THE BREATH OF COMPASSION
Snow
In highest silence we fly
passively melding wind and gravity
Judgment and thought
in crudely breaking steps
mimic our numb
perfection
We balm the upper side
of myriad twigs
upon each hidden tree
of cornices and sills
forgotten or condemned
exactly on the upper side
we visit each
and melting take
the one course to their ground
We are ruled by goodness
even more than truth
by love over justice
Falling light we rise
robe earth in white
that rays
from our faceless crystals
deep through each eye
awash in admiration
in highest silence
One night, dreamt I was one of a group of nuns in white, praying for the world. Overcome with compassion, I started crying with more and more overwhelming intensity. Woke up, then my son called out in his sleep from his room, “I can’t open the curtain!” At work that morning a nurse told us her dream. There was a man she loved humanly; another she loved spiritually, for whom she experienced a never-before-felt emotion of love growing til it woke her up.
Allah. “Al” means “The.” God is Al Aaah, The Breath of Compassion.
Compassion, vibrating harmonically, their grief is our grief, our stream of tears resting in a streambed of great peace, a current flowing in the ocean of Love.
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Baked While We Sleep
It’s been proven to me thousands of times, that anyone brought into our life is there to receive prayerful help (and so to help us) even if they don’t ask for it consciously. When we’re on the beam, we don’t pass by unheeding, cross to the other side of the street, or stay turned away. As in prayer, it’s all in the turning, which rounds us up.
We’re all “baked while we sleep;” we’re being alchemized all the time, no matter our state of awareness. Spiritual awakening is the crowning of creation, the frosting and the cake, while even before it happens, the birthday cake is here, creation moves around us.
All creatures are the Consciousness of God. God is the only life, the only one who experiences. To our ego it’s as if God is looking in through a two-way mirror, but to God everything is seamless and also seem-less. Endlessly variegated, God is an infinity of rippling awareness, simultaneously the simplest and the total complexity, having nothing to fear, loving Itself As Its neighbor.
Every time the deer take a step forward they move their heads backward as a kind of camouflage. That illustrates human striving. When we go “forward” we go “backward” in the same breath. We don’t accomplish what we think we do. And when we’re going “backward” we advance subterraneanly.
Our spiritual motion, another layer of our single activity, likewise goes forward and backward at once, or rests in one place, without trying to achieve. Only, at the greater level of awareness, we know this is happening. A balanced play that spirals open, into the real world that already Is.
The blind, unconscious, sleeping, all progress: We’re like a sprout rising through the ground towards the surface world, towards the warm sun.
Even our overlaid thoughts and feelings aren’t us, nor do they belong to us. They’re the group mind, leavened by spiritual impulse; all impersonal material which we each are given to deal with, to meditatively shift our awareness, just as with any seemingly distanced problem.
Each person’s life, each event, has unique lessons---God is completely economical. As we climb the mountain from every direction, each path has its limits, its perspective, and its role, and we can’t judge it, except with holy Love.
Every mind acts perfectly, according to its own conditioning.
This person here, with all their fear and anger, is God dealing with conditioning, doing what seems the best possible, in quandaries and suffering for us all, trapped unaware in the karmic web, forgivable, yes, and lovable as well. Together we’re all questing for Love.
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When we have tabernacled with the profound Silence, for Whom all points of view add perspective, we no longer dispute or lecture. We understand, we prize and feel compassion for each being in its full quirkiness, God’s self-education.
To “appreciate” means also to “perceive.” When we love our enemy, our close colleague, our self, we do this first in recognition of our great Identity beyond the perceptible. And then every aspect we perceive in this metaphorical world, “good” or “bad,” is to be equally appreciated as brought to us sacredly for our journey. So we also appreciate the appearance shell of our enemy, close colleague, self.
We normally are spared seeing our own face, and this Other may be us in a mirror, viewed from another angle, complementary. This Other is both difficult to deal with and beneficial. We have specific work to do. Our particular faults dissolve more, without combating them, as wisdom is increased; they are life buoys marking sites of still-concealed principles.
Another razor’s edge here: Compassion for all our shortcomings, all practice shots, without buying into any.
At one level of sacred awareness, we touch eternal perfection. On another plane of divine experience, when we see this broken world, we feel compassion, sympathetic engagement. We see that not only our divine core, but also our conditioned life and its suffering, are impersonal, blameless, and help lead us forward pricelessly in each instance.
Our shortfall from perfected Reality outpictures as every variety of dissonance until we’ve practiced our lessons and spontaneous harmony is playing. Yet no matter what judgments our ego makes, each encounter sings the holy overtones, interwoven into purposes that cross the levels.
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Compassionate Meditation
By grace, we build on the contemplative inquiry we’re learning to practice. Now we’re ready to embrace the sweeping unity of form and beyond, a further reach of meditating. With intent of heart, we stop controlling, we let go of the wheel:
1. Recognition. First, sitting quietly and patiently, the actual Identity of everyone involved is revealed, Real Being, one Life everlasting, flawless, innocent. We face no suppliant to assist, no alien power to resist.
In this Recognition, we impersonalize the errors involved, we drop them. They’re the processings of our mass psyche, our shared human sense. They’re no one’s personal property. So we have no individual to forgive for making mistakes. We start here.
2. Compassion. Then the divine feeling of everpresent compassion pours out from us. Our eyes are opened, so to speak, and we become aware of the others’ outward qualities in our world of appearances, with all their seeming virtues and flaws, their anguish. We all endure the pain of this human agony. As Socrates pointed out, those who do wrong inherently hurt as much as the victims, even as they may wall off that suffering. When we realize that, it adds to our compassion.
We see that everyone struggles and uniquely, essentially helps the world evolve. There’s no blame for errors. Rather, we contemplate the particular principles we’re fine tuning here and honor the great work of our One Self, in which each of us has tempestuously rocked.
3. Communion. And so our limited beliefs are freed up and we’re opened to truth, with humility and willingness to forgive, on the way into the Quiet Place.
4. Action. Lastly, our praying may bring outer steps that we need to take, God in action, which makes up our reconciliation. Make peace with thy brother. Sometimes meditation alone results in reconciliation, as when our brother miraculously realizes we’ve been praying for him, but often prayer must be attended by right action for the rapprochement.
Compassionate Meditation: Recognizing and resisting not, impersonalizing; compassion, with contemplative immersion in the principles involved; divine contact; action. Everyone’s gathered back into Sacred Relationship in Oneness.
A Peanut m&m
(If you live in a country without peanut m&m’s, you can make do by picturing an egg.)
In our compassionate meditation, we practice impersonalizing. We realize the so-called problem isn’t local to the others involved; we experience that the impersonal divine center of our own being is one with the divine center of all others.
Compassion like chocolate surrounds that peanut center.
The candy coating is the outer actions that spring from our inner work. A perfect interchange of any sort; righting all our connections; revealing our feelings when it’s meant; lightly, having a good time; everyone we meet a chosen member of the cast. This love in action is free unstinting flowing forth of joyful joining and harmonizing, intimate, overwhelming. With God’s own care for us, we take care of our friend or enemy, who is really God and the Self of our self.
Love, in our meditation and outer relation, is the sweet ingredient, the essence of all these layers, loving and being loved. And at some point the m&m melts in the mouth of the Lover; it’s not in our hands.
Organicity
When we meditate, it’s an organic whole. In compassionate prayer, we journey to the Center and back again. We don’t check off steps, but go by feeling the divine Presence and Activity to which we’ve surrendered. If we’ve crossed the bridge, then we’ve been taken through the moves to do it.
(Of course when it’s helpful we review these steps and remind ourselves, as well.)
Also, we’ve presented this in a logical sequence. In the actual practice, there might be any sort of order: We reach the Other in the divine contact. We may regard the conditioned self with compassion, then touch the inner depth. We might embrace the entirety of the divine Other all at once, for our continuum, from the center beyond form to the surface, expresses the One Life that Is.
After an effective impersonalizing meditation, we look at that human persona and realize that it has been just perfectly what it had to be, and we feel empathy pour through us. Surrendered to God’s point of view: Our compassion has an inner, unscratched, peaceful unseen Core and the outer feelings of utter love, acceptance and approval, and sympathy for the pain.
When we pray for any type of problem, such as someone’s illness or lack, the same approach might call out to be taken. We sink into the center of Being, impersonalizing their predicament, knowing there is no such thing as an evil power to resist, and also we experience this godly compassion, we honor their instructive mission.
Relativity: Two sons of a healer were playing teacher and disciple. The younger confessed “I stole a pickle from mommy’s jar in the kitchen.” The elder boy laughed. Then the little one started to cry. While comforting him, his big brother confided, “Daddy would never laugh at the problems of one of his students.” (From a 19th century European tale)
Compassion---during and after meditation, loving when our eyes reopen and we encounter the problematic angel. This gradation from perfect peace to compassion isn’t broken into various separate entities. God the Father, whose eyes are too pure to behold iniquity, and God the suffering Son, God is One. Our several levels of awareness are a single sacred activity, the united states of a miracle. It’s subtle as mist evaporating from the windshield, a huge difference but a smooth transition.
We humans take in all the data around, but consciously we filter out most of it. Spiritual Consciousness is multi-layered, the untouched bliss is one “aspect,” the compassion is another “aspect,” which is paradoxical. Feeling this deep compassion, a holy lovingkindness which
depends on both these facets, carries us along the footbridge that’s gently rocking our heart.
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Walking That Footbridge
Like a planet turning on its axis, our compassion revolves around our center of stillness from which it emanates. Our sympathetic vibrations resonate with all the spreading waves in our world. When love slings the footbridge across from our ineffable core to this human interval of changing visions, we open out a highway that traverses the whole universe, to transform the starting-line that’s the basis of this place, into a Renewed World.
This love is beyond form, totally simple and global at the Father’s end of the rope and uniquely suited at the Son’s end. When we awaken to that bridge of love, creating ever greater love from our thingless source (Ayin, Nothingness, the topmost kabbalistic sphere), we flow out from our sacred center of peace all the way through every outward circumstance, we honor the representative deeds of our companions, so we’re feeling for everyone’s struggles with their angels, which bless us all.
The more we know someone, the greater and harder is this act of love, since there are then so many more faults of which we are aware, sankaric (habitual) clamps which may also trap us, as with our matching Beloved and our family. The crux of our work may lie here.
Our holy lovingness, our reconciliation, our meditation in action, bring blessing and upliftment to our family, to our Self, to everyone. Even when we fall, we fall forward to enfold the Other One in a wholehearted outpouring. Gordian knots dissolve, specific truths reveal themselves, as we all grow together towards spiritual awareness, Sacred Relationship.
We go from “I Am the Lord thy God,” to the Two great commandments, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and....thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self.” We go from our impersonally recognizing the I within someone, to Loving the Other in all our actual encounters in this world, in all the Other’s particularity. Then we function as best friends to heal this broken stage. We see the Beyond-form passing through As the Other, a vagabond road that winds over a mountain, hidden roots sending forth the shoots that bend in rough winds.
We don’t hide our light under a bushel, not tossing our secret pearls towards unprepared hands, but giving forth our Love as seemingly human love. Like God the mime we reach the Other through our actions, our vibes, our friendliness, with the truth of worn sayings, vanishing in surrender like Mother Teresa, in her egalitarian concrete shining.
Being IS Becoming: The Fundament Self says Anoche, the divine I Am which incorporates We Are, which opens to the embodied messiah saying Here Am I, in this very stage setting, to act, to embrace.
A Many-Pointed Star
In meditating for people’s conflicts, we may see how each one is struggling with their sankaras and hard circumstances and in so doing is helping to lift up the world, and then we feel our compassion pouring out. And we can feel it like plasma reaching out from one person to the other and back again. Amongst all of us, a many-pointed star of compassion.
Such a process is never a judgment, a criticism of the shortcomings or praise of the virtues of others or ourselves. The only work we do is the work upon our self. Every issue is resolved within the healer’s own Consciousness. There is no such thing as an externalized dream. This is a spiritual universe, the manifestation of the one Consciousness that I Am. We’re all in the same bowl of soup. When I shift levels of awareness within, the picture around me changes, and I find us all grown closer.
Our prayer is not wishing for something or trying to make something improve. We never know how things “really oughta be,” nor can we bend the invisible arcs from their ways to make the least thing happen. In the world of our visions, we are recognizing, admitting, letting in, and living through the Identity that already Is, the love, the compassion, the harmony that Is.
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Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother
We can’t see our own face, or see through our own faults easily, or we wouldn’t have those exact faults.
Remember, our parents went before us and offered themselves up; now we learn from their mistakes and unfurl their shortcomings. Every person and every event shapes us and creates us, and is our father and our mother. Let’s honor them in their missing and falling, honor their missions, their commissions and omissions.
Honor thy father and mother. Honor the stern corrective events our collective human awareness dreams up, as well as the happy times, open to feeling both pleasure and pain. All events are procreative, fruitful, our father and mother. According to tradition, it says “father” first, embrace the difficult, because it offers as much as the nice mothering moments.
The failures of parents and mentors prove of precious value to us. Everyone builds new stories on the unfinished foundations of the past. If the ones who teach us could tie up all they’ve done in a pretty parcel with ribbons, seemingly quite completed, that would dampen our drive to launch our delicate vessels out upon scary, unknown seas.
Geppetto says, “Don’t mind me, son. Save yourself.” Our parents by coming first sacrifice themselves, and in loving and honoring our parents by shedding compassion upon them, we let open the door of higher awareness, so karma evaporates now into the sunlight of divine Grace, and salvation unveils for our parents living or dead, and brings all Consciousness out from the belly of Monstro the whale to Birth.
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The “Bad” Person
The “evil” person’s portion of our shared conditioning causes their misdeed, and it’s just as much me doing it. And as we’ve realized, the person who acts evilly suffers. Their distress and mistakes rule out some blind alley explored in the caduceus unfoldment of the universe, retrieve its hidden treasure, and thereby right our course. This all redounds to the glory of God. We are God’s new blossom, every petal counterpoised by its opposite number. So the greatest sinner is like the greatest saint. We can flow with compassionate love for this person, for ourselves, with our eyes open.
Love your enemy and bless him; it’s the enemy, the level of our one Self that is living within material or mental awareness, that is fragile, and seeks our Recognition.
If our adversaries destroy themselves, we help them arise.
We’re carrying our enemy’s pain: Desire good for our enemy, rejoice in his resurrection, wherein lies our own salvation.
The Winecup
A true story: One Friday night, the Rabbi and I could not find the winecup, though we searched scrupulously. It seemed stolen. So we used another one.
I recalled how in Israel I went to a temple, and they started reading about some innocent men who were framed for stealing a winecup, and their accuser, a powerful lord who could execute them, came in. Then he said, “Don’t you recognize me yet? I am your Brother.” Because I hadn’t known what they were reading, it had all hit me freshly.
Meanwhile, just before blessing the wine, the Rabbi was discussing this story of Joseph.
Then I thought, “They’re accused again, I should recognize that they’re really innocent, they are my Brother.” So I went to the kitchen and there was the cup just sitting on the counter in plain sight. We had two cups of wine for the blessing that night.
At the Window
A story: Martin was taking a midnight stroll through the village, when he spotted somebody in the dark, breaking into the poor cobbler’s shop and taking a pair of shoes. He dashed up to the window, struck the man, and dragged him to the corner under the streetlight. He confronted none other than the master teacher of the village! The master handed him the shoes and stammered, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Please forgive me.” And he ran off into the dark.
In shock and anger over his teacher’s betrayal, Martin returned to the window and nudged open the shutter to replace the shoes. He suddenly noticed with surprise that the abducted pair was only half-finished. Then inside one of them he found the gold coins his teacher had secretly hidden for the cobbler.
So at the time that we are meditating with compassion, we cease holding anyone to the appearances we all seem to present. Even surface things so frequently become radically different from what we imagined. We can all let the Nascent reveal Itself.
Our selfishness shows our acute sense of need. Our faults cry out for great love, eternally faithful Love. Each of us is the apple of God’s eye.
With developments in weapon-making, we’re moving towards the metaphor of a nuclear bomb in a suitcase: The dream that one person’s hatred (or an ant, a germ) can destroy the whole world. We may humanly try to stop this, yet “not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit.” Meditation absolves everyone and erases the fight-or-flight hatred and fear which can seem so inescapable. In reality the world is Omnipotence Appearing, it can never be destroyed.
Suppose a criminal is arrested. Mortal beliefs are operating in the mind of “perpetrator,” “victim,” and “police,” who each are anguished outlets reflecting our shared fears. Currents of karmic belief are arresting, stopping him, saving him from the course of his own actions. (When we meditate we’re not subconsciously depending on such human forms to protect us, but on the All-power.)
So when an individual or a nation is manifesting an excessive swing of our group mind, on the outer edge of the caduceus, behaving in a way that has to be pulled in, then if meditation doesn’t resolve it without hands, agents of the opposing tendency in the group mind will see to it, making a wave pattern needed to curve us higher.
So we seem to run in circles of sankara, while subtly the spirals of divine evolutions are at play everywhere, ascending towards spiritual awareness. The prisoner can be uplifted and free himself. In meditatively realizing that there is no blame on any level, but rather a gift of learning waiting for us to receive it, we are not simply trying to avert repercussions, but we ourselves and therefore the entire dreamworld are being taken over and raised into Actuality, into God’s love, so this non-reaction and compassion free us all and open out the cycles supremely.
Let’s remember, there is no objective world external to Consciousness. The work remains always on my own awareness. Our aggression is motivated by fear and by pain, so let’s see that our anger is but a camouflage. And our reaction to aggressors is likewise one of fear and pain. This fear and pain dwell neither in the other nor in me, but in the group mind that feels separated from You. When in my meditation I realize that this is a gentle spiritual universe with nothing to fear, and hold out compassion for our troubles, I reach a melting point that floats us all beyond the sink of teardrops, for we are all one Life.
Judge Not, That Ye Be Not Judged
Our judgment of another is self-judgment. Because we are all One. Because we are criticizing faults for which we are unconsciously blaming ourselves. Because what we live is our interior awareness. Because if we hold another in condemnation, we don’t allow ourselves to be released, for any sense of separation we impose upon our brother, we impose upon ourself. In the concentration camp, a guard was beating a woman, and Corrie Ten Boom’s sister cried, “That poor woman!”---meaning the guard! With divine love gushing out, we release others from the karmic burden between us.
When we speak of someone’s ill deeds, we’ve doubled their quantity. Beloved, we can simply refrain.
With all these specific principles of loving, we’re not looking for our own imagined solution to things, but opening the knots of our prejudices to lay the fabric at Love’s feet.
Instant Lesson
A rash of news stories reports Mexicans hitting cars. We go through a green light, a Mexican brakes violently to avoid slamming into us, backs up apologetically, while we’re remembering the stories. Then a pedestrian calls out, “The traffic lights aren’t working!”
Judge Charitable Judgment
(This was previously translated from the spoken Hebrew as “righteous” judgment.)
When we are meditatively seeing through, and this time the snarl stays unresolved and we still perceive someone’s faults, then we don’t cover our eyes, we don’t buy or deny the current scene. But we keep working upon ourselves until we recognize these failings as the sufferings of the messiah here, with total charity and lovingkindness.
With His Stripes We Are Healed
So judge not by appearances, judge compassionate judgment---suffering servant---all things work together for good---those that looked upon the brazen serpent were saved---when it seemed meant for evil, God meant it for good---they that sow in tears shall reap in joy---the last shall be first---You’ve turned my mourning into dancing.
In our prayer, unreservedly honoring people’s inward Being and outward life up to this moment frees us all to admit divine love. That love lets us hear our needs and see our problems without fear and approve of ourselves; well done faithful servant. So we are rested and readied to travel on.
“Human Being”: “Human” may derive from “hue-man,” shadow person; we’re likewise the colourist whose hues tint the emerging outlines of Being. Formative Being resembles a sweet sleep; humanhood resembles a confused dream which yet heralds this reality of waking life we enter at times. We groggily pass on the abuse we’ve endured to somebody weaker, or own it as self-hatred, or else transmute it into forgiveness, understanding and the defenseless all-strength of love for each and all, for a river only flows when not one spot is dammed. It’s so important to pray and to ask for prayerful help.
Children, helpless, we’re tossed into deep waters of fears and desires, though close enough to the Source, in our play and cartoons and stories before we’re enculturated, to still know we each save the world with awesome powers.
Yet as humans, we’re tragically flawed and can never get on the plus side of the ledger. The spirit does not call to our deluded righteousness, but to our failures, to return Home.
Everyone suffers cruelly. The saint, the enlightened, hurts as much as the sinner. On this path, we suffer in being numbered one with the transgressors as well as in our particular growth. “Compassion” means “bearing together.” So through our common nature, our temptations are all transfigured. Have compassion for the sinner, have compassion for the saint.
Compassion: feeling what the other feels, for it is also our feeling, opening to sympathy pains, yet our feet never budging from the river rock of the radiant Invisible. Welcoming the Presence here in the midst of our river of tears. The beautiful, the beautiful river.
A Meditation
This problem is grace calling, divine love expressing, giving me an opening to grow. These problem people and I myself are Christ crucified in our turmoil, our fear and trembling. Now I rest myself in No Thing, and let go of every obligation, every debt, every grievance. I spread my arms wide and embrace these people in God’s healing love, clean the wounds, feed them, apply the balm, anoint them with glory unending. I forgive and am forgiven. We’re resurrected and reborn in the Peace that passeth understanding, in the quiet utter holy beauty, so I rest in that which Is, and love with God’s love.