An Extra-Spectral Year

This year has been something else.  I suspected it would be when I realized purple was going to be its color.  I've never been fond of this color; you might even say I'm porphyrophobic.   I've always associated purple with discomfort, with intensity, and also with death.  When I finished making my collage for the year and contemplated the finished product, I just knew it was going to be a fiercely disturbing year, and that there would be death in it.

Then, at the beginning of February, my younger brother Scott unexpectedly died.  And that was just the beginning.  There have been deaths and brushes with death on many different levels this year.  I could do about ten more posts on each of those experiences, but I'll spare you all that.

Really, the death theme started at the end of 2011, and that's partly how purple came to be my color for 2012.  I had been writing the weekly blog for a client's website.  Her product, called Life at Hand, is a system for recording and organizing personal information and vital documents, so a lot of what I was researching to blog about had to do with estate planning and other end-of-life stuff.  In the process of that research, I became more and more aware of (and disturbed by) how deeply in denial we are as a culture about all things death-related.  I began to feel an urgent sense to do something about that, but I knew not what.  All I knew is that death was going to be a focus for me for a while.

When Scott died, I took on the task of planning and leading his memorial.  At the time, I had been happily planning the Valentine's tea party I mentioned in my last post, inspired about the opportunity to create a celebration of my woman friends.  Now that enthusiasm went into creating a different kind of celebration altogether, a celebration of Scott's life.

But I had never done anything remotely like planning a memorial before, so I went into major research mode, and what I quickly discovered is that there is very little freely available on the Internet that is useful for such a task .  The poems and readings I found were mostly cheesy and/or bland, and I was horrified that several sites wanted to charge for the most basic resources.  For instance, one site I landed on wanted $30 for a funeral program template Word document.  After many, many hours of research I did finally find some good stuff, and managed to put it all together, but my sense that how death is approached in our culture needs to have the lid blown off it was amped up several levels.

It wasn't just because of the research, either.  It was because of Scott.

I had never had much of an opinion or feeling either way about the idea of connecting with people beyond the grave.  When people recount experiences of having felt the presence of a dead loved one, I've never really believed or disbelieved it.  But with Scott's death, that changed forever.

One day, shortly after his death, I was sitting with a friend in a coffee shop, talking about him.  Some amazing things had been happening among those he was connected to; a sense of community had formed over many miles among us.  His two ex-wives were connecting with each other, for instance.  And for me, who had been alienated from Scott for several years because his addictions and demons had made him an unsafe person for me to let into my life, I felt all of the walls I'd erected with him come down, and I simply loved him once again.  As I discussed all this with my friend in the cafe, I said, "I have no regrets; I'm at peace with all of this and I can tangibly feel that he is at peace too.  I just wish I could give him one good hug."  And as I said that, all of a sudden everything just lit up and became more alive, vibrant with warm good life; and his spirit, his essence - HE - was there hugging me, and it was infinitely more satisfying than any physical hug.

Eckhart Tolle says that when someone dies it's like a soap bubble bursting; the outer form of the bubble is gone, and what was inside that bubble is released.  That's as good an analogy as any I've heard to describe how this could be.

Can I prove that it was really Scott's essence there with me?  No, of course not.  But I know it on a level that trumps the puny "knowledge" of the rational mind.  Conveniently, there's a fitting metaphor here involving my color for the year: 

There is no such thing as the "wavelength of purple light" on the visible color spectrum; purple only exists as a combination, and is therefore referred to as "extra-spectral."  It wasn't even acknowledged on Newton's color wheel. However, as it says on Wikipedia, "The spectrum is often divided up into named colors, though any division is somewhat arbitrary: the spectrum is continuous."

Just as the color spectrum is continuous regardless of the divisions we impose upon it, so is the spectrum of life and death.  And whether you classify and divide the spectrum, whether you name the color or not and include it as part of a system you recognize, you know it when you see it, and that's all that matters. 

Heart Surgery

God has to work on your soul “in secret,” according to the saints and mystics.  If God gave you any idea of what God was doing, which is always radical surgery, you would do one of two things:  you would try to stop it, or you would try to engineer it and take control of the process.  God has to operate in darkness to get the job done.  ~Richard Rohr

I chose the word bless as my word for the year because of a book that friend, author, and fellow blogger, Jonna-Lynn gave me.  This book is called The Gentle Art of Blessing: A Simple Practice That Will Transform You and Your World and was written by a man named Pierre Pradervand.  The premise of the book truly is simple; it's the idea of practicing blessing any- and everyone who (literally or mentally) crosses your path (including yourself).  And in terms of freeing the mind from negative and obsessive thoughts about the self and others, it really works.  For it to work, however, the blessings must be sincere, they must come from the heart, and this of course is the hard part.  But I've discovered that if I am the least little bit willing, and can muster up just one simple blessing-thought, it quickly blossoms into more.

With this blessing practice combined with green as my color for the year, which is the color related to the heart chakra, I already feel enfolded in an intense gentleness, energized by a vibrant airiness, circulated by a  lush bright flow.

And yet, there is something else going on too, something I've been having great difficulty putting my finger on.  When I tried to write about the feelings I've been having in my journal the other day, I kept seeing the image of cutting up a chicken, and thinking of the word "unhinged," and a Bible verse came to me, Hebrews 4:12:  "For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart."  This is the best description of what's been happening within me that I have found so far.

I have been slowly replacing the word "God" in my vocabulary with "Being."  Eckhart Tolle points out in The Power of Now that for many people, "God" as a word has become too tired and overused (and even abused) to truly point to what it points to anymore, which is far more mysterious than anyone can fathom.  The word "Being" however, is very open-ended; an atheist could probably use it comfortably, and it points to the great mystery of sentient presence, whatever you believe its origins to be.

My point in saying all this, is that for me, "the word of God" is any manifestation of Being that I pay close attention to, which is to say, anything at all.  By this process of blessing and by simply practicing presence in the moment as I have for several months now, things have become loosened within me, and lately I have this sense of being unhinged.  When negative thoughts try to take over my mind these days, I experience it far more intensely in my body than I ever used to.  Specifically, I feel it as a trembling and weakness and acute anxiety in the area of my heart.  However, it's also much easier for me to recognize and move out of such negativity.  Moving into blessing is one way to do that, putting my attention on how I feel inside my body is another.  Sometimes all I need to do is breathe.

The dividing of soul and spirit mentioned in the verse above I read as the division of the temporal and the eternal, the self that uses mind to operate in the world, and the selfless spirit that is the eternal witness.  According to these definitions, I can say that by practicing watching my self/soul, I have become more aware of the spirit, the one who watches.  All of these words are inedequate; I have no way to really explain this.  I'm always relieved when I find a metaphor to express such things, and yesterday morning as I sat in meditation with these deeply disturbing physical/emotional sensations, I finally landed on a metaphor that fits, and the moment I did, I felt centered and calm:  Pruning.  Green surgery.

Back in June, I discussed pruning as metaphor in a post called The Ruthless Gardener, but back then, the pruning was about outer situations and relationships; now it's more intimate.  It's about thought processes, cherished mental habits and beliefs, and so on.

Somehow, by envisioning limbs being cut off a tree, I came to peace with the loss of control I've been feeling. Which has resulted from a greater and greater recognition of the illusion of any such control, that the thought-habits the mind cherishes are its always futile attempt to make control real and grasp it forever.

Yikes!  That's way too convoluted.  Let's try this instead:

The spirit prunes the soul; Being prunes everything that interferes with Itself.  

Backstory

As it turns out, I have given up church for Lent. 

Will I go back once Lent is over?  I don't know.  I have no idea what's going to happen next in any area of my life.  I'm out of control.  (I looked all over for it - I'm definitely out.)  Hurray!

Giving up attachment to stories.  Surrendering all goals except awakening, the paradox being that to awaken, even that goal must be surrendered.

Learning to say Yes to everything.  As someone very wise once pointed out, Yes is surrender.

I started out by giving up bitching for Lent.  That was the surface goal, but I recognized that to truly do this, I had to give up the negative thinking that leads to bitching in the first place, otherwise it would just be a sorry attempt at control.

When I announced my intention on my blog, Dan recommended Byron Katie and The Work.  I began to explore that website, then mentioned what I was discovering there to Jennifer, who suggested I also read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.  From there began an amazingly rapid process of unraveling:

To give up bitching I had to undo negative thinking.  To undo negative thinking I had to look at my beliefs, which led to examining the stories I tell myself, which led finally to seeing that all stories are untrue.  Even the good ones.

I came to the edge of this forest once before, a long time ago, but I wasn't ready to enter then.  There were still stories I wanted to believe, and I didn't understand that one doesn't come to Reality by denying the body (or the world) and its stories, but by fully entering into them with an alert and embracing yet questioning mind.

To see the world as illusion or Maya is not to blow it all off and sit in your head.  It's merely to perceive the deeper Reality that is the Source.  (I feel like A.A. Milne, using all these caps.)  That was one of my biggest stumbling blocks when I tried to come to this before, and I ultimately found myself lost.  That's when I turned to the Bible and church.

In adopting a biblical worldview, one of the greatest joys was in experiencing the earth and myself as Creation, as real.  (Now I'm thinking of The Velveteen Rabbit.)  Reading the Bible, especially some of the beautiful nature imagery in the Psalms, and shifting my worldview this way turned me into an environmentalist and a social activist, because I finally had permission to care, to love Creation and all of its creatures.  Before that, when I saw the world as illusion, as something to be transcended, I didn't see it at all let alone feel that I wanted to care for it.

And so I entered a new paradigm, one in which there was a true Presence and Creative Intelligence who loved the earth, who made it and continues to make it in every moment, and who - could it possibly be??? - loved me.  Forgave me.  A Being who I didn't have to keep trying to climb some endless ladder to get to, who was instead reaching down to me, just where I was with all of my flaws.  I spiritually relaxed for the first time in years, maybe ever.  I accepted the gift that I now saw was always being offered, and realized that this was all I'd ever had to do to be with God.  In Christianity, that gift comes in the form of Christ.

I had spent so much time and energy trying (and failing) to connect with a formless, distant God, that it was an immense relief to embrace the incarnate version.  So much more accessible.  The Son became for me the access point to the Divine and to my own incarnation, the intersection of the ineffable and the tangible.  This is one of the most important symbolic meanings of the cross for me.

It makes perfect sense to me that if there is a God that God would take the form of a human to be able to communicate in a language humans can hear and comprehend.

Now, as this most powerful and unexpected Lenten journey winds down toward Easter, I find myself considering anew the Resurrection.  There are those who never seem to get to that part of the story.  There are others who try to jump straight to it and miss the point of the way of the cross, which is about surrender, the ultimate Yes.  Without that Yes, resurrection is impossible.  However, the Yes can only happen because it sees the deeper Reality that makes resurrection not only possible but inevitable.

Asking if (or stating that) Jesus and the Resurrection really happened loses all importance when one comes to the point of view that nothing has ever really happened, no story is true except in the telling.  Anything with a beginning, middle, and end necessarily falls into the realm of illusion because the present moment is the only ultimately real thing, and the Being within it.

And so, as I contemplate the Jesus story during a time in which all stories are dissolving, what I see, the true beauty of this and any good story - which is any story rightly perceived - is that the point is to go beyond the story into the Yes, the surrender, the all-encompassing Now that is eternal reality.  In that Yes are both the crucifixion and the resurrection; in this one moment they occur simultaneously, and are seen for the stories they are. 

Gradual change occurs in an instant.  And now, all that's left is love.

The Conjunctive Mood

Recently my son was having trouble with his laptop; it was processing slower than he wanted it to, so I showed him how to defragment the hard drive.  While looking at the defrag screen together, he was confused, and asked how it works.  I said I wasn't entirely sure, but that it's a way of moving files together so there's no wasted space.

The analogy I used was that of a bookshelf, on which the books are disorganized and randomly placed, some standing, some in piles, with unused space in-between.  Defragmenting is like taking all the books and standing them up together to create more usable space.  It's a way of organizing.

I've been reading Eckhart Tolle's miraculous book, The Power of Now, and later that day I came across a passage that made me go deeper into the defragmentation analogy.  He says that the inability to feel connected to Being (a word he uses in place of "God") causes you to "perceive yourself consciously or unconsciously as an isolated fragment."  And I thought, when we feel this way we are like a book askew and alone on the shelf, unread, undusted, just taking up space.

Or we are like an instrument in the orchestra when the musicians are tuning up and there's no harmony.  Each instrument makes a sound with no connection to any other, and the result is discord, cacophony.

I have not been blogging much lately, partly because my outer life has become quite busy of necessity, but even more so because my inner life has been shifting radically.  I have been undergoing a defragmentation process.  The orchestra has stopped tuning up and the first few notes of coherence and harmony have begun.

This is happening because of some recent life events that have urged me to move away from the negative thought processes that have kept me fragmented.  Some of these events have been by choice, such as giving up bitching for Lent, and some of them have come from the "outside."  In conjunction with these events is the reading I've been doing of Tolle and of Byron Katie's book Loving What Is.  At this point, I must heartily thank Jennifer for directing me to Tolle and Dan for directing me to Byron Katie.  The fact that I was turned on to these amazing resources at the same time blows my mind.  Literally.  Because the purpose of these books is in fact completely aligned, and that purpose is undoing the egoic mind, bringing the Self into awareness and acceptance of reality in the moment.  Embodied in this is the realization that the mind is an instrument, yet only one in the whole orchestra.  It has its uses, but when it's allowed to run the show, the result is discord.

Within a few days of applying the principles of these books, I was experiencing and responding to life significantly differently.  (I will post more about this soon.)

Around the same time, I also drew a card from The Kabbalah Deck, and pulled the Hebrew letter Vov (or Vav), which means "and."

Edward Hoffman, the creator of The Kabbalah Deck, says that Vov "reveals that things seemingly separate and even contradictory...can be seen to comprise a higher unity.  With the right attentiveness, we can perceive the nature of that unity and thereby resolve conflicts."  This sounds uncannily related to the practice of Negative Capability (see my About Me section for the definition of this term.)  This quote shows why Negative Capability is important, and not as abstract and esoteric as it seems.  It's a practical process resulting in defragmentation.

And.  Such a little but powerful word.  The supreme conjunction.  And is the solution to fragmentation.  It is the empty space, the gap, the silence and stillness between things.  It's a powerful and always accessible koan. It's the reason I make collage, the very nature of it.  It joins all things.

Black and white.
Fire and water.
Male and female.
Inspiration and expiration.
Inner and outer.
Yes and no.
Past and future.

To meditate on the and is to truly apprehend the things it joins, but also to become less attached to them.  To see that higher unity, which cannot be understood by the egoic mind because its mantra is "or."

Interestingly, Vov is also associated with the ability to reverse past and future tenses in Biblical Hebrew.  According to Inner.org, "the power of teshuvah  [repentance or returning to God] to completely convert one's past to good, is the power of the vav to invert the past to the future.

I see a connection here to English grammar's conjunctive mood (more commonly called the subjunctive mood).  This is a way of joining past, present, and future tenses, but can be done for different purposes and with different effects.

It can emphasize the present as the place where past and future meet, or in the case of expressing a wish, for example, it does almost the opposite.  It reaches to the past and the future with no real recognition of the present.  This is very fitting, since wishing by its very nature reaches to the future with no regard for the present.

But the conjunctive mood is also used for blessing, a way of coming fully into the present and allowing it to extend into the future.  For example, the conjunctive mood phrase, "Peace be with you" is for right now, but also a continuation into the future.  Same thing with "God bless you."  It's subtle, because the emphasis is on the present, as it should be.  The hint of future enters with the implied word: "May."  (May) peace be with you, (May) God bless you.  If the word was included, the emphasis would be on the future, but because it is not, the present-tense form of the verb is in the spotlight.

Interestingly, this type of construction is falling out of usage, and (according to Wikipedia) especially in the UK, for some reason.  In fact, there its usage is actually being fought.  What does this change reflect, I wonder?   

I like this construction; I like contemplating that even the ways we use language reflect our spiritual condition.  It is another vehicle for practicing Negative Capability, specifically with the paradoxical and mysterious nature of time.  I find myself living in a conjunctive mood these days.  And my favorite koan-ish conjunctive mood phrase, appropriate to end this contemplation with is:

So be it.