Holding in the Light
August 4, 2024 § Leave a comment
There is within each of us a Light,
a Light that can comfort us and heal us,
that can drive away the shadows
and illuminate the way forward.
When we hold someone in that Light,
we act in our own Light
and we give answer to their Light;
we stand beside them,
we stand in solidarity with their suffering;
and we say, “You are not alone.
We are here with you.
The Holy Spirit is here with you.
And together we offer hope, faith, and love.”
Deepening Techniques, Part 1b: Relaxation with Focus—The Breath
August 1, 2024 § Leave a comment
First, a note about brain waves. A commenter has said that my information about brain waves is out of date, and I wouldn’t be surprised. I learned what I passed on in the early 1970s and have tried to update my knowledge since. That’s fifty years of research ago. I should have mentioned that. That doesn’t change the value of using techniques that shift our consciousness more toward the dream state, though.
The words “breath” and “spirit” are the same in Sanskrit, Greek, and Hebrew for a reason. The word “inspiration” means both being inspired and breathing in for a reason. Your breath and your spirit are intimately related.
Breath is the only autonomic function we can consciously control. Taking deep breaths slows us down. Slowing the breath relaxes us.
Deep Breaths
There’s more to taking deep breaths that you might think. We normally breath from the chest, even when we take a deep breath. But it’s better to take a deep breath from your belly. Well, technically, it’s from your diaphragm. Here’s how you do it: As you breathe in, let your belly expand. When it’s bulged out as much as is natural, then switch to the chest and finish the inspriration. Now that’s a deep breath.
Paying Attention
This is the basic element in any breathing exercise: to just pay attention. Just keeping your attention on your breath is a powerful deepening exercise. Your mind will wander off onto something else after a few breaths. When it does, you just bring it back to your breath. That simple. The more you sustain your attention in this way, the deeper you sink. But now for an added element to paying attention.
Letting Go of the Expiration
This utterly simple addition to attentive breathing is even more effective: Pay attention as you exhale and exhale naturally, without force. When all the air in your lungs has been expelled, DO NOT BREATHE IN right away. If you just wait and pay attention, your body will naturally pause between breaths for an amazingly long time. This is a letting go of breath, a letting go, letting . . . until your body naturally starts the next breath.
Allow this letting go, breath after breath, and you will go deep after deep.
Now, sometimes you might feel a little panic while doing this. Your body—and your mind—are not used to this extended pause. If you feel compelled by this little anxiety to breathe, go ahead, No problem. Return to the exercise with the next breath. You might feel the need to make this breath a deep one. Go ahead.
The more you continue letting this pause after exhalation take place, the longer the pause is likely to last, until you reach a floor. It’s at this point that I usually switch to the next part of my practice, if I haven’t already.
Deepening Techniques, Part 1a: Relaxation with Focus—The Eyes
July 31, 2024 § 1 Comment
To start
I sit in a comfortable chair that helps me keep my back as straight as possible, feet flat on the floor. I close my eyes. I take a couple of natural breaths.
The eyes
The brain devotes seventy-five percent of its activity dealing with the outer senses to vision. So just closing your eyes reduces brain activity substantially. But one more eye technique can jump-start your descent into the depths: looking upward.
I was taught that the reason that saints look up in sacred art is because looking upwards lowers brainwave activity. The artists somehow intuitively knew this. Of course, they could also have been looking up toward heaven. Same thing?
Brain waves
Let me get into this a bit. The brain produces four bands of brain waves from different parts of the brain, and these regions of the brain contribute different aspects of our consciousness. The bands of brain waves are named alpha, beta, delta, and theta. All parts of the brain are firing at once pretty much all the time, so we are always producing all of the brain wave groups, but at any one time one of these groups has the greater share of the total brain wave pie chart.
Our normal wakeful consciousness is in beta (so-called because it was the second to be discovered), between 14 and 21 cycles per second (CPS). Alpha (the first to be discovered), between 7 and 14 cps, is the brain in the dream state and in periods of deep relaxation or creativity. Theta (4–7) is deeper sleep and responsible for fight and flight. Delta (1–4) is deep sleep.
Back to the eyes. Looking upward shifts the brainwave balance toward more alpha, less beta.
“Deep up”
You can raise the upward angle of your gaze in three stages. The second stage brings you deep; the third stage is a very powerful deepening exercise.
Stage 1: Just look up, which you will easily do with focused and sustained attention.
Stage 2: Deliberately look even farther up, as far up as it seems “natural”. You will begin to feel a little strain on the muscles controlling the eyes; it’s a little bit uncomfortable.
Stage 3: Look even farther up, with the focus of your gaze up inside your skull deep behind your forehead, where the pineal gland is. This is the third eye.
Doing this feels really weird, and I can only sustain it myself for a moment or two. But that’s all it takes. You will feel a tension in your forehead and in your brain and a mental plunging sensation—I don’t know how else to describe it. When you release your gaze, you will notice a major difference in your consciousness.
Deepening Techniques, Part 1—Introduction
July 30, 2024 § 1 Comment
Download the series
I have created a page aggregates the posts in which I describe various techniques for centering down or deepening, shared from my own practice and experience. Here’s the link:
Deepening Techniques for Friends
When the series is finished, I will publish a pdf file for downloading on that page with all of the posts in one document.
Deepening techniques and spiritual formation
I think that spiritual formation is one of the more important roles that a Quaker meeting should play in the spiritual lives of those members and attenders who want it. By spiritual formation I mean, as Sandra Cronk put it in her School of the Spirit pamphlet Spiritual Nurture Ministry Among Friends, helping people
“grow in relationship with God and become more receptive to the work of the Inward Guide.” In practical terms, I see spiritual formation as efforts to help members to clarify their faith, to identify and mature their spiritual practice, and to integrate both their faith and practice into the Quaker way.
Our meetings don’t do a good enough job of spiritual formation. We don’t usually mentor newcomers. We don’t usually provide programs that expose our members to the various spiritual disciplines that might serve their formation, let alone teach these disciplines. We leave this process of self-discovery and maturation to osmosis, to chance, and to personal initiative.
And when we do focus on spiritual formation, we very rarely pass on techniques for deepening consciousness. The Christian tradition is in general very weak in its understanding of consciousness and the role it could play in spiritual development; Quakerism is only marginally better.
So I want to try to fill this deepening technique gap a little bit. I have a lot of experience with meditation in several disciplines, and I have a settled devotional practice that really works well for me. I want to share it here in a series of posts.
Much of what I will be passing on comes from yoga, which offers a several-thousand-year-old science of consciousness. Most of the rest comes from my time as a teacher of Silva Mind Control, which has a sinister sounding name but is a quite effective self-help and psychic healing toolbox with a quasi-scientific approach centered around brain wave science. Mind Control teaches some deepening techniques and their theory.
These techniques are just what I’ve come to for myself and they won’t work for everyone. We each have our own spiritual temperaments and the whole point of a Quaker spiritual formation program is not to inculcate but to invite, not to indoctrinate but to share, to explore together options that we might find fosters and deepens our spiritual and religious experience.
I feel this is especially important for the quality of our worship. I believe that deepening one’s consciousness is one of the most important things we can do as Friends to foster Spirit-led vocal ministry and the gathered meeting. The more people who have entered a deeper consciousness, the more likely the meeting is to be gathered, and techniques make a difference.
A personal outline of practice
So let me start in this post with just an outline of the routine I use when I meditate, which I’ll unpack in some detail in subsequent posts. My practice progresses through three phases or clusters of technique:
- relaxation with focus,
- starting with the eyes looking up,
- then breathing deeply,
- then focusing and consciously relaxing discreet sections of your body, working from the face down to the toes in concert with your breath; then
- prayer, broadly defined,
- affirmations in concert with with breathing and relaxation,
- inviting in the Presence, however, you define that, and
- projecting out your “mind forms” of healing and blessing; and finally
- meditation proper, that is, sustained inward attention on something that serves your deepening.
In the next post, I will start with the eyes.
A New Bible Commentary Blog
July 24, 2024 § 1 Comment
Dear Readers:
As if one blog was not enough, I have started another one.
Bible Openings is a vehicle for sharing my openings into the Bible. It’s subtitle is Reading the Bible creatively in the Spirit. Making it relevant to our times and lives. These openings keep pressing on me to share them, until, after this first one on Matthew 18:20 came to me, I couldn’t deny them any longer.
You can read an introduction explaining what I’m about on the blog’s About page.
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments, Part 4
June 22, 2024 § Leave a comment
Thou shalt not covet.
On the face of it, this commandment seems to prohibit inner desire for something that is not yours. But that connotation breaks radically from all the other commandments with its focus on the inner life. The other commandments, and indeed all of Torah, quite consistently and definitely focus on the outer life. Sin in biblical religion is about action, not thought; it’s about what you do, not how you feel.
When Jesus said, Whoever looks at a woman with lust in his heart commits adultery with her, he was giving us a radical innovation of biblical moral faith. The Essenes were the first to go there in their rules and writings some time after 165 BCE, but Jesus took it to a new level. We have retrojected his moral sensibilities back onto Hebrew scripture and onto this commandment in particular.
If this commandment is about outward action, not inward feeling, then it prohibits actions that would deliver on these desires. That is, the tenth commandment prohibits swindling; it prohibits stealing by deceit. (Outright theft is covered by Thou shalt not steal.) It’s a “white collar crime” rather than burglary or robbery. Specifically, the tenth commandment prohibits latifundia, loan-sharking that uses debt as a weapon with which to seize other people’s property unlawfully.
This commandment lies behind Isaiah’s famous oracle in Isaiah 5:8: “Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left alone in the midst of the land! The Lord of Hosts has sworn in my hearing: Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses without inhabitant.”
Note that, in this context, coveting a wife or servant is not about lust, it’s about property. If your debt is deep enough, you have to hand over people in your family or household as debt slaves, who will pay off your debt with their labor as a kind of indentured servant. The maximum term of service is seven years, according to Deuteronomy. But in the meantime, and assuming your creditor follows Torah in this manner, he has your unpaid labor at his disposal.
Ever since Ronald Reagan repealed our usury laws and allowed banks to charge more or less whatever interest they wanted, banks and other lenders have become legalized loan sharks. Now our entire economy is in violation of the tenth commandment, but the coveters are not people, but corporations in their status as legal persons. Note that in Torah, and in the gospel of Jesus, it is illegal to charge interest on a loan at all.
Louisiana’s ruling elites are probably pretty focused on the wives and maidservants, and on coveting as lusting, given how obsessed some conservative Christians are with sex. But they will be teaching the kids in the schoolrooms they bedeck with their posters a false understanding of this commandment and failing to teach them about God’s good news for the poor, which Jesus proclaimed, namely, that we shall do whatever we can to keep people free in Christ from debt, starting with “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.”
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments, Part 3
June 22, 2024 § Leave a comment
Thou shalt not take the name of Elohim Yahweh in vain.
Taking God’s name in vain means violating an oath in which one has invoked Elohim Yahweh’s judgment as the guarantor of one’s oath. Well, a lot of us, maybe most of us, swear quite a lot. I do myself; not good, I admit. But I have never taken the name Elohim Yahweh in vain. But naturally, we expand and generalize this commandment to include any name of God, hewing to the spirit of the law rather than the letter.
However, most of our cursing is really a form of expletive; it’s a sharp verbal exclamation point that carries and amplifies our reaction to an experience. I’s not part of a formal oath. This expletive kind of swearing is not technically “covered” by this commandment, which is about formally swearing to something and then breaking your oath.
This exactly describes the actions of Louisiana’s ruling elites with this law. They have sworn an oath to uphold the constitution of the United States, and have invoked God as the guarantor of their oath under penalty of God’s judgment by saying, “so help me God.” And now they have deliberately violated their oath by violating the constitution’s first amendment. They obviously plan to take this to the Supreme Court, where they expect the conservative majority will say that, actually, it’s not a violation of the first amendment, after all. Until then, though, and on its face, they have with their actions taken the Lord’s name in vain as oath-breakers and can expect the judgment of the God whom they have invoked.
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments, Part 2
June 22, 2024 § Leave a comment
Thou shalt not make for yourself a graven image
I grew up with a painting of Jesus on the wall that made him look vaguely like Charlton Heston. Such paintings bedecked the walls of lots of people back then; maybe they still do. The Roman church and its believers have for millennia put crucifixes on the walls of their churches, buildings, and homes, not to mention the vast quantity of other sacred art portraying Jesus, the saints, even God the Father. I saw Michelangelo’s Pieta when it was in New York when I was a teenager and even as a teenager, I felt its power. It is a magnificent piece of art. It also violates the second commandment.
If we assume, as the ruling elites of Louisiana do, that God himself (sic) wrote the ten commandments, then he understood himself to be pure spirit, which could not be represented by any outward form, which then would tend to attract worship in his stead, as the golden calf famously did in the Bible’s case study of the matter in Exodus 32. God wanted his followers to worship him in spirit and in truth, not in outward forms. This is the very foundation of the Quaker approach to worship.
Louisiana’s Ten Commandments
June 22, 2024 § 1 Comment
The governor of Louisiana has recently signed a bill that requires public schools to display a large poster of the ten commandments in each classroom. This is unconstitutional behavior, but it is also ignorant, sloppy, and disingenuous, maybe even deceitful, theology. I won’t talk about how this seems to violate the first amendment of the US constitution’s establishment clause. Rather, I want to address the way we violate the commandments themselves and the bad theology behind these violations, which makes the people who wrote, passed, and signed this law immoral according to their own professed faith.
The vast majority of modern-day Christians violate the first two commandments. We often violate the third. And we usually misunderstand the tenth commandment and ignore the way Jesus interpreted it. Louisiana’s ruling elites are either ignorant of the meaning of the ten commandments, or ignore-ant of their meaning.
In the next few posts, I want to explain what I mean.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Traditional Christianity inherently violates the first commandment. Traditional Christianity places Jesus Christ before the Father in every way that matters. Christians look to Christ for their salvation from sin, which is their understanding of the purpose of their religion; his sacrifice on the cross is what saves them and he even plays a role as a judge, though his Father is presumably the chief justice. Christians pray in Jesus’ name, even though Jesus himself prayed directly to his Father—“Our father who art in heaven.” The paragraph about Jesus in all the creeds, Nicene, Apostolic, and Athanasian, is far longer than those for the Father and the Holy Spirit, and its theology is central to the creed as a whole.
Christian theology’s solution to this problem is the theology of the trinity. In my opinion, with this theology we project a meaning out of the theological dissonance created by holding two opposing ideas and commitments of faith in one’s mind at the same time: that there are three Powers in heaven, but really, there is only one. (By “theological dissonance,” I mean the combination of cognitive and moral dissonance). I consider the arguments for why the trinity is truth quite tortured. I feel that the only real solution for this dissonance is to fall back on faith and let reason be.
Now I’m not saying that Jesus Christ is not God, nor that the triune God is not real, nor that Friends should not worship a triune God. Some religious temperaments do not need a coherent and sensible theology to know religious fulfillment. Some traditions of religious faith and practice can deliver on their promises without a reasonable theology. And just because it doesn’t work for me doesn’t mean that the Trinity doesn’t work for others or, more importantly, that it isn’t the religious truth.
But traditional conservative Christian evangelicalism does, in fact, need a coherent theology; it’s all about what you believe. And I’m saying that trinitarian Christianity isn’t monotheism, however clever your argument is. Three persons but one God—how does that work? This is why the rabbis at the Council of Jamnia in 84 CE declared Christianity a heresy: there can only be one Power in heaven.
More importantly for an examination of Louisiana’s new law, on the face of it, traditional Christianity puts Christ before his Father in every way that really matters, even though Jesus himself did exactly the opposite—and that violates the first commandment.
Are We A Chosen People?
June 9, 2024 § 2 Comments
In the elder days, Friends would sometimes refer to themselves as a “peculiar people.” By “peculiar” they did not mean that they were odd, though they were odd, and I think they knew they were odd. Rather, they meant that they were a a distinct people, a chosen people; they had been gathered by Christ as a people of God for a purpose.
This identity as a chosen people appears in the passage in the gospel of John from which we get our name as the Religious Society of Friends:
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me, but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. (John 15:12–17)
Integral to the identity that we claim with our name from this passage are five things:
- The commandment of love—“Love one another.”
- Direct and intimate communion with the spirit of the Christ—“You are my friends.”
- The promise of (continuing) revelation—“I have made known to you everything . . .” And
- Being chosen—“I chose you.”
- For a purpose: a mission as a called people of God—“Go and bear fruit.”
Pondering this passage today in meeting for worship raised some queries:
- Do we see ourselves as a chosen/called people of God?
- If so, what is our mission?
- Are we bearing fruit that will last?
