Where To Put Our Faith

Why did Jesus say we should pray specifically — that God will not lead us into temptation?

Outside of Christianity, this isn't an issue. Elsewhere in the New Testament, it even says this isn't possible. Yet Jesus implied it in 'The Lord's Prayer, his model example of how his followers should pray: "... lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." 

Were we intended to limit that prayer to ceremonial use in church services? Elsewhere, Jesus suggested praying for anything we truly wished, which implies we should be honest to God about that. But he thought we should include the wish not to be tested or suffer harm.

Is it an idle question, to ask why? No, that line looks to be one of the few unique elements of Christianity, something I'm coming to see as a crucial feature. Where encouraging good behavior is a typical feature of religions, the tacit message here is that it isn't all about us. 

Jesus certainly does say we should avoid sin like the very Devil; but evidently doesn't assume we can do that on our very own, nor expect we can accomplish it without help. Such help should always be forthcoming; but we're supposed to ask. "For You are the true ruler; all power and all glory belongs to You." It's not about us!

In most Christian traditions, that stance is only implicit, a hidden concept only visible through our customary exposure to this prayer. It is an element in some strains of Quaker tradition, and via a later pious church movement, became a key inspiration of Alcoholics Anonymous. 

People criticise AA for that: "They shouldn't be making people wallow in humility, shouln't be telling them they need rely on any 'supernatural' influence, or saying anything that makes people feel helpless." But that's the situation of anyone trying to escape an addictive habit.

One's talents get enlisted on both sides of an addictive conflict. Me-in-the-morning gets overruled by me-an-hour-later, Each time I weaken, the habit gives me a feeling of relief. It's enough to confuse people about sin; people may even feel that pleasure is sinful and sinfulness pleasure. Truly, a pleasant habit can make a trap feel like a comfort — until cruel jaws close.

Among the many paths to folly, wrongdoing and harm, there are multi-step programs to prevent recurrences, but only for those few paths people consider "addictions". Jesus was speaking in a different context about other temptations, but the process of enticement involved is as basic to humanity as pain, fear, and desire.

  
George Fox, in the early 17th Century, also saw how often people's habitual pleasures (what were called 'addictions', in his day) can work to their detriment:  "Whatever you are addicted to, the tempter will come in that thing; and when he can trouble you, then he gets advantage over you..."

But addiction (as we think of the word) is only one of myriad causes of wrongdoing & mishap. We know we should avoid those, but can't necessarily recognize the temptations that can lead us that direction. Since wrongdoing & mishap are all too familiar, I wish to be spared these, and can quite honestly ask God not to let me go there. The Lord's prayer implies it's a wise thing to ask.

If we didn't ask, would God then subject us to temptations and harm? -- Why? Does God make life an entrance exam for Heaven? Are there better explanations?

Raymond Smullyan found a more likely reason: That people need to experience enough evil to realize that it's overrated. Any advantage from doing harm is strictly short-term and harmful to the perpetrator; anyone should be able to learn this, given enough lifetimes. Why would God arrange life this way? Because, Smullyan says, it was logically impossible to make sentient beings without free will, which implied that they would sometimes choose evil and needed to learn not to.

But most of the time people are not "choosing evil"; we stumble into it -- perhaps from a moment of carelessness, perhaps from a long elusive chain of choices that seemed harmless at the time. People can be trapped by a personal weakness that may be no fault of their own, nor of anybody else's. A susceptible person might start to drink like a normal person, and only later learn they can't do that. 

Or a mother's well-intentioned, probably necessary decision can impact a child's life with subtly disabling effects that likewise muddle his sense of what, for him, can be dangerous temptations. My own life is likely an example.

Gabor Mate mentions his early childhood separation from his mother, during WW II. Jews in Nazi-occupied Budapest, they'd been staying in a dangerously crowded embassy compound where his health was deteriorating dangerously; so she'd given him over to the care of a complete stranger. When she was able to retrieve him three weeks later, she tells him he shunned her. That's a normal reaction in a young child, he says; but their emotional bond was broken and they were alienated from each other for years afterwards.

I can remember missing my parents only once. It was late at night; I was in a hospital bed, too young to know why I was there, or which stay that was.  (Hospitals at the time made little concession to the emotional needs of young children.) There are scars on the back of my knees where cysts were removed; I've had these as long as I can remember. Or maybe it happened the time (I'm told) I turned blue. Whenever it was, I missed them intensely. After I came out, my aunt tells me, I'd changed. "You just kept wringing your hands." In a photo from that time, today I can see myself doing that. 

Ever since, as long as I can remember, I've distrusted my mother and been wary of her health concerns. 

One common effect of early childhood trauma is a feeling of being unloved, unloveable. And as Joni Mitchell sings in 'Trouble Child': "You really can't give love in this condition/ Still you know... you need it." That opens myriad occasions for misunderstanding and strife with the very people who matter most to you. Temptations? — certainly. 

That's probably how I got my ADD traits. Gabor Mate says there's a critical period when babies normally learn control of their attention and their emotions. If their closest parent is absent or persistently unresponsive though that period, they can miss that timing. The child continues to develop, but is hampered by lack of the earlier skill. He might learn to read — might not — or like Mate and me, might read compulsively ("afraid to be left alone with my own mind", as he said.) 

What you get are typical human tendencies taken to extremes. At different times, the same person can be intensely emotional or numb, can have an attention span of seconds, but can focus obsessively on whatever does interest them. 

I didn't know why I was a weird kid, but I was. The kindergarten had neat toys — and threw me out because I'd rather play with them than with the other kids. I never said "Hello" first when I'd see someone; I'd struggle for an answer to "How are you!" I liked to snuggle with my parents. But sometimes my mother would ask, "Do you love me?" And that was another question I didn't know the answer to.

Without my high IQ & general compliance, the local school might well have considered me "Emotionally Disturbed." A compulsive class clown, a magnet for fights, continually frustrated that nobody taught us anything I didn't know... and always fighting off parental efforts to control me, to tidy my room until everything was 'put away' where I'd never expect to find it, to make me put my book down and play outdoors. This wasn't the stereotype picture of 'ADD' — but another way the same traits can manifest.

The Lord's Prayer? My parents had sent me to a Methodist church nearby; my atheist father had enjoyed singing in church when he was a boy; and we all hoped I'd find friends, maybe girls there. So I must have recited the prayer with the group many times. The part about "temptation" didn't mean much. The heros of the stories I liked to read were generally brave, smart, and good enough to avoid foolishness and evil; when that failed them I'd be painfully embarrased — and was even more so when the person being wrong or inept was me.

In short, nobody said we were "sinners." We really weren't, in any terms that made sense to us; and neither did Jesus call people "sinners." The prayer he suggested simply implies that there's that potential in us. Among the disciples there to listen, Peter later pretended not to know him when the Romans & their clients cracked down — And look what happened to Judas? Had he ever expected to be tempted, and come to grief?

In any case, by high school I'd read enough Bertrand Russell and Mark Twain [on the absurdities of American hellfire Christianity] to reluctantly conclude that God was a figment. I'd think, "I really wish You existed — but it wouldn't be right to put people in Hell for not believing ridiculous things! If You turned out to be that way, I'd never forgive You!"

I tried going to Unitarian church, where people might believe anything or nothing — but all I found there was  intelligent young company. Then my high school best friend invited me to his Quaker meeting, where I figured God at least could have an hour to speak for himself, bypassing all the silly doctrines people attributed to him. But there'd been no epiphany, only a chance to look more deeply at myself than I'd managed on my own. I'd liked that, but not believing in God, didn't think I belonged there.

But then I did start noticing elusive patterns in events around me, 'coincidences' I had no 'rational' way to account for. The thought that God was at work in these somehow appealed to me. As time went on, such coincidences became too striking to dismiss; and I had increasingly less credence for the "Skeptical" explanations I thought "Objectivity" required. (By now I've found it far more reasonable to simply observe that life sometimes comes out intricately choreographed!)

If God was producing these, they did not seem to be entirely on my side, at least not if God was at all interested in my GPA. Mate, a doctor, says Something  "loves us so much it can even give people terminal diseases," when that's what it takes to wake us up. 

I didn't get mortally sick; but I still had illusions about myself, kept desperately holding on to them, kept getting repeatedly clobbered!

That was a problem, going to college on a scholarship that required high grades on a full load of courses. I managed one successful semester, and after that my habitual ways all worked against me: procrastination, disorganization, frequent breaks from any subject that wasn't attracting me. I spaced out toward the end of classes, lost track of any assignments not given in writing. 

Though I'd never heard of it, these were characteristic features of ADD. So were the new habits I took up, including some minor addictions appealing to anyone trying to focus on mental tasks. Smoking had became habitual with my first summer job — as an alternative to compulsively eating candy bars there. (Chewing up pencils, as I'd once done to keep focused on homework assignments, was too embarrassing in a shared dorm room!) Coffee with milk and sugar proved highly addictive.  [My father's diabetes, like my mother's, had not yet developed — but my own "sweet tooth" was evident, waiting only for opportunity to grow excessive. Sugar, it's been said, is not a drug; but people respond to it as if it were.] 

I could set up a comfortable study-space, park myself there with coffee and cigarettes and pencils to chew — but everything I tried to read became tedious and unintelligible. I was repelled by the second-semester English readings, I didn't even like thr math, the class having gone from pedantic rehashing of what calculus I knew already, to suddenly moving ahead on unfamiliar material. The hard physics course I'd looked forward to — was assigning hard homework problems, with half the grade based on turning all that in!

"Temptations"? Certainly I wasn't tempted to actual wrongdoing, but I wasn't meeting expectations, not even my own. Any given day, by the time I'd had a couple cups and a cigarette or two, had found an abandoned newspaper and seen what was happening to the world, I was already late to my early-morning class. I might or might not make it to classes that afternoon.

Outside of class, I read, had friends who recognized and respected my intelligence. I seldom mentioned what was happening to me; I didn't understand it myself. I certainly couldn't tell the woman I was going with. 

What the school was offering turned out to be mostly outside my range of interests; but the fact is, I was in no condition to work at learning anything. 

What I wanted to think about: whether my loving friend would finally give in on our next romantic walk, and why she kept fending me off, while the old sexual mores were collapsing all around us? My underlying fear: that she didn't love me "enough." It made sense, later, to learn that's a typical reaction among people traumatived by early childhood "abandonment". I knew I was being unreasonable, & still felt that way, still obsessed over it! 

To all appearances I was a wastrel college student, living comfortably on my parents' largess. In truth, I was busy fending off endless anxiety. 

"Temptation?" "Sin?" Is it a sin to impersonate oneself? It must be: What I impersonated was a self-image that had outgrown anything I was actually able to accomplish. For decades afterwards I'd still occasionally wake up from college dreams. It would be finals week; and I'd be terrified, unable to remember which classes I was supposed to be taking, let alone where they met. 

The breaking point came when she finally did say "Yes." That accomplished — I suddenly realized how very much else I'd neglected; there was no hope of me possibly keeping the scholarship.

The temptation, the sin, was that I blamed her. There was a great deal to blame by this point; it had been my own doing, not hers — but I was panicked by the thought of ending up like my parents, two people who continually misunderstood each other and fought incessantly. I broke up with her the day after her birthday party; and when she threw her present at me I finally realized what a horrible mistake I'd made. But I stayed cold, and stubborn, feeling I shouldn't marry a woman I'd become afraid to speak openly to. That too was my fault, me stifling my own voice. When in a poem years later I mentioned "the woman you fled out of cowardice," I knew how very apt that was.

Afterwards she told me: "I forgive you — but I won't forget." Neither could I. By so skillfully concealing my pre-nuptual panic, I had spared her nothing — but had made it all to clear, to both of us, that my feelings could not be trusted.

God, that Being who'd graciously made his presence known, when I'd been an atheist, had now given me a new, unwelcome piece of self-knowledge. I wasn't in Eden anymore.

Since then, I've done things I could feel good about, and some things I couldn't. I intended the good things, but it's been God that instigated and enabled them. I wish all the bad had been unintentional; but these have always seemed to be things I needed to do. So I know that I can self-deceive, can make myself inhumanly cold when I imagine  I should, can't always be sure my good intentions will come out harmless.

I need to remember that prayer, because only God can keep us safe from harm.

Past Loves

          

For the sin of lovelessness I've wandered

places inhabited by invisible people

from one desolation to another desolation

drowning athirst in love unwarranted

and hence unrecognized, stumbling into

random blows and clinches, desperate

gropings and grapplings beset by my

inheritance of guilt:

I know them now, these ancestors

who loved with this same heedless ignorance

holding each other like broken dolls

and I know the harms I've done

in sleepwalking imitation.

Penance was due

and done; when I see,

there's no more need

to be so blind.

Forrest Curo

July 27, 2021

 

About Prayer

 

The world doesn't depend on me;

It depends on You.

For my sake you make

some of it depend on me

remembering You.

 

[Forrest Curo August 2019]

To be human

By that much
he escaped being You
and became only
one of us, as You
intend us to become.

Knowing You, he could refuse
harsh laws of nature
for our sake, these being meant
to serve, not enslave.

Yet we, lacking his strength of trust
live shrunken by futile fears and hopes,
lean on vipers, embrace desolation
in fear of love, suffer implacable
decrees of consequence

which he once dismissed
with a word, without
even a word.

[Forrest Curo]
October 15 2018 

An Observation

Welcome or not, death happens in its time.
Dream announcements come
where needed: warnings arrive before
and reassurances later
saying the life we'd thought was lost
is fine in that noplace
we can't fit into here.

Forrest Curo
April 30, 2018

And All Things Shall Be Well

I never knew
the porch was rotten
til I'd stepped through
and sat upon the boards:
my leg vanished
somewhere in the dark among the spiders.

I never knew
my heart had gone to sleep
til I'd walked years away from you
thinking myself alive
and awake but
dreaming in the cobwebs.

I'd never known
I was a minor character, but here
we are, leaving the theatre now. Aren't we
leaving the theatre together?

Heart's truth, when you said
"We'll always love each other"
I hadn't known, but knew at once

was truer than all my shame
and as useless, to take back
who I was, or the gap I'd torn
between us. Truth breaks out
at inconvenient hours, in dreams
of school and exams for classes
I've never been to, of futile searches
where I'm lost, and can't find you

and now I know
this choreography
did not contain one false step, that no one's foolish wrongs
are more innocent, or less so, or unnecessary.

Eden was for its time
only. I didn't know
I needed to see myself naked,
leave everyone and go
into a place where I'd find everyone
not guilty, out of our silly minds.
We love
who we have
and who we are
or no-one. There's nobody else here.

Do your dances, fear your villains
and hate yourselves
as long as it takes.
We're all leaving together.

Forrest Curo, March 26, 2017

Seeking God's Guidance

I first encountered the fact of this in the 1960's, when I was flailing through a life already hijacked by God, reframed by mind-striping drugs, immobilized by conflicting ideas and ideals.
In search of a group I might really belong with, I stayed overnight with people who kept the air thick with pot smoke amid the bewildering sounds of a record I'd never heard of: 'The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter,' by the Incredible String Band. Among many intricate, confusing lyrics, one mad fragment struck me:

and who would hear
directions clear
from the Unnam-ed All-Namer?

an obvious reference, accurate or not, to God. "Could I actually _do_ that?" I wondered? That thought was, I knew, a prayer. The answer — I had no idea how I knew it — was "Yes." Why would anyone think they might actually hear from God? Why would they want to?
Because there is something that recognizes truth at the center of every human being. This isn't the intellectual mind, nor is it (strictly speaking) the heart. Its workings aren't confined to the marvelous neural net that embodies each human's interactions with the physical world. It isn't God; but it is our interface to What or Whom it is that people know as 'God'.
There's no place for such a star in the cosmos of contemporary normalism; but the telescope for seeing it is patient self-observation.
I didn't say it's a faculty to make anyone error-free or infallible. Everyone who's ever practiced any art form under inspiration's odd jurisdiction should have seen this at one time or another: A poem (or other inspiration) that wakes a person late at night, inexorably demanding to be written, won't necessarily be a masterpiece; and it may well benefit from subsequent editing. But something wiser than your waking self takes a hand.
People are usually willing to concede this much, but often they balk at claims that what's involved has any power beyond our physical skulls. That reservation is the most obvious obstacle to relying on it; but not the only one.
People have been so much mislead by hopes and fears that they're afraid to trust even valid hopes; they find it easier, somehow, to hope that trusting their fears will keep them safe. This is simply tragic.
The hope involved is that God is real and will give us what we want. The worst outcome, of course, would be if God had been real, but cruel as our imaginations.
Much depends on how we conceive of power. For the monarchists who collected our Bible, power meant being able to give orders and have them be obeyed. The stories they assembled came from even earlier times, when power was a warrior's prowess, including the foresight necessary to an effective war-leader.
The existence of evil was not a problem for either concept. Other gods could contest power; subordinates could abuse delegated authority. Their model of God could be, was supposed to be cruel against disloyalty and rebellion, which threatened the safety of all their law-abiding subjects.
But Newton's God was a system designer, more than merely the Psalmists' artificer of the 'fearfully and wonderfully made" human body — This model of Creation envisioned a builder who'd constructed and set in motion the whole clockwork machinery of the universe. Any flaw in its operation naturally reflected on God's character. As more and more people adopted scientific explanations of how the world works and why it works that way — More and more people found the idea of God as its Maker — morally repugnant. A magnificent Creation — but any God who would create it seemed inept or wicked. So in the academic world, the world of Great Thinkers and socially-acceptable opinion -- Atheism came to be as much taken for granted as it commonly is today.
Still, it left the world just a little too meaningless and hopeless. When drugs suddenly came along that offered a chance to see something else — God, even — It was the brightest students at my university that wanted to see what we might find.
Of all the varied descriptions of how a drug like LSD affects people, the one that seems beyond question is this: that it lowers the threshold for pattern-detector mechanisms in the nervous system. A pattern that isn't visible to normal vision, hearing, or conceptionalization — is generally called 'a hallucination.' But sensitivity to pattern is a basic feature of how a brain functions at all.
The issue is how much sensitivity is desireable. A computer scanning a satellite photo for hints of camoflaged airfields, tanks, soldiers... applies many similar processes; and there's a useful range of responsiveness that picks out features a human observer might miss; while beyond that it would see features that aren't there, or turned too low would miss too much.
Hunger — or fasting — typically lowers the perceptional thresholds. For an individual lost in the wilderness, or a tribe with a failing food supply, that kind of change is functional. It would be too much to have to live with in normal circumstances. People living with pain, suffering, or boredom — prefer beer, a substance with almost opposite effects.
Extremely unlikely meaningful coincidences — examples of what Jung called 'synchronicity — had become a regular feature of my life well before LSD appeared. My love for a young Unitarian woman, who insisted that the word 'God' referred to something real, even if explaining the meaning could be elusive — had forced me to recognize that there could be a powerful intelligence choreographing our lives and that people who thought so weren't always fools, but could in fact be simply more perceptive.
But the dance of my subsequent life included a long series of mis-steps and pratfalls. And hence, my brief stay with this household of holy fools and their haunting new record.
Soon afterwards, circumstances — a further series of synchronistic events — introduced me to a man who often used the I Ching for divination. I don't even remember how I decided to try it myself, nor what I asked [through] it nor what answer I received — except that I was surprized [and somewhat distrustful at first] to find the response meaningful, appropriate to what I'd wanted to know.
Before long I had my own copy of the I Ching to bother. Life in late-60's Berkeley became even more strange and wonderful as synchronicities and unexpected inspirations multiplied, snatches of that String Band record running through my mind:

"May the Long-Time Sun shine on you,
all Love surround you
and the Pure Light within you
guide your way on..."

At times I would stand at some unbusy spot on the sidewalk, feeling for a nudge towards one direction or another, before I'd go that way. Alas, at whatever encounter or destination I eventually arrived, still I was my same unenlightened self. And so, there were other times when this didn't seem such a good idea.
When the I Ching said an idea would work out wonderfully, provided I took proper care with other people's property... this had nothing to do with how things would go if I were careless. So I floundered through many interesting outcomes, until one day I found myself with a raging nicotine fit, sitting on the floor in a welfare hotel room in downtown Oakland, asking: "Why shouldn't I sell you and buy a pack of cigarettes?" Before I'd finished sorting the yarrow sticks, the phone rang — an unexpected invitation from one sweet and sexy young woman friend.
Returning from that, I ran into friends of a veteran I used to smoke dope with — who offered me floorspace in their shared apartment. When a State disability check finally came through and I could at last repay them, I'd become an honorary member of the group.
But eventually I tired of Berkeley, and returned to Southern California, to the small town there where I'd first started college. There I fell into sudden love, and when the I Ching told me, "You are very far from happiness," my reaction was: "Why am I asking this silly book who to love?"
Despite an intense empathic resonance with the woman, I was indeed very far from happiness -- She kept striving to attune herself to God by total withdrawal from the world. As a friend of hers told me: "In India her neighbors would call her a saint, and look after her. Here, they call her crazy, and lock her up." Decades later I found a poem by her in a newpaper in Washington, and wrote to get us back in touch. "Hardships and suffering," she wrote back, "have left me with an unshakable faith... in Something." Where I'd feared I might have treated her badly; she said the time with me had been one of her good periods. But clearly we hadn't been meant to stay together.
The next woman I met was even less appropriate.
Years later, she said she'd seen me first, walking across the lawn at a May Day celebration, and told herself: "I want that guy!" Then a mutual friend had introduced us, and my own senseless lonesomeness did the rest. A few days afterwards, she was caught up in a raid on her apartment building and extradited on a bullshit charge to Utah, well out of reach.
I stayed in town while the local collective mood turned apocalyptic. Nixon was escalating the war against Vietnam, protesters were being killed, too many people had turned to bad drugs or to worse religious notions, while a desperate few wanted to oppose the war with their own futile violence. The only thing that made sense to me was to return to school, maybe study nursing and learn enough to mitigate the widespread suffering that seemed likely. As my summer rental ran out I suddenly realized I'd turned old. The world might end in nuclear folly at any moment; and no-one I knew there cared if I stayed in town or left. I decided I should go home, make peace with my parents while we were all still alive.
I had no plans to stay with them... But I seemed to be coming down with a cold. My mother fussed, claimed I looked sick, insisted I see her doctor. The doctor had no doubts whatsoever: "Mono. Gamma globulim shot."
After that, there was nothing else to be done. I lay around the house exhausted, with a sandpaper throat, passing out at unpredictable intervals. One day I started walking the long two blocks to a nearby bookstore, stopping to rest each time at a bus stop halfway there.
And then I got a letter. After months in solitary (the only woman in a small-town Utah jail), my extradited friend had gone to trial and been released. She said she feared that some people were doomed to find their way through life all alone. I invited her to come visit. As my parents were opposed to her staying with us, I rented a room upstairs from a local health food store; and a year later we were married in the park across the street.
As everyone knows, astrology doesn't work, but when I looked up our data it showed Saturn from her chart in the same place as the Sun in mine, my own Saturn likewise overlapping her Sun. A long-lasting bond, said the best astrology book I had handy. Everyone who knew us thought we were a happy couple, as in fact we were. What the book didn't say, I learned later.
Saturn in Virgo could make a person harshly critical; Saturn in Cancer could squash a person's interest in household matters... and Saturn close to another person's Sun position could definitely cramp a person's style, because Saturn did symbolize a strongly constrictive force, while the Sun in anyone's chart was supposed to be a pointer to that person's basic identity.
Despite the fact that astrology doesn't work, we were tightly bonded — and we each tended to crush the other's sense of who they were and most needed to be. Toward the end, she called me into the living room, where she'd been watching tv — from the bedroom, where I'd been trying to write a novel, as far as I could get from the tv's attention-stealing presence — to say, "Forrest, you know we really don't have much in common." Ten years to the day from the May Day when she'd first seen me crossing the lawn, I moved out of her house and into freedom once again.
My first marriage, and my second wife's first marriage had both violated a major taboo of Chinese astrology: that couples born six years apart shouldn't marry. Our own marriage did it again — and while our first marriages were disasters, we seem remarkably suited to each other. (There is a pattern to the world; but not as simple a pattern as humans tend to expect.
Aside from all that — I'd long ago stopped promiscuously bothering the I Ching. Though there is good advice in it, though traditional divination techniques often serve up truly appropriate passages — Reverence for what I found in the book itself was clearly a distraction.
There's something paradoxical about divination in the first place; this is after all a prayer for guidance, and I should be respectful of the results; yet sometimes these conveyed very little, apparently hinting I needed to "Figure it out yourself, dummy!" I could just flip a coin (and many times did) but that method implied that half the time my answers would need to be 'noes' — unless, indeed, I wanted God to shift physical probabilities out of true, just to accomodate me.
If I'd once yearned for powers beyond the ordinary — Whatever made me expect to use them harmlessly without considerable wisdom? Since I'd shown little sign of that, it seemed better for now to grope through life like everybody else.
And so the matter stood for many years. I still felt myself to be under God's instruction, still read everything promising about religion that came my way, was continually trying to figure out what God was doing with the world, and why.
I hadn't forgotten that [for no apparent merit of my own] I had been touched by Grace, back in that mad, holy era called the 60's. God had given a brief, bewildering backstage tour to a peculiar assortment of idealists and rebels, then gone incognito, leaving the world sleepwalking on into all the evils we'd once hoped to see swept away. While I stopped bothering God for continual guidance, I continued to follow whatever trails of synchronistic breadcrumbs came my way, finding some of them idle hopes, finding some of them truly Gifts.
Whenever it was I found an unfamiliar yoga book at a local library — I had already joined the San Diego Friends Meeting, and the title seemed evocative of Quaker worship: _Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness_, by Erich Schiffmann. While Shiffmann was saying many things I'd heard and read from other yogis, he also pointed out the origin of asana practice as meditation poses, and emphasized yoga's ultimate purpose: enhancing our awareness of the human connection to God. Several chapters were explicitly about a practice of 'Listening for Guidance.'
Keeping in mind the synchronistic lives and intuitions reported in early Friends' journals, this struck me as the most truly Quakerish book I'd seen in a long time.
Schiffmann wasn't telling it the way George Fox would have; his language was more Newage than Christian. In the process of illustrating certain points, he'd thrown in some gratuitous historical howlers. But he was Quaker in his recommendation to examine ourselves for the essential truth, rather than relying on him or on anything we'd thought we knew or anything we thought we should believe.
In my own Quaker Meeting, worthy old Friends were rising to proclaim Messages like: "It's dangerous to think God's talking to you," while this Southern Californian yogi was telling us we should learn to tell when God is talking to us, because God can and does.
Indeed, Schiffmann observes, the gap we see between God and ourselves is largely an artifact of egotistic thinking. "We think it's egotistical to think we are fundamentally perfect expressions of a divine Life Principle." But it's truly egotistic, he says, "to think that you are responsible for who you are and that you created yourself... That's ego." We didn't, after all, make ourselves. It makes more sense "to recognize the Allness of God" — an allness which implies that there is no thing, neither our imperfect selves nor our many faults, that can possibly exist outside of God.
"Meditation means listening, and the meditative mind is the 'listening-to-Infinite-Mind' mind. The practice of yoga is a way of learning to be in this meditative listening state all the time. It's not only about how flexible your body is, or how many advanced and intricate postures you can do, though all of this is wonderful. It's about you and your specific mind listening to, being guided by, and communing with Infinite Mind, God."
Therefore Schiffmann devoted several chapters specifically to learning how to be guided by God. One does this by asking, 'listening' for, and following what guidance comes.
"There is a whole other language involved in listening inwardly for communications from the universe in this way. It is not always dependent on words... You will know what to do without having figured it out." If that process turns ambiguous we are once again in familiar Quaker territory: "The best thing to do in this confused state when you are faced with a difficult decision is mentally to stop, become quiet, centered, and still; and then silently ask again... And then be patient.... If you are calm and attentive and are truly desirous of an answer to your dilemma, and are therefore listening with open ears, the mental waters will become clear and calm and the most appropriate thing to do will be obvious."
Was Schiffmann suggesting people put themselves through dramatic tests of faith, deciding their most urgent dilemmas this way? That's what initially frightens people about the idea; but what he actually says is to practice resolving minor uncertainties with prayers for guidance. This should solidly confirm that it's our best way to navigate through any situation where we don't know the score. (Really, we don't know, more often than we like to realize.)
Schiffmann's book recommends hatha yogi asanas to 'purify' our intuition, to render it a more dependable medium for receiving guidance. Yet I am an utterly undisciplined, obsessively intellectual couch-potato. Asana practice is not the first activity that comes to mind when I wake in the morning, nor at any other time.
Is there hope for me, then? Actually, yogi offers diverse branches for people of different inclinations to reach awareness of our 'yoking' to God. And while contemplative traditions in many religions encourage quieting the compulsive mental chatter that's the most common, crippling obstacle to knowing God; interpretations that would stifle the mind — like those which have traditionally devalued the body and the emotions — are simply mistaken. (I'm an intellectual; I should know!) God permeates all modes of perception: physical, emotional, mental — and that elusive 'something else' people persistently fail to reduce to physical, emotional, or mental events. Truth. Beauty. Love. Everything we're ultimately brought to recognize as 'spiritual'.
Schiffmann says that "Practicing yoga during the day is a matter of keeping your eyes on the road and one ear turned toward the Infinite. It’s about listening inwardly as often as you can for your deepest impulses about what to say, think, do, or be... It is the meaning of `Thy Will be done.`" The distinction between our wills and God's fades with the recognition that our will attuned to God's steers us better than our heedless flailings ever did.
I do not find this easy to practice. What I have realized is that it's our only hope. Probably it fits a spiritualized interpretation of what 'The Reign of God' ought to look like. Probably it describes the way early Quakers navigated their preaching missions. Such conceptional considerations aren't convincing to anyone who denies that he has, that we have, methods that work well enough to effectively guide our lives. But the fact is that following the prevailing ideas of "what makes sense" has brought the Earth and its inhabitants into an inexorable series of escalating disasters. Our various "problem solving" techniques, as David Bohm pointed out, intrinsically produce solutions worse than the problems we started with, in a collective reenactment of "The Old Lady Who Swallowed the Fly." The best possible human plans to cope with multiple interlinking crises — would be clearly inadequate, would never be agreed to, and certainly would leave out crucial unforeseen obstacles.
In my own life, I have reached the end of my habitual "Figure It Out" mindset. I can't do it anymore. My lifelong struggle with having "a mind with a mind of its own" has ended in helplessness.
"I can of my own self do nothing" — or nothing much worthwhile. To write this very piece, I've needed to repeatedly turn away from it, distract myself briefly (a pleasant, but increasingly dysfunctional defense against anxiety) — and most effectively, to sit in meditation until the next piece of it finally came clear.
And you? Do you feel safe in this world as you are, as it is? Do you have a truly adequate way to cope?