to root our politics in mindfulness and silence. If we fail to do this, we will either neglect our civic responsibility or our politics will be tainted with fear and aggression.

You can be present and centered while protesting or voicing concern—Dorthy Day, Gandhi, King, Thich Nhat Hanh, and the Dalai Lama are perfect examples.

While the basic outline of spirituality remains unchanged, the terrain that path must traverse changes with each generation. And it is no accident that these great icons of mindful activism have come before us, showing us the way. They have outlined the path before us. Their activism is rooted in prayer and meditation.

Venturing into the realm of politics without tethering the mind to reality is the way of madness.

Meditation anchors the mind in the present moment. But it is not enough to sit every morning. Mindful activism is meditation in action. We have to bring the principles of meditation—letting go and returning to the simplicity of the present moment—into our daily life. In the presence of injustice, we often feel fear, anger, and aggression. But we must disown the fear, anger, and aggression, not the awareness of injustice, which is grounded in reality.

Our conscience must rise above our fear of confrontation. We have to speak truth to power. Our words must not be weighted down by anger and resentment. 

Politics devoid of compassion is just another way to vent resentment. And our body politic is already saturated with resentment. Prayer connects the mind and the heart, melting away resentment. William James wrote in Varieties of Religious Experience, "Religion is nothing if it be not the vital act by which the entire mind seeks to save itself by clinging to the principle from which it draws its life. This act is prayer." And the heart is the principle from which the mind draws life. But once again it is not enough to pray only in the morning. We have to see aggression as a reminder to pray throughout the day. When are afraid or angry, we have to pray for those that arouse our bitterness. We have to pray for those in need. Prayer gets us out of our head, out of our self-centered mind. It awakens the spirit of selflessness and sanity.

Spirituality reminds us that it is our responsibility to be a voice of sanity, a light unto the world. I say that not with a condescending tone, but with an awareness that I too must work harder to bring mindfulness, compassion, and sanity into my politics. Politics is a sticky subject. It is easy to get caught up in politics. But the spiritual path always cuts through our obstacles. It never goes around them. This is the path we in the era of Trump must trudge and we have to do it together.

Part of doing it together is holding each other accountable. When we see someone with good intentions lash-out or become disrespectful, it is important to point that out to them. We have to remind them that how they say it is every bit as important as what they say. Yes, we are obligated to speak the truth, but we are also obligated to do that in a skillful manner. If we oppose hate, then we have to oppose it even when it is attached to a message that we agree with because hate--in any form--only adds to the problems that we face as a nation. Hate is not the counter-measure for injustice. As Martin Luther King said, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."

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Jesus Wasn't Polite Company

Well-intentioned followers of Jesus too often assume he was a warm, fuzzy guy. 

In him they see someone preoccupied with keeping the peace, not making waves. And there can be no doubt that Jesus was a peacemaker. He was non-violent to the core. But non-violent is not the same as non-confrontational.

Non-violence is an inherently confrontational practice. We need not look as far back as the Gospels to confirm this fact. Both King and Gandhi used confrontation to effectively dramatize injustice. Similarly, confrontation was a preferred tactic of Jesus. 

Jesus was undoubtedly a kind, compassionate, and loving man. But Jesus's message was subversive. His behavior, tactics, and rhetoric call to question the simple-minded ideas many of us cling to about love and compassion. The fire-brand that turned over the money-lender's table is tough to square with the overly sentimental image of Jesus many of us hold dear.

Jesus was not an "agree to disagree" kind of guy. When the Pharisees asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" Jesus did not say, "To each their own. Now go in peace my brother." He instead called them "hypocrites" and said,

"You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!"

Ouch. That is the sting of brutal honesty. 

“Our ideas of God tell us more about ourselves than about Him,” said Thomas Merton. I suppose the same is true about Jesus. The always affable and courteous image of Jesus that occupies the altar of our mind conforms more to our fears and expectations, than the picture painted by the Gospels. It appears to be an image cast in the shadow of our fear of confrontation. We don't want Jesus to be confrontational because we are afraid of following him into the conflict.

Conflict can be scary business. 

Jesus never declined an invitation to a good debate, even when tensions were high. "They took up stones to stone him." Stop and think about that: "They took up stones to stone him." If there is ever a time to keep your mouth shut, it is when they take up stones to to stone you. Yet, Jesus offers perhaps his wittiest response of all to this stone-toting audience: "Is it not written in your law, 'I said, you are gods?' (82nd Psalm) Now if those to whom the word of God came were called 'gods'—and the scripture cannot be in error—can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, 'I am God’s Son?' If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father." He said that to people who were about to stone him!

I am not saying that Jesus was unnecessarily combative or the First Century equivalent of an internet troll, but I am saying that when ideas and practices deviated from the truth as he saw it, Jesus turned into that friction, rather than away from it. He was not concerned with "keeping the peace," so to speak. He said, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." Obviously, he is not referring to physical violence. He is talking about the sword of wisdom which cuts through those ideas, beliefs, traditions, and institutions that prevent us from realizing what he called "The Kingdom of Heaven."

Challenging someone's "beliefs" is often thought to be impolite. Social customs that place our religious ideas above dispute are built in memetic devices that aid those ideas in their struggle to endure. On the spiritual path, such etiquette is counter-productive. It compartmentalizes our beliefs, segregating them from the reality of our daily life, which is the environment they must learn to operate within. In fact, unless they learn to operate within that environment they cannot be considered proper beliefs.

Kant describes three degrees of conviction: opinion, faith, and knowledge. In brief, opinion is both subjectively and objectively insufficient; faith or proper beliefs are subjectively sufficient but objectively lacking; and knowledge is both subjectively and objectively sufficient. Sufficient to what? Establish truth. What is the minimum threshold of truth? According to the pragmatic theory of truth as fleshed out by William James—which is the most suited for our purposes—it is utility. When an idea inspires action and the corresponding result of that action proves to be useful, then that idea ceases to be a mere opinion and becomes a proper belief, though it lacks the persuasiveness or efficacy needed to be universally accepted as knowledge. This is the ladder our ideas must climb to become beliefs, the ascent of which requires study, debate, self-examination, and spiritual practice.  

Social taboos against openly critiquing religious or spiritual ideas do nothing more than guard those ideas against the pressure truth applies to them, which is what forces them to adapt or mature into proper beliefs. As a result, our ideas about spirituality fail to ripen into a practical and effective spirituality. They remain adolescent, under-developed, ill-suited for life in an adult world, which is why Jesus ignores this custom. He embodies the sentiment expressed by Paul when he wrote, "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways."

Politics is another sphere of intellectual life that is often quarantined. We are afraid of the tension soaked conversation that ensues when politics, religion, or the ever combustible combination of the two surfaces. People tend to identify with the the ideas that collectively define their religious and political orientations and therefore feel internal friction—stress, fear, anger—when those ideas are challenged by competing points of view. Therefore, those conversations typically surface only in the "safe space" of like-minded people. And breach of this unspoken protocol is thought to be bad manners, as the old saying goes, "In polite company, it’s not proper to talk about religion or politics."

Jesus is not polite company! 

He is extremely critical of other's beliefs. In fact, the word "hypocrite" appears approximately twenty times in the Gospels. I am not suggesting we run around calling people hypocrites, but I am suggesting that open and honest debate is healthy, even necessary, for spiritual growth and a thriving democracy. We should be respectfully critical of other's beliefs, as well as our own. And by critical I do not mean rude, but "crit·i·cal: an analysis of the merits and faults of a given idea, proposal, or practice."

Beliefs are the ideas that orient us toward the world in which we live. They are those ideas upon which we act. When beliefs or traditions prevent ourselves or others from orienting their entire Being toward the reality of our daily life, they should be challenged. If there is a manner of living that is more fulfilling, then that life should be lived and any beliefs that prevent us from actualizing that life should be challenged. Avoiding this confrontation is a form of spiritual bypassing. When our ideas are challenged, it is an invitation to grow: an invitation to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.

I am not suggesting that walking the spiritual path requires us to become contrarians. I am simply saying that debate and discussion are an essential part of a balanced and healthy spiritual diet. And furthermore, they are part of the path outlined by the example of Jesus.

We have to be willing to have those uncomfortable conversations. Discomfort is the texture of kenosis, which is the active ingredient in spiritual growth. We have to be willing to question not only our beliefs and traditions, but the beliefs and traditions of others—not out of spite, but as an expression of love and fidelity to the truth. This is part of Jesus's yoke, his jnana yoga, if you will.      

The Proclamation of Basic Goodness

The following is an excerpt from Finding God in the Body, Chapter 8, "Is It Not Written in Your Book?" Click here to order on Amazon.

“They took up stones to stone him,” John writes in Chapter 10, Verse 31. Jesus responds:

I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these are you going to stone me?

They answered, as Caiaphas would soon thereafter:

It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.

You see, moments before Jesus said, “The Father and I are one.” Steeped in Jewish mythology, as Jesus was, he turned to his stone-toting audience and asked, “Is it not written in your book, ‘You are gods’? If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’—and the scripture cannot be in error,” he skillfully continued, “can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, I am God’s Son?” Simply put, if I am in error so is the book you believe to be inerrant.

Frustrated by Jesus’s sharp-witted response, the mob tried to seize him, but he escaped. Later, in the Sanhedrin trial, Caiaphas tried to pin Jesus down once again: “I put you under oath before the living God, tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God.” Jesus replied, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

First he tells Caiaphas, “You have said so. But I tell you…” In other words, what you and I mean by “messiah” are two different things. Jesus then unpacks his messianic vision. He describes “a new heaven and new earth” where “God lives amongst mortals.” In his vision, humankind is at the “right hand of God.” The phrase “right-hand man” refers to someone who does the work of another, usually someone more powerful. Jesus is saying that humankind is the instrument of God’s peace and creativity. And that all the kings, queens, and ecclesiastical hierarchies cannot stop this evolutionary force because it is coming on the clouds of heaven. This is the messianic hope of Jesus.

The messianic hope is realized not by a prefigured savior or by a chosen few, but by the whole of society. “Messianic consciousness is not something that comes in the future; it is our intrinsic nature,” writes Rabbi David Cooper. “It is our birthright, available to all of us here and now. Although obscured over the millennia by clouds of ignorance, its light continues to shine in the divine sparks at the core of our being… In our time, the goal of raising holy sparks is nothing less than the attainment of messianic consciousness for all of humankind. In this context, the individual cannot be separated from the integrated whole; the collective enlightenment of humanity is clearly as relevant as any focus on individual attainment.”

When the messianic impulse is read through the lens of fundamentalism, it leads to complacency. Instead of saying “Yes!” to our adventure, we sit on our hands waiting on our savior. When the messianic myth is read within, it leads to responsibility. We all bear messianic responsibility. “You are the light of the world,” says Jesus. “A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lamp-stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

It is our task to transform the world, not by trying to change the people in it, but by recovering the spark of basic goodness that shines within ourselves and elevating that light to new heights. We must allow the flame of God’s Being to consume our whole person. When our life is set ablaze by the fires of basic goodness, others feel that flame burning within themselves. This is how the world is transformed.

Just before his arrest Jesus prayed, “Father, the glory you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.” Jesus did not see himself as the Boss’s Son. He saw the flame of basic goodness in the heart of all people: “God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust alike.” His message was a universal one. He did not see man, woman, black, white, gay, straight, Jew, or Gentile. Jesus wanted to speed up the day when all of God’s children would answer the call to participate in the Power of God.

Reverberating in the mind of Jesus were the words, “God saw everything that God made, and indeed, it was very good.” This “goodness” is at the core of the gospel message. It is the “good news.” At his baptism, when the heavens parted, Jesus heard the voice of God say, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am pleased.”

At the top of the mountain, during the transfiguration, Peter, James, and John saw the heavens part and heard a voice say, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am pleased.”

When we look deep within ourselves, we see that we are good. “Christian life and growth are founded on faith in our own basic goodness, in the being that God has given us with its transcendent potential,” writes Father Thomas Keating. “This gift of being is our True Self.” The light of our True Life may be obscured by the clouds, but it still shines.

On the mantle of Jesus’s baptismal confession was the proclamation of basic goodness, the gift of eternal Being—not immortality but I am-ness. When we place him at the center of our baptismal confession, we become idolaters. When we place Jesus on our altar, we end up loving him more than we love what he embodied, which lives in our body. When we love something more than the indwelling presence of God, we break the first commandment.

Jesus walked the path for us, but not in place of us. He blazed a trail, but it is up to us to walk the path. The Power of Being must be resurrected in our body and no one can do that for us. We have to take up the yoke before us. We have to pick up the tools of self-analysis, study, prayer, and meditation.

The Most Common Mistake in Meditation Practice & How to Correct it.

People come to meditation because they are stressed out.

They are stuck between their ears, disembodied. They want to arrest the feverish pace of thought and abide peacefully in the present moment.

Simply put, they want to get out of their head. But they don't know where to go. They don't know what it means to move beyond the thinking mind.

Getting out of the head means, for most, stop thinking. So they take a seat and try to silence their mind. But the only resource available to them is thought, so they start thinking about not thinking, which, needless to say, is a frustrating exercise in futility.

Mindfulness practice is not about concentrated attention. It is the thinking that seeks to concentrate the spectrum of awareness upon a single point. When we are navigating rush hour traffic at the end of a long day, the thinking mind reduces the multitude of sights and sounds down to only those features of the present moment pertinent to the task at hand, making it home safe. This is undoubtedly necessary but nevertheless stressful. It, however, is not the aim of meditation practice.

In the context of mindfulness, "mind" does not mean brain. We are not talking about brainfulness. "Mind" means awareness. Mindfulness is the fullness of awareness.

In mindfulness practice our awareness is relaxed, not concentrated. It's no longer monopolized by the thinking mind. Meditation enables our awareness to pour out into the fullness of our person, into the body. Only a somatic reference point, like the breath or posture, can interrupt our tendency to think about our own thoughts, enabling us to escape the claustrophobic world between our ears. Mindfulness is embodiment, presence.

Don't try to get out of the head. Just reconnect with the body. When you notice your mind drifting off, simply feel the breath, the heartbeat, the blood flowing through your body. No more, no less. Any more is elaboration and any less is lethargy.

To get out of the head is to return to the body. Meditation practice is about embracing the fullness of our life. The Life of the body is too rich and vast to be held within the tunnel vision of the thinking mind. However, the undifferentiated awareness of the body is expansive enough to include the life of the mind. In the basic awareness of the body nothing is left out. Thoughts arise and pass away, like any other sensation, but they are no longer the point around which our identity is centered. 

In the fullness of awareness the wholeness of our person is embraced. Our true life is resurrected.

It is not about abiding in that space continuously. It is about allowing our thoughts to touch the present moment, which we are anchored to by the breath. It is about grounding our point of view in reality as it is revealed in the naked awareness of the body. Meditation is about sanity. That's what it means to get out of her head.

There is No Room for Admirers.

"Of all the children born to women, there has never been anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he." - Matthew 11:11

Conversion or the rebirth experience (metanoia) marks the resurrection of our True Self, which is of the Kingdom and not born of woman, so to speak. Metanoia is a renewal of one's mind and motivations. It is an experience that re-orients our entire being because it relocates the point or center from which we live our life, moving it from the head down into the heart.

In the Gospels, the Christ image is made manifest in Jesus of Nazareth. Through Jesus's life and actions the indwelling presence of God is born into the world. But the life of Christ does not end with the crucifixion of Jesus. Christ is resurrected. In fact, Christ is Resurrection. This unending Resurrection is the story of Christianity. It is the True Self or the Resurrected Christ that, in Galatians, Paul says has replaced his false-self.

Paul further elaborates on this point in Ephesians where he writes, "Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, putting on the new self, created after the likeness of God." This false-self/ True Self, former life/ New Life dichotomy is common in spiritual literature. In Alcoholics Anonymous members celebrate "sobriety birthdays." The sobriety birthday is often more significant than their biological birthday because it marks the point at which they adopted a new manner of living. The sobriety birthday is in fact a re-birth day. It is a celebration of the True Self, which obviously was not born of a woman or brought about by reproductive means, but by a spiritual death and resurrection.

In the opening quotation, Jesus also says "the least in the Kingdom" which denotes a spectrum of realization (least to greatest). This spectrum recognizes both maturity and depth of insight into the Kingdom, ranging from the admission of powerlessness found in Alcoholics Anonymous to the realization of Oneness with God proclaimed by Jesus in the Gospel of John.

But either way, he who is of the Kingdom is greater than he who is of the world because Kingdom dwellers, so to speak, strive to live in accordance with their True Nature and not the law or the prescribed guidelines of religious and social institutions. In fact, the prescribed guidelines of churches and governments are legitimized only in so far as they relate back to the inclinations of human nature and aid individuals in their quest to realize or embody that nature for themselves.

Often, institutions fail to do this because they are more concerned with perpetuating their power, which is why people like Jesus, Gandhi, and King are seen as subversive by those institutions. They embody the principle freedom of the Kingdom, not the ways of the world.

Many Americans believe America is a Christian nation. The majority of Americans may self-describe as Christian, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the spiritual principles outlined in the Gospels—the principles Jesus embodied and Christians are called to follow—are repugnant to many American "Christians," especially those that frequently say America is a Christian nation. It is obvious from the Gospel account that Jesus offered a counterculture and because of this he was seen as a troublemaker. And he was. But he also still is. He causes trouble for anyone that claims to follow him because the path he outlines is not an easy path to walk.

Richard Rohr wrote in Jesus' Plan for a New World, "We keep worshiping the messenger, keeping Jesus up on statues and images, so we can avoid what he said. It's the best smokescreen in the world! We just keep saying, 'We love Jesus.' The more we talk about Jesus, the less we'll do what he said. That's the way the ego fools itself. And in this case, it's the way culture, nations and even churches have fooled themselves."

We worship the messenger but ignore the message. In the process, Jesus obtains admirers but not followers. We have confused our ego with the Christ image depicted in the Gospels, and tragically with the image of God that lives within us. This is spiritual materialism.

The Christ image is subversive. It undermines our ego and all of its attendant fears, prejudices, resentments, and defense mechanisms. This is a challenge. It requires that we empty ourselves. Letting go of the false-self and it's strategies takes the burden off of the True Self. It shifts the burden over to the false-self. This burden is the cross upon which the ego is crucified. And the resurrection of our True Life is proportionate to the death of our false-self. "He and I cannot dwell together in the same space." Without death there can be no rebirth. "We cannot welcome the presence," writes Rohr, "the Parousia, the full coming of Christ until we've let go of the old."

Beyond the noise, the chaos, the stress, fear, and anger we can feel our heart beating, calling out to us, pleading with us to let go of our false-self and to return to the life of the body. This is the call of Christ, which lives within us as the image of God, our True Self. Jesus shows the way. And only those that follow can be called Christian in any meaningful sense of the word, regardless of what beliefs they affirm. On the path Jesus outlined there is simply no room for admirers.

Order Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West by Benjamin Riggs today. Available in Paperback and Kindle on Amazon. 

The Space Between Fundamentalism and Atheism

The remarkable success demonstrated by the methodologies of science over the past two centuries has brought us to a place in history where its epistemology has cornered the market.

In the modern West objective truth and facts have a monopoly on value. By these standards, religion does not measure up. It is useless in the modern world. The question is whether this is a fair standard by which to measure the value of religion.

Religion is viewed, by most people, as a set of supernatural propositions that must be either affirmed or denied. This position creates a deep chasm. On one side are those who validate the supernatural truth-claims of religion; on the other side are those that categorically reject the validity of those claims. These two camps are commonly referred to as believers and atheists.

For the better part of 15 years, I thought myself an atheist. The ubiquity of fundamentalist religion in the deep South (where I live), coupled with my tacit acceptance of this false dichotomy (believers vs. atheists), forced me to side with the atheists. Nothing in me believed that “God” was a suitable explanation for the origin of life or the cosmos. Furthermore, the idea that an all-knowing, all-powerful creator God fashioned a world, which so displeased him that he was forced to offer up his son as a blood-sacrifice in order to pacify his own wrath made no sense to me. It wasn’t a matter of being angry or resentful at Christianity. I was just as disinterested in reincarnation as I was in heaven and hell. As a child of modernity these supernatural propositions just didn’t resonate with me. So I found common cause with the atheist, though I was always sympathetic to the idea of spirituality.

This spiritual impulse pulled me towards the Buddhism section at my local bookstore. Buddhism seemed to be devoid of these supernatural elements. After spending some time in India I learned this was a Western facade. Buddhism, like all other religions, is full of supernatural elements: reincarnation, tulkus, gods, dakinis, dharmapalas, and yidams. Much of this is read out by those that have popularized Buddhism in the West, but in its indigenous form it is there. That said, Buddhism has a rich and rewarding tradition of contemplative practice and philosophical inquiry that is capable of functioning independent of any supernatural elements. But so does Christianity.

One day, twelve or so years ago, I was reading a book by the Dalai Lama. In it he mentioned a name: Thomas Merton. I didn’t know Thomas Merton from a hole in the wall, but the Dalai Lama—who I deeply respect—gave him a glowing recommendation. So I bought my first Merton book—No Man Is An Island—which began my love affair with Thomas Merton and my introduction to contemplative Christianity.    

As I plunged into the wide array of contemplative Christian writers—ranging from Pseudo-Dionysius to Meister Eckhart, John of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Avila up to contemporary writers like Matthew Fox, Thomas Keating, Richard Rohr, and Cynthia Bourgeault—something began to awaken within me. Their words were resurrecting the winds of inspiration deep in my body. It felt like a homecoming.

In Contemplative Christianity I found a practicable spirituality that was organized around an experience of God, rather than paranormal speculation. Furthermore, it was consistent with my cultural background and required no ideological allegiances that disqualified my commitment to Buddhist practice or the principles of Buddhist spirituality that had for me proven to be true and effective. As a Westerner, their view supplemented my Buddhist practice and the practices they offered enlarged my spiritual life.

Eventually, it go to the point where I could no longer exclusively identify with either tradition. In fact, I am still in this bardo, so to speak. I am confused—actually, I am not confused! The confluence of resonant threads in my spirituality and my inability to honestly label myself as one or the other is probably a more accurate representation of the complexity of the human experience, and interestingly enough, more in line with the view selflessness in both traditions. I am comfortable without the name tag. And I am not alone in this. In the ever-developing spirituality of the modern West identification with traditions and labels are losing their significance (and not just for pretentious, quasi-intellectual reasons).  

The emerging view of spirituality in the West is one based loosely on the idea of pragmatism. What works? This is the concern driving the development of modern spirituality. And this concern necessarily absorbs into the existing framework effective ideas and practices from a variety of traditions. In fact, this view of spiritual practice is fleshed out in my book Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West.

This approach also exposes the inadequacies of the "believer vs. atheist" dichotomy. Falling through the cracks of this fatuous debate are millions of people who see religion as an effective vehicle for spiritual growth and personal, and thereby social, transformation—not as a set of truth-claims about the physical world.

If we are talking about the origins of life or the cosmos, then yes, in that limited sense, I am an atheist. Science is the most effective tool for answering those questions, not religion. However, if we are talking about moving beyond the narrow and lifeless world between our ears and reconnecting with the ground of meaning and being, then I am a religious person. When skillfully utilized, religion is, in my opinion, the most effective means of approaching and embodying our human nature.

The value of religion cannot be measured by its capacity to explain away the mysteries of the material world. That is not the job of religion. Those mysteries belong to science. And the fact that large numbers of people believe that religion’s value consists primarily in that endeavor is strange. It demonstrates our limited perspective and painfully anemic grasp of truth.

Yes, something is of value only if it is rooted in truth, but truth is not the same as trivia.

The word truth is a representation of reality, which is a rich, kaleidoscopic domain that the word "fact" fails to envelope. When the word “truth” is mistaken for the word “fact,” life is reduced to a myopic, single-tiered plane of cerebral existence that ignores every phenomena which escapes measurement.

Our understanding of truth must also account for those intangible dimensions of reality. It must account for consciousness and courage, meaning, longing, patience, and self-sacrifice. Love is not a quantifiable fact, but it is an indispensable quality of truth. And this aspect of truth, strangely enough, finds its most judicious descriptions in works of fiction, not philosophical treatises.

Fiction is not necessarily antithetical to truth, as any student of literature well knows. Fiction can be skillfully deployed as a means of communicating truth. When fiction is used to communicate truth (The Odyssey or The Lord of the Rings) or when fact and fiction are blended in an effort to lift truth from its historical context and place the story on a timeless plane (The Bible), it is properly called myth. At its core, religion is a collection of myths coupled with practices or rituals that enable us to participate in the story.

Myth is a system of symbols that, as the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell explained, point past themselves “to a ground of meaning and being that is one with the consciousness of the beholder.” There is always a sphere of experience that escapes the plain language of facts. This is the realm of mythology.

Historical facts detail the events of times passed; whereas myth tells the story of an ongoing journey, the human adventure. Since mythology is organized around eternal truths rather than historical details, it invites us to participate in the journey, which in truth is the unfolding of our authentic life.

Briefly stated, myth tells the story of mankind, not a particular man, and therefore invites us to participate in the telling of this story through our lived experience.

The value of religion consists, not in the factual accuracy of these stories, but in their capacity to arouse within us the courage to be in the face of despair. And furthermore, couple that inspiration with an actionable path structure that enables us to actualize that potential or express it in our actions. The value of God, for example, is found in its ability to direct our longing—to set our gaze on the transcendent realm or center our identity in the selfless awareness of the heart. The word God does not explain existence away. It is not the name of the most powerful being in the universe. God is a symbol for Being-itself, which we participate in through basic awareness.

God is not a being far removed from the reality and the immediacy of our daily life, but The intimate, intensely personal, and deeply affecting presence that substantiates our life.

The word God calls us out of the claustrophobic, false-self identity that is at the root of our suffering and into the life of the body. But religion is not a collection of magic words. Religion without practice is wishful thinking. Practice births God into the world through our actions. Prayer invokes the power of Being in the face of fear, anger, and depression. Meditation practice crucifies the false-self on the cross of silence, enabling our true Self—Christ, if you will—to be resurrected from rubble of our disembodied life. This true Self—not I but the Christ within—is the impersonal or selfless quality of basic awareness that mediates our relationship with God.    

In the words of Rabbi David Cooper, God is not a noun, but a verb. When practiced—rather than simply affirmed—God enables us to overcome personal suffering. And that is the standard of truth by which religion must be judged.

William James wrote in The Meaning of Truth, “The true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in our way of behaving.” I don’t agree with the idea that expedience is any more representative of truth than are facts. I believe that both have their place. Each represents a quality of truth.

Suffering brings us to the spiritual path. We might pick up a book about spirituality, meditation, or some religion for reasons of curiosity, but no one commits themselves to the painstaking work of spiritual practice unless they are looking for transformation. And suffering is what motivates us to change. So when we ask the question, “Does it work?” we must understand that to mean, “Does religion enable us to overcome suffering?” For example, we get frustrated when we lose our temper because deep-down we are aware of a greater potential. We know that our responses are limited, that our freedom is restricted by the conditioned reactions of the false-self system and we yearn to throw off the old, tired ways of this false-self. The question is, does religion enable us to accomplish that goal? It depends.

When religion is viewed as a series of truth claims that must be affirmed or denied, it does not have the ability to change our lives. It isn’t even concerned with this life. When you believe in the literal existence of heaven and hell—eternal bliss and eternal damnation—this life loses its significance. Such religion is forced to ignore the concerns of the present moment and obsess over the hereafter. However, if you reject this literalist position, which creates the false dichotomy of “believer vs. atheist,” and accept the claim that there is truth in usefulness, then you recognize the space between atheism and fundamentalism. In this space, religion is free to focus on this life.

When religion is seen not as an answer to the question of existence, but as a sophisticated system of practice that enables us to enter into the experience of Being-itself, then yes, religion has the ability to overcome personal suffering. It has the ability to conquer spiritual death.