1/24/10

People talk a lot today about the great divide in American thinking—like there’s a cultural civil war going on. And the two opponents can be any two of a great many labels that come to mind.

People talk about the blue states against the red states, the liberals against the conservatives, the moderns against the traditionalist, the atheists against the religious. The working class against the upper class. Races, ethnicities. There’s a basketful of them to chose from.

Dennis Praeger, who is the only talk radio personality I can actually stomach, largely I think because he talks less about politics and more about religion and culture. 

Dennis Praeger talks about there being only two classes of people in the world, the just and the unjust. That’s a very Jewish way of putting things.

But even if there were only two classes of people in the world, even if they were the just and the unjust, they’d always going to be at each other’s throats, because that’s been a part of the human mindset for thousands and thousands of years. And you don’t change things by the way everybody who failed did.

If I could be allowed to make one of those broad generalizations, what I’d say is that there are only two kinds of people in the world, the dualists and the non-dualists.

And just so we lay down a marker, let’s define non-duality the ways Hindus define it. In Advaita Yoga, which is the non-duality branch of Hinduism, they would advance the idea that only Brahman or God really exists, and that the physical world, with its multiplicity and images and forms, is merely an illusion, or maya.

They would further that the human soul is identical with Brahmin soul, because it emanated from Brahma. So that’s what non-duality means to the Hindus, and it made all the difference in the word as to how spirituality evolved and developed, evolving eventually in Buddhism, which is ultimately a non-duality religion.

It matters because it makes all the difference in the world as to how you think your thoughts, and live your life, if you believe that everything is one large, living entity, or you believe that everything is different, separate, that the world is made up of many complex parts, just the way it seems.

For example, if you believe that everybody’s different, a different person, a different consciousness, then you probably believe that there is evil, as well as good in the world, and that there are evil people populating it. People like Hitler and Stalin and Mao Tse Tung. And Judas Iscariot and the pope, and your parents, and the president, and your next door neighbor.

But if you believe that we are one being, not many, and that our behavior, good or bad, is really only an illusion, then we understand that evil is also an illusion. That evil is only a misinterpretation of the refractions that our one being, that we experience as sensation and light and sound.

Now, I know that that’s a terribly weak analogy, but if there really is a one—then ultimately no analogy is a possibility.

If you see the world as one there are no enemies, no others, no outsiders or traitors. There is only “I.” I am that. I am you. I am the one who resists me. And that’s different from the way most people think.

When most people talk about a one world, or universal consciousness, they mean the world the way they see it. As pieces of a great big puzzle—visual, individual pieces, all of them different from one another, but they all fit together to make up one big picture, just like the picture on the box.

But that’s not non-duality. Non-duality only sees the world as a one piece puzzle. And the puzzle itself is that it looks like it has lots and lots of pieces, and it doesn’t.

Now here’s why that makes a difference. If we see the world as diverse, as the many, then we hate the otherness of our enemies so much that we want to root them out, and eradicate their thinking. Make them into androids, just like the image we hold of our own selves. 

What we don’t we see is that that kind of thinking is elitist, dualist, just like what we accuse our enemies of being. Because if we have enemies, any enemies at all, then we’re not doomed to become them, by definition we are them.

Jesus was a non-duality teacher. He said love your enemies as yourself. Why? Because they are yourself. He said I and the Father are one. And he meant it. He didn’t mean that he was God—in a God form like Zeus or Jehovah or Baal.

He meant that whatever God was, whatever the nature of those things that God emanates from God is, he might have said create baw-raw in Hebrew, that what God is, His consciousness, His present awareness, the very ground of His being was exactly the same as His own. I and the Father are one.

That was Jesus’ insight about his own consciousness of the self. But then he goes on to say that he is one with us, that we are one, and that we are all one together in this sausage skin that he calls the Father. And we could call God, or Mother, or Higher Being.

Whatever it is, that is, if the world is one—whatever it is, that’s what I am, Jesus said. And because we are one, we can all say, in our own voices, that we hear inside our heads, me too! I am that thing. Whatever it is. And I can feel it within me.

And Jesus built his entire philosophy, his whole spiritual revolution, on that one truth. He called it the kingdom of God. And it was his analogy for the way that God is in what we are. And how our unfolding consciousness is awakening to the presence of God within us.

And so he said things like, the kingdom of God is like a net that gathers everything there is unto itself. Or the kingdom of God is like a treasure, like a single pearl that we sell everything we have, everything that we are, in order to possess. Which means I guess that it possesses us. That’s all non-duality symbolism.

And it was important to Jesus because for him it was the key to a new way of thinking. Thinking that accepted the otherness of the neighbor, the stranger, the enemy because it acknowledged as a philosophical truth the oneness of the universe.

And you can almost imagine the excitement in that young man’s mind when he came awake to the presence of God all around him. Within him. And he went around shouting, drawing people’s attention to it. “Behold, the Kingdom of God is here, and it’s there, it’s in the imagination of a child, and it’s in your midst.”

See, Jesus didn’t lay down a whole pile of rules like Moses and Mohammad did. He didn’t even dictate lists of attainments or practices or commandments. Because he didn’t think that you controlled behavior from the outside in.

He thought that it worked the other way around. You didn’t attack behavior like a cop or a preacher or a politician or a behavioral psychologist—you don’t attack anything.

You awaken the inner being, the inner Christ, you awaken to the kingdom of God all around and within you, and the mind and will and ego are all realigned and you don’t think about the foreign, the disconnected, the hostile, the unknowable, anymore. Those concepts cease to exist.

Because if you awaken the inner Christ, there are no uncertainties, there are no obstacles so large, so dense that the mind, will and ego of the inner Christ can’t get over, around or through them.

And apparently, if you awaken the inner Christ, you can even walk on water. It’s been known to happen. And, by the way, stories like those, walking on water, miracles, levitation those stories in Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity are always meant to illustrate the understanding of the physical world that the spiritual initiate attains through enlightenment.

See, the power of spirituality always comes from knowledge. Jesus did and said everything that he did, everything recorded in the gospels in order that those who saw him, or heard him, might understand. Understand what? Understand what he saw, what he thought and how he put it together.

To experience the understanding of Jesus. Saint Paul said, “Let this same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

Now Jesus didn’t live and practice and preach a non-duality doctrine in order to prove that he was holier than everybody else. In fact, just the opposite turns out to be true. Jesus himself was, not without cause, accused of being a drunkard, an associate of whores and tax collectors, a corrupter of innocent minds.

Far from holier than thou, he probably wasn’t considered by his peers even holier than most—but he had a vision of the whole—the wholeness of God, the unity of the human and the Divine, the unity of all life, and that drove him forward—no matter how many people failed to understand him.

And Jesus didn’t condemn or punish anybody for not seeing things the way he did. A lot of his followers have had historically different feeling about that, but Jesus was very clear, the kingdom of God is like opposite day. You accept the opposite, you don’t condemn it.

Do you remember opposite day from when you were a kid in school? That’s when every yes meant no. Every thank you, meant screw you. Every boy was a girl, everything bad was good. Jesus says the kingdom of God is like opposite day. And so he says love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, and resist not evil, no matter what.

Meister Eckhart was writing about the beatitude where Jesus says “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” And he said that it’s the spiritually poor who are actually able to say I am God. Who radically rely and indentify with Him.

Because they have nothing left of themselves, nothing to have so they surrender their all, their routines, their identities to God, and nobody can do that.

That’s why Jesus said to the rich young man, you’ve done everything you need to, to enter the kingdom of God, except for this one thing. Give up everything you have, turn it all loose and follow me. And, of course, the guy couldn’t do that. Who can?

Jesus says, what I have done, through works, you can do and greater works will you do. Why? Because I go to the Father. Again, non-duality. I and the Father are one. You can walk on water, walk on air. Because I and the Father are one. You can reconcile differences and befriend enemies because I and the Father are one.

Jesus laid out our work for us with his life. Give everything that you are to the living of your life as though you were walking, seeing, smelling, tasting, living out God’s life on earth, as though His mind was behind your eyeballs, His heart beating in your chest.

Why should you do that? Because it’s time, Christ says, because I and the Father are one, and because you and I are one in the Father.

The reason that God doesn’t want us focusing on money, on materialism—the reason that He doesn’t want us fixating on life and death, on passion—is that all of those are inconsequential issues, there is only one, there is only God, and God doesn’t worry about acquiring or hoarding things, God doesn’t worry about dying, God doesn’t worry about rejection or loss.

God just is. The whole universe, and all the universe beyond this one if there are such things, are emanations of His consciousness. And that’s okay with Jesus and it’s okay with Buddha. And it’s okay with me.

Our role as humans in this process is to direct people’s attention, just like Christ did, to the imminence of the presence of God in every place, in every mind, everywhere you look.

The role of the non-dualist is not to reconcile the illusion of the many, with the truth of the one. It’s to reconcile our own awakening awareness with divine mind. Harvest that intelligence, push it forward with God’s will for your life, and you will move God’s brain and hand and will through His creation.

11/29/09: What Are We Waiting For?

(Matthew 2:1-11)

This morning is the first Sunday of Advent, and we begin our period of ceremonial waiting. Waiting for what? The standard theological response is, waiting for the coming of the Christ.

But that’s not exactly what we do, is it? We do a lot of things during the Christmas season. Shopping, wrapping, egg noggin, but waiting for the coming of the Christ, like expectant father’s in the waiting room, is way down on the list.

In fact, if we’ve done our math right, we know that the Christ doesn’t need to come into the world, because Christ is already in the world, because Christ is in us, dormant, and what he really makes annually, or periodically, is not an arrival, but an awakening.

Or rather, it’s us who awaken, we awaken to and become aware of the fact that Christ, the Christ spirit, the presence and power of God in human form, is within ourselves, right where God put it.

So what are we waiting for during Advent? We actually await the birth of a child—a child who’s already been born. We understand that. A child whose life and death and fate are very familiar to us.

A birth that happened more than two thousand years ago in a culture whose language and customs we’re completely unable to recover or decipher. So what is it about that that we’re waiting for?

Obviously, we’re not waiting for anything visible or physical, like a reappearance of Jesus, newborn or otherwise; what we’re waiting for is an internal experience, invisible to the world.

What we’re waiting for in advent is us, ourselves. We’re waiting for ourselves to get to the place where Christ has gone.

But the waiting part is still the key. Because what we learn in the religion of Jesus and Buddha and Socrates is that you don’t have to run, you don’t have to go outside yourself, you don’t have to play catch up to achieve everything that’s required in the Christ life—

In order to live the life of Christ, all you have to do is to stand still, and allow the portals of your mind to open up to the God within and around you.

That’s called understanding by Jesus in the gospels, and according to him it plugs us into a world of light and truth and connectedness. And it does that by letting us become ourselves. Our true selves. Our inner selves.

Look, religions only exist for one good reason: to pull something important out of you. Out of you. Aristotle understood that.

For him, the highest expression of religion was the drama—the story of the interaction between the gods and human beings enacted before an audience in such a way that it drew out your pity, your tears, all of your body fluids, all of your energy and left you broken in your seat. He called that catharsis.

Religion is cathartic. It doesn’t give you something, you’ve already got what you need to have. It pulls something out of you, it pulls out who you are, and what you think and believe—and lets you look at it and handle and understand it.

But if you’ve got a religion that’s pumping things into you instead of pulling things out of you, if you’ve got a religion that’s pumping things into you like dogmas and beliefs and taboos—if that’s your religion, then you’re cooked. Because you’ll never spit out what you were supposed to spit out. You’ll drown in toxic religion first.

Jesus said behold the kingdom of God is at hand, within and surrounding you, awaken to that, understand it, make it the way you look at the world. Make it the way you do business. Realize that the God of love is everywhere, in everything and everyone, and then conduct your life accordingly.

Now, Christmas doesn’t reinvent that, or even enhance the experience in and of itself. What it does is to provide the whole world—because Christmas is not one of those esoteric mystery drams meant to be presented behind closed doors, to invited guests only.

Christmas goes on right in front of everybody—because Christmas brings out the inner Christ in the outer world—Christmas is Christmas just by being there, unfolding in front of them.

Which is why Christmas is able to draw in and captivate non-Christians as well as Christians, and atheists as well as non-atheists, because it offers the opportunity to bring out the inner self, the inner Christ, the inner Buddha, for everyone to see the symbols and understand their meaning.

That’s it. You don’t have to sign anything or believe anything. You just have to see the symbols, understand their meaning and realize that that makes a difference in your own life.

That’s what Christmas is all about: seeing and understanding. People talk about the Christmas tradition. And there’s a whole pantheon of Christmas traditions and people like Any Williams and Burl Ives that populate it. And I enjoy that stuff as much as anybody. Maybe more.

But there’s a whole cottage industry that’s sprung up around Christmas tradition, that’s turned it into kitschy, gooey, family farce. And it’s really not.

True Christmas tradition is about tapping into the skein of fabric that represents all of the millions and millions of awakening experiences, all of the Christ experiences that people have had for thousands of years. And some of those experiences have been harrowing. Mystical experiences have that side too. And it’s all a part of the story.

The Christmas tradition is really kind of like the Akashic record. Do you know what that is? It’s from the Sanskrit word for aether. It’s one of the five elements: earth, air, fire, water and aether, akashic.

And the Akashic Record, the ethereal record, has entered the new age iconography as a wonderous book of life, where every single word and thought and action of your life, your father’s life, his ancestors’ ancestors’ lives, are all recorded. Everything anyone who’s ever lived, has said or thought or done.

Which also, means that the teachings and thoughts of wise teachers and holy men, and presumably Christ and Buddha, all of the holy wisdom of the universe is contained in the record. And because it’s our record, we’re in it too. We can access it. We can put ourselves on a mental and spiritual plane where we can see the record and read its wisdom.

Or, to put it more theologically, the Akashic Record is a cosmic energy field that can transmit information to human beings without having to go through their senses. Kind of handy to have around.

And the Christmas tradition in several ways is like the Akashic Record. It transmits information about the cosmic Christ, the inner Christ, without having to go through logic or reasoning or rationality.

It just overwhelms and saturates you, if you let it, with thoughts and images and connections between you and a universally inner God.

And experiencing, by the way, that kind of contact with something like the Akashic Record is a lot like a self working trick that you buy at a magic ship. You don’t have to be a magician, for it to work, it works itself.

And that’s a good analogy, because the Akashic Record just transmits information—you don’t have to be a translator, a philosopher, a theologian to decipher it. It’s self working. You don’t listen to it. It’ll tell you what it’s about. Hear it. Understand it, and you’re in.

That’s what Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol is all about, if you stop and think about it, isn’t it? It’s about tapping into Christmas memories in order to bring about transformation and understanding in a life where the Christ self has been covered over by greed.

And what we do at Christmas time is not so much to wait for anything, but to unroll something that has already been written and recorded for a more convenient time.

And that time is whenever you say so. That’s the wonderful thing about Christmas, you don’t have to wait for it. This Advent thing is bunk. Dig into Christmas, dig into Christ right now. It’s always open for business.

No wonder Jesus didn’t make a big deal out of his birthday. No wonder he told the disciples, don’t get me any presents, no surprise parties, nobody jumping out of a cake, nothing. Because the birth of any man, even Jesus, is not worth the rebirthing of an awakened, enlightened mind.

Let’s drink right now, let’s celebrate today—because it’s God’s day, His kingdom, His table we’re feasting at.

In fact, you know when Christmas happens? Not on December 25th, or January 6th. It happens when Christ comes alive in you. And that happens every single day of the week somewhere to somebody. What do you want to bet?

So every day is Christmas, literally. Isn’t that what we wanted when we were kids? For every day to be Christmas? Well, it is.

Every day is filled with songs and laughter and presents. Isn’t that your experience of life? It would be if it were your Christ experience of life.

Especially the presents part, because Jesus thought of every breath that he took as a present. Every meal that he ate was a feast, and he thanked God for it and blessed it, and multiplied it and passed it around, so that the feast never ended.

Let’s do that today! I mean really make it work. Say Merry Christmas to people all the time. Buy everybody Christmas presents every week, every month, and keep all your Christmas lights up all year long, even on the garage and fence and even on your trash cans.

Let’s never stop playing carols and cantatas and Christmas songs, especially Dr. Demento’s Demented Christmas Album. You know that that’s gotta sound better in July. Let’s keep Christ, animated and up front every day, every second of our lives, or.....

If that seems a little impractical, let’s celebrate the next four weeks with everything we’ve got. All out. Not because it’s Advent. We’re not waiting for anything anymore.

Let’s celebrate because we’re delighted that God has transformed our minds, our lives, our world, and we just want everybody to know.

So forget everything that I said about this being the first Sunday of Advent, because it’s not. In fact, I’m banning the whole concept of Advent from this church. There is no Advent, there is no waiting.

This is not the first Sunday of Advent, it’s the 104th, the 468th Sunday of Christmas, of Christ awareness and awakening, and we don’t have to wait for anything. Every we need is right here, right now, within us.

Everything we need for a perfect Christmas is within us right now—just the same as it will be in four weeks. So let’s not just put it off. Break out the fruitcake and mistletoe.

Christ has come, God’s kingdom is here, for gosh sakes it’s Christmas. We know that, we’ve known it all along, and let’s get out there and try to convince the world to see things our way. And then watch, and really see what a transformation that invokes.

-Rev. John Newton

11/1/09: Death is the Road to Awe

Today is called in Los Angeles and Guadalajara and Albuquerque and Mexico City, today is called La Dia de Los Meurtos, the Day of the Dead.

It’s a part of a very ancient Aztec tradition that the conquistadors were appalled to see the Indians practicing when they invaded their country, because it involved keeping skulls and body parts in their homes and on their persons. But what it really had to do with was commemorating and communing with the dead.

And in Latin America, it has melded into a hybrid religious expression, which fits almost seamlessly into their passionate brand of Roman Catholicism. Which should really come as no surprise to anybody. Because right from the start of Christianity, death and dying was a really big issue.

Think about it. What was the most important event in Jesus’ life? He died. He was resurrected, but he had to die first. And that became a model for the Christian view of life and death.

Christian doctrine says that there is a wall between life and death, but it is a permeable wall, you can walk through it. It isn’t solid brick, you can cross through it and come back again. You can talk to people who have died. You can talk to Jesus, who died. You can talk to saints.

By the way, la Dia de los Muertos, has a counterpart in the western European Catholic and Protestant traditions as All Saints’ Day.

All Saints’ Day is a day on which we either recall and commemorate the brave and pious lives of the saints, or else we light candles to them. I personally always find candles a very dicey and messy affair.

But on All Saints’ Day in medieval Europe, parishioners would go a lot further than that in the messy department. They would haul out the relics of their church’s patron saint; the petrified liver of Saint Cecelia, the neck bone of Peter the Hermit, the leg bone of John the Baptist. It was like the Frankenstein Monster of holiness spread out all over Europe.

And then they’d venerate and kiss the bones as though they possessed some supernatural power, healing power, power to intervene in contemporary life. The Day of the Dead is exactly the same thing.

It takes the same theological principle behind All Saints’ Day, and acts it out, applies it to the context of everyday life.

And that’s why, in Mexican homes, you see the skulls and skeletons, which in the villages would have been real, and you see pictures of grandpa and his favorite food and his favorite mariachi music, and the whole day is spent living life as though Grandpa, grandma and Great Aunt Rosarita were literally present in the room.

In ancient Rome and Greece, in medieval Europe, in modern day Mexico and South America, commemorative days like the Day of the Dead, the day of the candles and the dead saints, were not days of gloom and morbidity. They were days of hope and triumph.

They are days when the line is crossed, and the realization is achieved that life and death are not experienced apart from one another, that they are part of the same continuum, and that resurrection is at the end of the continuum and rebirth is at the other. That life is a circle and not an arch. It doesn’t stop. There is no end.

See, here’s the truth. Life and death are merely a resifting of energy and consciousness. It goes on when we’re alive and it goes on when we’re dead. It goes on when we’re aware, and it goes on when we’re unaware.

The big difference is that, when you are aware, awakened, enlightened, whether you’re dead or alive, your consciousness is always present, and the consciousness of God is always comingled with your own, in every moment, in every particle of time and space.

This would be a great Easter sermon, because it’s really all about resurrection, isn’t it? Not a resurrection after you die, but a resurrection right now, that allows you, allows your consciousness, to transcend life and death, and to merge in energy, in form, in consciousness with Christ, with Christ as he merges with God.

There’s an old Disney cartoon, a Mickey Mouse from the early talky era, and it has Peg Leg Pete. Now, if you remember him, he’s a big fat mean cat, with a squinty eye and a peg leg, and in the early sound cartoons, he’s Mickey’s natural enemy.

So in this one cartoon that takes place in the old west, Pete is a Mexican bandit, and Mickey is a vaquero, a cowboy. And Pete steals Minnie, who sings in the saloon, and Mickey, her hero, rides after them.

And they do one of those animated loops where the figures up front are fully animated and the background is just a few seconds of the same cactus and rocks, repeated over and over again.

But then they come to a rim of a canyon, and have to leap from one side of the rim to the other. And Pete on his great big horse makes the leap fine, but Mickey is on a little horse, and he can’t do it.

And so he stops, and even thought it’s a talking cartoon, question marks come out of his head. And then he gets an idea.

He takes out his rope, and lassos across the gap to a little rock or tree stump on the other side, and then he pulls the two rims of the canyon together, by pulling hand over hand, on the rope, until the two sides join. And then he rides on, chasing after Pete and the much abused Minnie.

The Day of the Dead is just like that. It’s like a rope that we toss across to the other side, to death, and we pull it close to ourselves, or more correctly I guess, we pull ourselves, pull our consciousnesses closer to the other pole in eternity, the one that is equally a part of our destinies, but that we just can’t seem to get a handle on.

In fact, our spiritual practices could use massive doses, especially in the United Sates, of Day of the Dead awareness. Not days of cancer prevention awareness, or longevity awareness, where we try our hardest to think of ways to outwit or outlast death, our great enemy, like Pet Leg Pete;

But days, months, years of the awareness that death is our inevitable goal, at least if we’re in control of ourselves, death is the place where we’re aimed already at, where we’ve been going all along, it’s the downbeat in the rhythm of our lives.

Socrates said, philosophy should be the practice of dying. By which he meant the experience of eternal, cosmic mind.

Saint Paul said that we were dead in our sins, but now we are alive in our knowing, in our knowing of Christ, in our unity with God through a radical re-identification with Christ, and his journey through the permeable membrane between life and death, between the human and the divine.

So how do we do that, in LA, as we totter on the rim of the second decade of the 21st century? How do we make dying a part of our spiritual practice? It’s really just a matter of attitude, perspective.

This is one of those things like in the movie “Jumbo,” where Jimmy Durante is caught trying to smuggle a full grown African elephant out of the circus, and when the policeman questions him, he says, “Elephant? What elephant?”

Death? What death? It’s the great big gray thing that’s always standing a couple of inches behind us. We’re already dead, and Socrates and Christ and Buddha would all say that’s right, but we’re also already redeemed, enlightened, resurrected.

See, death is inevitable. You’ve gotta Get over it. It happens because it happens.

Resurrection, on the other hand, happens because you make it happen, you allow it to happen. As you open up your consciousness to all of being, to the whole cosmic shooting match—to the other side of the rim where our feet have never trod.

I think as a part of our spiritual practice, we should think about death every day. We should realize the mortality of our bodies, and the uselessness of all our treasures and trophies; we should think, I’m already dead, so hey, everything I think, everything I do had better pertain to eternity, not stuff, not fads or current events, but eternity.

And we should concentrate on our only mission here in this incarnation, which is to advance the well being, and the spiritual unfoldment of the human race.

Sure, we should take care of the environment. Why? Because we live here. We should concentrate on all of the integral aspects of the well being and unfoldment of our own species.

This whole karma thing is very human-centric, isn’t it? Because it’s not about anvils and sunflowers, it’s all about us, humanity.

It’s all about our consciousness driven humanity, and our need to strengthen and protect our line, by expanding our awareness.

And people say, well then, you shouldn’t focus on death. You can do that by focusing on life and ignoring death, except how to delay it.

But you know what? Ignoring death puts blinders on you, it limits your consciousness, makes you smaller, less evolved, less advanced on your journey.

In fact, when you ignore the other side of the rim, your journey’s already over, you’re just waiting out the inevitable, and that’s a nice safe way to do it, I guess, but then the journey, the exploration, the growth stops right there. On this side of the canyon.

People say, but when you’re dead, you’re dead, and that’s true. But when you’re dead, and then come back to life again, the way Saint Paul is talking about it, when you’re dead and that you resurrect, you awaken to life’s wholeness, connectedness, to life’s conscious continuity;

When you awaken to that, death is behind you, it already happened. And you’re further along your journey because of it.

So, traditions like la Dia de los Meurtos, and All Saints’ Day, remind us that there is continuity. That life and death go on together, that they’re compatible, and if you try to separate them, you’ll throw yourself out of spiritual alignment.

And while it’s true that you won’t actually do anything to the process, you’ll set yourself back quite a few karmic cycles. And you don’t want that.

So learn from the Aztecs, the shamans, the animists, we’re living in a post modern age, we got a lot of catching back, not catching up, but catching back to do.

We’re supposed to be on the slowing back mode, we’re on the road to return, restitution and reconciliation, with the God of our ancestors. So dig out your shells and photos of Uncle Chester and Aunt Agnes.

Live death to the fullest, learn from it, make friends with it, because by doing so you’re integrating your finite life cycle with the infinitely renewable cycle of the life and mind and heart of God.

So don’t give up on life, but don’t give up on death and dying either. Don’t’ give up on death because it’s part of where God wants us to take our enquiring souls and consciousness, into His whole kingdom, a kingdom of light and darkness, that exists in us, as it does in all the universe.

06/21/09: Seek You First the Kingdom of Heaven and Its Righteousness

(Matthew 6:31-33)

I can remember back in the sixties—you know, it’s amazing that I can remember anything at all about the sixties.....considering that I hadn’t even been born yet!

But with whatever glimmer of memory I can conjure up, back in the sixties, we used to call anyone who consistently acted above and beyond all moral expectations: righteous.

He’s a real righteous dude, we used to say. Or, what a righteous move the selective service lottery system was, but only if you had a really high number. Which I did.

My draft number was the Greek symbol for infinity. It put me at such a low priority that even the Vietcong didn’t want me. If I got a draft notice, it would say greetings from the president, don’t call us, we’ll call you.

But being thought of, or talked about as righteous, a righteous dude, was something that we longed for, dreamed of in the sixties.

People could say a lot of things about us, and they did. That we were radical, flipped out, turned on, out of sight, that we looked really great in a tuxedo jacket and patched jeans, but righteous.....righteous was the eagle scout, the Oscar, the highest honor on a scale of one to infinity.

We don’t say the word a lot anymore. Righteous. Righteousness. And usually, when we do, it’s prefixed by self. Self righteous. Self righteousness.

That’s something we despise, isn’t it? Self righteousness ranks down there with hypocrisy in a reverse scale from infinity to one.

Self righteousness means you’re full of it, and I don’t mean righteousness. Full of manure, full of what the Hindus call maya. Illusion. The drek of reality.

But is self righteousness really such a bad thing? Think about it. Where else can you be righteous except in your self; where else can you experience righteousness? It’s not a can of soup. It’s not a blockbuster movie, or a new pair of shoes. It’s not an all expense paid trip to Barbados.

Righteousness is a character or quality of being. It’s something that you can be. You can be a righteous dude, like Buddha or Jesus or George Harrison.

And we get our concept of righteousness from the Hebrew religious tradition, from the Hebrew word, in fact, twin Hebrew words, tsedek and tsedaka. Being right, and doing right.

Tsedaka means justice, being right. It means righteousness of behavior, and speech and morality. But the word actually goes way back in the history of the Hebrew language, where it means to conform to the norm. And for the Hebrew religion, that norm is the character of God. And what’s God’s character like? That’s a hard one, isn’t it?

We really don’t know how to talk about the character of God, do we? Human language only reaches so far. We usually talk about His characteristics instead of His character. We say, He’s omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. All of those are characteristics, like red hair or a big chin.

But who is God intimately? Who is He on His day off? What are His hobbies? What kind of drinks does He like? Does He like pina coladas, and long wistful walks on the beach at sunset? Only for Him, I guess, since He’s omnipresent the sun never actually sets at all.

So how can we describe God’s character except by saying that God is the best that’s in us.

Because if God is really omnipresent, if that’s one of his characteristics, then he’s also in us. In our bodies, in our minds, in our consciousness, in our spirits.

And we know, pretty well, what the best in ourselves is, don’t we? We certainly know what it’s not. It’s not envy, revenge or anger.

It’s loving kindness, it’s mercy, it’s generosity, it’s acceptance and tolerance. That’s the righteousness of God that our own lives can form to.

But that’s not the only way that the Bible has ever defined righteousness. Like everything else about the Judeo-Christian religion, it’s taken a large, millennia old path to realization.

In the oldest of the Old Testament, the word righteousness starts out being attached to the law of God, the Law of Moses. God’s righteousness is what’s presented in the Torah, it’s the rules and regulations of righteous behavior. But often that develops, it changes and evolves. Why? It softens. It becomes more sensitive, more accessible.

Because the more the writers of the Hebrew bible, the Old Testament, got to know God, through their tradition and through their direct mystical experience of the presence of God—and we’re talking about the prophets, like Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and Micah.

The more they got to know God, the more they learned about God’s true character, the more they came to realize that God wasn’t a stern judge—sitting on a cosmic throne of vengeance and retribution.

They learned that God was actually compassionate, and aware of frailty and suffering, and they realized that God wanted justice not for Himself—by obeying His rules and restrictions and purity laws. But for another reason altogether.

God wanted justice for the poor, the helpless, the weak, the unimportant and overlooked ones of the earth. Remember the words of the prophet Micah? He wrote, “He has told you, oh mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you, but to act justly, to love kindness and walk humbly with your God?”

So righteousness in human behavior comes to mean conforming to the character of a loving, accommodating, reconciling and impartial God. And that’s how Jesus understood the term.

In our text this morning, from the gospel of Matthew, four hundred years later, Christ says, “Therefore, do not worry, saying ‘what will we eat, or what will we drink, or what will we wear.’ For your heavenly father knows that you need all of things. But seek you first the kingdom of God, and its righteousness, and all of those other things will be given to you as well.”

This is one of the most Zen things that Jesus ever said. He says, look, we’ve all got needs, right? The rent, good grades, a career, a car that doesn’t break down. We all want to live a good life, we want health and prosperity and happiness. But how do we get it?

Jesus says we get it by not seeking it. Not even by thinking about it. We get it by seeking first the kingdom of God, and then all of that other stuff will be given to us as well.

So a righteous person is a person who doesn’t worry about the things that God doesn’t worry about. Like ritual sacrifices, or gathering wealth, or our immediate futures.

Because God’s mind is full of different priorities. Like loving people non-judgmentally, like mercy, like kindness, like mending the fabric of creation. And that’s where he wants us to put our heads too. And not on us, not on our needs.

Because when you live in God’s zone, you can take sufficiency, you can take abundance for granted, as you become aware of God’s oneness and the immediacy, and availability, and interconnectedness and the closeness of everything there is to you.

But you say, I don’t feel abundant. That’s right, because you haven’t realized abundance yet.

Remember what we said last week, manifesting means realizing, making something clear, making obvious something that is already present in God’s world and in your self. Including His kingdom. Including its righteousness.

Imagine that. Self righteousness, the righteousness that you can only find within yourself.

And by the way, once you find righteousness within yourself, you being to see it, and find it everywhere you look.

Because righteousness means seeing the world the way God sees it, through God’s eyes. Righteousness means caring about the things God cares about. Relating to people the way God relates to them. That’s why Jesus could say, “I and the Father are one.” And people said, blasphemy! He’s saying, I am God!

And Jesus said, what do I think I am meshuga? You think I’m a moron? I know that I am no more God than you are, but I am no less God than you are either. Know you not that we are all His offspring, together?

Righteousness means knowing that we are all God’s offspring, God’s incarnations. That means that we need to be especially careful about how we treat people, doesn’t it?

It means we have to be careful how we talk to people. How we talk about people when they’re not around. If who we’re talking about is God, then there is no such thing as talking behind His back. Because, oh yeah, God is like omnipresent, right.

Look, God put us here, each one of us, for a very specific, unique purpose. Now it just so happens that in every case, it’s the very same purpose: to do good, to be kind, to love one another. To change the world in a positive, Godlike way.

It’s all the same purpose, but what makes it unique and individualized is that He’s given us all our own individual gifts and talents to implement the purpose with.

And I don’t just mean the obvious gifts, like singing, or beauty, or grace, or tap dancing. I mean inner gifts, gifts of sensitivity, intuition and compassion.

Now, the other Hebrew word for righteousness is tsedek. It’s very much like the first word tsedaka, they’re from the same root word. Tsedek means equanimity.

It means not reacting to things as if they’re all scary alien objects, surprising, frightening things that make us react like animals in danger. We jump, we cry out, we run away and hide.

Tsedek means the sense of right, of sympathy and responsibility that’s been planted in our hearts.

Tsedek is the spiritual inner sense that allows us to resist opposition and negativity and even violence, not with violence, aggressively, but with love, passively, peacefully, with empathy and understanding.

Jesus talks about this over and over in the gospels. “Do unto others, turn the other cheek, the father running to the prodigal son.” That’s why Jesus said things like love your neighbor as yourself, walk an extra mile.

You know what those things are? They’re simply what the prophet Micah said. They’re all the things that God requires of us. You know why?

Because it’s what He requires of Himself. It’s God’s self righteousness that we then come to realize as our own self righteousness. The righteousness of nurturing God’s creation, of turning the illusion of evil into the reality of good.

You know, I don’t think that there’s anything really complicated about this. People always say how hard, how unfathomable life is. I don’t think so.

This part of it at least is absolutely straight forward. Be perfect even as your father in heaven is perfect. How? In your righteousness. In His righteousness which is located, dormant, unused unless use it, inside of yourself.

That means that God’s righteousness is in your love, in your connection to people, in your concern for the environment. That’s how you manifest your God self, righteousness.

Stop thinking about the self that you feed and put clothes on so much, and start thinking more about the self that created you and the world around you, the inner self, the God self.

And when you seek that inner kingdom, and its righteousness becomes your norm, then everything else will fall into place.

And the most important, and the most striking part of God’s righteousness when you finally discover it, is just how much He loves you. How much God loves the world. How carefully and mindfully he’s provided for it.

And that’s the culminating realization that’s going to have the biggest impact on you, that’s going to bring the most light and calm and confidence into your life.

Because it’s the realization that God’s love, God’s love for you, love in you, the love that God deposited at your core, is what connects you with every living thing.

That’s where your purpose is. That’s where your righteousness is. Turn within. Christ is there, the essence of Christ is there. Just as powerfully present as it was in Jesus. Only it’s yours.

Seek you first the kingdom of God and its righteousness. Then, once you’ve found it, put it to use in your daily life, in your work, your school, your relationships, and then watch how it transforms your world.

-Rev. John H. Newton

06/14/09: Manifesting Yourself

(Mark 8:17-21)

There’s a term that we use in the new thought movement in religion. And I love that identification, “new thought” religion.

We’re the thinking person’s religion. We like to think about what we believe in. I like that better than “just shut up and believe what I tell you” That’s not my kind of religion.

There’s a term we use in new spirituality called manifesting. You hear it all the time from new age teachers. You also hear it misused all the time.

People say, you want a new car, a better job? Manifest it. You need more money? Manifest it. New boyfriend, girlfriend? Manifest them. Put out the thought, and they’ll appear.

This is called “I Dream of Jeanie theology,” and it’s very attractive to people, but it’s not the way it really works.

But manifesting isn’t like rubbing a lamp. Think about it! What’s the lamp? Where’s the lamp? Manifesting is creating something. Creating something from where? Out of what? Out of nothing?

Try that sometime. It’s like pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. It can’t be done. You can’t lift yourself off the earth by pulling on the tops of your boots. You just fall over.

You can’t create something out of nothing at all. You need something. You need materials, language, ideas. It takes a lot to create something, and, like, dozens of trips to the hardware store.

Manifesting is creating something out of a change in perception. That’s what it means. The word manifestation has to do with vision, with seeing.

Manifesting means making something clear or evident to the eye or the understanding that wasn’t clear or evident before. To manifest money means to make money clear or evident to the eye or the understanding of the beholder.

You see what I mean? Manifesting doesn’t create something out of nothing. It creates clarity, it creates a clear vision of what is already present. Manifestation means the act of coming into seeing, into a clear view of whatever it is you’re trying to see.

So manifesting a new job doesn’t mean creating a fake job out of nothing. It means making the real jobs which are already there, they’re just not being seen, or utilized. Manifesting a new job means making a job apparent, manifest, by bringing it into view.

Now, people might say, wait a minute, God created out of nothing. He manifested the universe from the void. No He didn’t.

The God of the book of Genesis clearly exists in a world in which He is the only inhabitant, and sole designer. What did He design it out of? Himself? That’s clear enough. There was nothing else there. There was only Him. He manifested the universe, which already existed in Himself.

You might argue that God existed in a wraparound environment of His own, everything in place, in Him, but the only thing lacking was light. Once He said “let there be light,” every created thing appeared, it came out of the darkness. It grew out of the earth. It appeared in the sky.

In the only detailed account of an act of divine creation we have, the creation of human beings, he brings them into being by breathing his breath into him, and the Hebrew word for breath is “ruach,” which is also the word for spirit.

In Hebrew, to give up the breath means to give up the spirit. God’s breath is our life, and the whole animated universe, is God exhale, and the creation’s response to Him is the inhale. So God creates, or manifests, out of Himself.

How about Jesus? Did Jesus manifest things? Think about the feeding of the multitudes, with the loaves and fishes. Where’d the fish come from?

Did Jesus make new fish to fill the baskets, or did he manifest fish by showing that just like the little boy with his lunch, everybody in the crowd had a small morsel of something that they could share—and so everybody pitched in and made a feast.

That could have been how it happened. Jesus manifested fish by showing people where fish already were.

Here’s another possibility. This is metaphysical—Jesus manifested food to people all the time: to the woman at the well, he offered water to her. What was the water? Himself. I am the water. Another thing, I am the bread of life. I am the true vine bearing fruit.

Christ manifested the loaves and fishes by feeding the people out of himself. His energy. His power. His spirit, his love, his generosity, his compassion, they became him, and then they accessed the infinite resources of life, the way he did.

We manifest, we clarify, we create out of ourselves. We manifest by clarifying what already exists within us. Everything’s already there. All of the truth. All of the answers.

We bring forth creation from the stuff that God put in us, from the stuff that God is in us. From God’s mind, God’s vision, God’s spirit, His ruach! His exhaled breath!

So! Can you manifest money? Sure you can. If there is money in the world, and it’s in circulation, and you’re inspired and awakened and know where that money is, you can make that money appear to anybody. And anybody, including yourself, can take that information and do something wonderful and positive, creative with it.

But that’s not making something out of nothing, is it? It’s taking the forces of life and turning them, not to your own advantage, but to God’s advantage, and the world’s advantage.

And doing that aligns you with the God within you, and you become a vessel of power, and a healer of wounds, and a birther of minds, and a reconciler of lives. And that’s manifestation.

Could you take a meal of five loaves and two fishes, or two hot dogs and a bag of peanuts, and feed a crowd at Dodger Stadium through it?

I think you could! I think you could activate the mind of God in every fan from the bleachers to the box seats to see the plenty that they have right in their midst, in you, in themselves, and they would begin to fill up on each other’s creative energy and generosity and sharing.

You do that. You could manifest world peace, by first finding peace within yourself. And then second, by making it clear to the world that that’s how peace is lived out in a human life.

Manifest it, and you know what? It’s no longer the peace that passes understanding, because now it’s perfectly clear. You can understand it because you have manifested it.

That means that you can manifest, that you should manifest, every good and perfect thing in yourself, in your life, in the world: Everything that you want to discover, everything that you want to share, you can manifest.

And you know what? If your God self, your inner self becomes your outer self, then everything that you propose, everything that you undertake, is suddenly possible. It’s always been possible, you just don’t know it.

But if your will is aligned with God’s, then everything that you want is what God wants. And how likely is it that what God wants is going to happen? Pretty damn likely.

And by the way, people don’t just manifest good things. Have you ever known anybody who simply loves to go around uncovering negative things, everybody else’s errors, imperfections and mistakes?

Those people manifest their negativity. They manifest their need for problems. They manifest the worst, the most defeated in themselves and then project that onto other people.

See, here’s the crucial thing. Since what we manifest is what’s in us, we are intrinsically capable of manifesting both the very best and the very worst in us. We always could. It’s always been up to us.

We can manifest anger, bitterness, or regret, or we can manifest calm, compassion, wisdom, creativity, the characteristics of the inner Christ.

The characteristics that enabled him to manifest seven loaves and two fishes as what they really were: the expansive gifts of a spontaneously generous heart.

So, here’s an answer to a lot of questions that people are asking of themselves and the world right now.

If you’re manifesting envy, revenge, and all of that stuff, then you’re probably also manifesting temper tantrums, chronic bad health, prejudice, failure.

But if you’re manifesting God, then you’re probably manifesting love, wisdom, reconciliation, peace, prosperity and community: because that’s the stuff that God manifests.

If you’re manifesting God, then you’re probably finding out—not that you can have control over other people or external circumstances, but that you can have control over inner circumstances.

That’s where it starts, first in yourself, and then through your life as a conduit, to other people. And it begins by turning over your mind and spirit and vision to the one from whom they all came from in the first place. To God.

But not the God who lives in a castle beyond a crystal sea, in the mists of the cosmos. But rather, the God who lives quietly, patiently within you, within yourself, within the best part of you.

Do you realize what kind of power, power of mind and power of faith and power of spirit, power of imagination, that gives you?

Do you see how important that could be in a life that’s lived with purpose and power? Have you manifested it yet? Have you uncovered the potential power in your life and put it to work? If you haven’t, manifest it now.

Manifest your own destiny. Manifest your prosperity. That’s an inner thing too. Manifest the prosperity that’s within you in the presence of an all knowing, all powerful God, all loving God, all purpose God. Right inside of yourself.

Take that idea and run with it in your everyday life. That’s what living a spiritual life is all about. It’s not dogma and restrictions and religious bureaucracies. It’s about you.

It’s about you being the spiritual dynamo you are meant to be. The engine that drives the forces of peace and freedom and enlightenment in the world.

That’s what God intended you to be. How do we know that? Because that’s the way God is. And in this world, we are God’s eyes, ears, voices. We are God’s hands and feet. That’s why we incarnate.

God has not finished with the world. And he can’t finished with it until you’ve put your special mark on it.

Manifest your gifts, your place in the mosaic of human evolution, fulfill the role that’s uniquely yours. That’s what God wants, He wants you to be yourself. The self that He loves. The self that He can use to inspire, awaken and transform the world.

-Rev. John H. Newton

03/29/09: Spiritual Prosperity

(Isaiah 53:7-11)

Since Easter is almost upon us, I was looking through the traditional Old Testament Messiah tests that are interpreted by the New Testament authors as prophecies related to the passion of Christ. And as I read, I was struck by something I’d never noticed before.

In the fifty third chapter of Isaiah, it says, “He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities.” That’s the part that I remember from Sunday School when I was a kid.

But then, it goes on, “And the will of God shall prosper in his hand, the hand of the messiah.”

And so I started wondering, What does that mean? I mean, I know what it means in the broadest sense. Somehow God worked, or would work, miracles through the vehicle of some human life, which is what a messiah was supposed to be.

But what did that really mean to them? And more important than that, what does it matter to me, because I’m a boomer, and everybody knows that everything has to relate back to me. It’s only fair.

And the first thing that struck me was this word “prosper.” The will of God prospering in his hand. I checked every translation—they all use the same word, prosper.

So I looked it up in a Hebrew concordance, and the words prosper and prosperity come from the Hebrew root word “saw-lay-ach,” which literally means to push forward, to advance—in a lot of different senses. It means to break out of the mold, to go over the top, to be fulfilled, dynamic—to cause, effect, make or send out an aura of prosperity.

Now that’s not a definition of prosperity that I frequently use. To me, prosperity is fat farmers with fat cows in fat barns filled with grain. Or fat bankers in fat vaults knee deep in money. That’s prosperity.

But in the Hebrew religion, the religion of the Old Testament, prosperity is the breakthrough or the advancement of the will of God.

Now, it just so happens that we’re in the middle of a social and economic meltdown of global proportions. All because the world’s economy had been based on a wrong definition of prosperity.

The world defined prosperity as more stuff. Bigger barns. That doesn’t work. The Hebrew Bible defines prosperity as pushing forward God’s agenda in the world. And that, as it turns out, may be exactly what we need in our lives and in our world right now.

It’s certainly, if we accept it, a heck of a lot easier concept of prosperity to realize, to make happen, to manifest in your own life.

Think about it. There’s no mortgage on the kingdom of God. No indebtedness. No blame. No shame. And the simplest acts can take on the greatest meaning there.

My wife was tutoring one of the youngest kids in the school who’s been having some issues with the—fraction.

And she said that all of a sudden, I realized that what I was doing with this kid—and it wasn’t what I was trained to do, it’s not what I took my degrees to do, but tutoring this kid, right here, right now—might be the most important moment in the universe.

Because who knows where this kid is going? Whose life he’s going to touch? And if I’ve moved him ahead even a fraction of an inch—I think I’ve done something significant. Something meaningful. Better than buying new shoes, I asked? Much better, she said. Better than watching your stocks soar up the S and P Five hundred? Infinitely better, she said.

And you know what? That’s the real meaning of prosperity. When the inside of you tells you that the outside of you is doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing, cooperating and interacting with God’s world and God’s humanity.

And you know what? That’s exactly what we’re here for! That’s progress. That’s prosperity. That’s the only real prosperity you’ll ever going to experience in your life.

See? When you’re fulfilling the actual destiny of your life—and I’m not talking about your own dreams, I’m not talking about liberating a third world nation from tyranny, or climbing the last tallest mountain on the planet.

When you’re fulfilling the destiny that is uniquely yours, the destiny that reveals itself to you in your passions and your talents.

When you’re unfolding to that inner pattern, accomplishing your life the way God intended it—that’s prosperity. It doesn’t mean you’ll make a fortune. It doesn’t mean you’re an instant celebrity—that stuff’s not important enough to constitute prosperity.

Because when you are fulfilling your individual destiny, you are advancing the kingdom of God, and that’s tremendously important. Do you realize that?

If what you are doing in your life, with your life, is being done in accordance with the pattern within you, the code that God implanted in your brain, your soul—so that your unique life form is orbiting and operating according to its inner code—then what you are doing in your life is Divine will. Because what you are doing is being willed by the divine in you.

And when you’re doing that, all of the other things and beings and places in life, in the world, where Divine will is being enacted, are operating in harmony with you.

Now, does that mean that a lion won’t eat you? No. Because the lion is enacting God’s will by sustaining itself on meat, evolutionarily speaking. What it does mean is that you’ll have the good sense and sensitivity to the natural order to leave the lion the hell alone, and stay out of its way.

Enacting God’s will by fulfilling your own destiny means that you appreciate, you revere all of the presences, all of the manifestations of the Divine. Everywhere you find them. Everywhere they intersect with your life.

Now that means that you’ve got to start learning to appreciate all kinds of things: all kinds of religions, all kinds of opinions, all kinds of lifestyles. And you’ve got to learn to see the sameness, and stop going on about the differences between things.

This is kind of like reducing fractions, you’ve got to reduce things to their smallest common denominator, and then you’ve got to reduce that, and keep on reducing it until it is seen to be one thing—one thing that contains all of the other things.

And what is that final denominator—the irreducible one? I guess it’s God—it’s oneness, it’s primal energy, divine mind, pure consciousness.

You know what that’s like? Pure consciousness? I was thinking about this. When a baby is born, it has a wonderful baby consciousness that only recognizes warmth and brightness and love.

It doesn’t see the differences between a mantelpiece clock and a bottle of organic herbal shampoo. It doesn’t see the difference between a ten dollar bill and a maple leaf. It has to learn to see those separations, and to make distinctions.

And we learn that very quickly, don’t we? Very early on. We learn to distinguish between what fills our stomachs and what hurts our fingers. We learn to distinguish between what we like and what we don’t like. Between beautiful and ugly. Between good and evil.

And once we start making distinctions, we automatically start making discriminations. And once we start that, we never stop.

And so our goal, when we start practicing spirituality, is to try to unlearn that knowing. And you know what we discover? As we make the journey, we find out that journeying itself tears down the boundaries between people and things and God and the universe.

And whatever we started out striving for, we end up striving toward oneness. The oneness thing, right?

When you unlearn the knowledge of good and evil, you return to the Garden of Eden, you get the newborn consciousness, pre-judgmental, entirely surrendered, utterly dependent upon expressions of nurture and love. But we’ve got to unlearn to get there.

We’ve got to unlearn seeing the differences. Because we’re all caught up with the differences. Racial, political, ethnic, religious.

People! Republicans and Democrats ain’t all that different from each other. White folks and black folks. Venezuelans and Laplanders aren’t all that different from each other.

Western democracies and communist and fascist nations are all basically the same sort of people, doing basically the same sorts of things to each other: projecting their own desires, living out their selfishness and their fears, protecting those they love, and shunning those they hate.

And religions aren’t awfully different from one another either. Selfishness, fear. Guilt. It’s just as much a part of organized religion as it is in politics, or business, or education.

What we aim to do in spirituality, and I think that it’s our destinies, those of us who are called to do it—what we aim to do is to advance the kingdom of God, to advance that level of divine consciousness through love and creativity. Not necessarily in that order.

And by the way, there are not many kingdoms of God. There is only one. And we all live in it. The only diversity, the only difference is that some people are aware that they’re living in the kingdom of God, and some people aren’t. That’s it.

I say this all the time, people are always looking, searching, for the kingdom of God. Stop looking for it. Stop searching. It’s already here, you don’t have to look for it anymore.

That’s the great truth of spirituality. Everything you seek, everything you truly need, every happiness, every triumph is already accomplished in the kingdom of God.

And getting there is easy. Step one: realize divine presence everywhere. In every breath you take, in the very life, the very world in which you live.

Step two: there is no step two. There’s no need for one. Simply realize that the presence of God is within you and all around you, and then start living that way. You’ll be amazed!

Did you know that every day is the kingdom of God? It is. Everybody you meet is the kingdom of God. Every circumstance you encounter is the kingdom of God.

So stop complaining about your circumstances, it’s just another opportunity for God to manifest His kingdom. Stop second guessing God.

And I’ll tell you why. If this oneness thing is really true. If that’s the way of the universe, then you are a part of everything that is, and everything that is, is a part of you.

So when you open up your consciousness, when you advance, when you prosper the kingdom of God in your hand, in your life—the consciousness of all humankind opens up and expands. Makes more room for a new breathe of consciousness. How awesome is that?

Or think about it this way. In the great cosmic sweep of things, you’re already dead and reborn, and living a new life somewhere else. But that doesn’t matter right now.

All that matters is right here. Open up all of your senses to it and take in all that God is.

Empty yourself of who you think you are, and the desire for what you think you want, and just fill up with God.

Receive your wisdom, your vision, your experience of the truth, and then start living deeply, passionately, bountifully and prosperously.

Do that. And then come back, and we’ll talk about it.

-Rev. John H. Newton

03/15/09: Be Still

(Psalms 46:8-11)

I sometimes like to go to the self realization Lake shrine which is on Sunset Boulevard, just as it starts to slope down to the Pacific Coast Highway.

There’s an enormous Dutch windmill, and of course the Lake with ducks and geese and fish, and an inner garden shrine where the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi are entombed or housed or whatever you do with ashes.

And there’s an incredible mish mash of architecture from modern to ancient mid eastern. There are golden domes and Indian temples and a gift shop and information center that looks like Gepetto’s Workshop.

And everywhere on the grounds, there’s a network of little rustic paths that wind around the lake.

And since the shrine is open to the public, a lot of local people go there for the exercise, to walk, either vigorously or meditatively, up and down the paths around the lake. And then you get back in your car and go somewhere else.

So it’s really rather like a huge miniature golf course with a spiritual theme. Or maybe like a scaled down, ecumenical Disneyland.

And one of the features that I really appreciate is that here and there along the paths there are very nice concrete garden benches molded to look like carved wood.

And on every bench is a bronze plaque with a quotation from one of the holy books of the world’s religions: Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Bahai.

My favorite bench, and at first I was drawn to it because of its view, it is on a terrace path looking over the lake toward the old church.

And what brings me back to this particular bench, and I always stop and sit and rest on it. What keeps me coming back to this bench is the quotation on its bronze plaque from the book of Psalms, it reads, “Be still and know that I am God.”

Which just so happens to be absolutely what I need to hear. I mean, what are the chances? What better place to end a walking meditation around a lake shrine than to park your tuchus on a bench that says be still and know that I am God?

The Hebrew word that we translate as “still” is “raphah,” which literally means to cease.

In fact, the root word for “raphah” means dead. It means cease to be, to cease being you and realize that within the you, once the you is depleted, there is an “I am God.”

So that’s what I do at the end of my walk. I sit down. I get still. Do I pray? No. Do I meditate? No. Do I think? No. I just get still.

And I turn on, not the cognitive part of my brain machinery, I turn on the God radar, the no mind.

The assimilating knowledge cells, the knowing that you don’t get from reading, from logic, from spiritual exercise. You don’t get it until you’ve ceased to be a sentient being, and become instead an open channel of God. 

Saint Paul says I die daily. Die so that Christ can come alive within me. Saint John of the cross calls that the ceso, when the individual self surrenders to the God self.

In Buddhism, they call it Inatma or no self. And atma, or true self, in Hinduism.

It’s all the same experience. Becoming still enough of your actions and intentions to realize the all presence of God everywhere within and around you.

That’s a religion without any dogma or hierarchy, it’s a religion that anybody can practice.

It’s a religion that says you aren’t here to be Jewish, or Christian, or Buddhist, or Moslem. You’re here to be still and know that I am God.

Who is “I?” Who am I? It’s funny how the question changes when you garble the grammar.

“Who is I?” is a question you might ask to the “out there,” to the universe. “Who am I?” is a question you ask of yourself. “Who is I?” is a theological question. “Who am I?” is a spiritual question.

Be still and know that I am God. Who am I? And who is the one who makes me who I am? Those aren’t questions, by the way, that I’m likely to ask myself when I’m sitting on the concrete bench looking across the lake.

When I’m there, I’m simply still and I’m wide open to whom and what God is, in whatever form, in every form that God takes.

And the older that I get, the more I become aware that there are infinitely more manifestations of God alive and active in the world than I ever suspected when I first lowered my canoe into my spiritual journey.

That’s a very James Fennimore Cooper-ish allusion, isn’t it?

Being still and realizing the omnipresence of God, is exactly what Jesus meant when he said, Behold—or realize that the kingdom of God is within you and around you.

If the world is like that, and more importantly, if you live like that, how can you ever seek to harm or control any living thing? You can’t.

How can you ever harbor an ounce of anger, envy or revenge? How can you ever treat anything like anything less than a manifestation of the presence of God?

Because God doesn’t exploit, resist or disrespect God. It just doesn’t happen—in our world of illusion, where we make the rules, it happens, but in God’s world, life sustains life, love nurtures love. Positive links with negative, it doesn’t try to eliminate it.

The spiritual teacher Shinzen Young talks about a process called “doing nothing,” by which he means that if the goal of spiritual practice is to return to the source of consciousness, which is not found in the noise and distractions of the physical world. And in fact, that noise can be very distracting to the spiritual quest.

If the spiritual journey is going to attain the goal, then he or she must learn to desist from intentional behavior. Because intentional behavior, dwelling on the noise prevents you from remaining in the zero space, the nothingness space, which is the source—because nothing is source everything. That’s why in the Hebrew scriptures, God created the world out of nothing.

So Shinzen says if you want to reach the source, you have to realize your grip on intentionality. And he defines intentional as something that you do voluntarily, that’s something that you do that you have control over, like putting your arm up and down. You make that action happen, so you can control it.

Now, what Shinzen points out that it’s not the things that we can’t control that get in the way of our spiritual goals, it’s the things we can control. So if you can’t stop doing something, like breathing, that’s not intentional, so you don’t have to cease that.

And if you’re meditating or praying and a random thought comes into your mind, you can’t control that. So don’t try and stop it. But if you dwell on the thought that enters your mind, that’s something you can control, so you can stop dwelling on whatever the thought was and return to being still.

And Shinzen says let whatever happens happen, but you don’t have to initiate it, or react to it.

Because when you do nothing, or as Paul says, when you die daily, nothing takes you to ground zero, to the source of being.

So if that was the goal of your spiritual practice, you don’t have to struggle to get to the source of consciousness, all you have to do is quiet down, and wait for God to get to you.

Now, I’ve usurped and Christianized his teaching, but I don’t think it’s altered the meaning of it much. It’s one of those places where traditions overlap.

Be still and know that I am God. Cease intentionality and return to the source of consciousness. Take no care about tomorrow, consider the lilies of the field.

Now, that’s a comparatively easy principle to apply to our lives. In fact, it’s the least demanding of all of God’s requests for us. After all, He’s not asking us to do something, He’s asking us to not do something. How easy is it not to do something?

Here’s how you do it. Stop chasing God around. Be still and just notice Him, be aware of Him. And then stop being so uptight and frantic about the rules that we’ve created for ourselves to control other people’s behavior. And stop blaming those rules on God.

Stop putting your own will first in your life. When you put God’s will first, your intentionality decreases automatically, and you being making fewer mistakes, suffering less and failing less.

Decrease your dependence on the external world. We talk about decreasing our dependence on fossil fuels. We need to slow down our consumption of and reliance on desire, feeling and sensation.

And then most important of all, stop being so myopic. Learn to see the big picture. Learn to see things God’s way. Too many of us are living with spiritual blinders on. There’s more out there to see than we’re seeing.

To God, the world is a whole earth, inhabited by a whole people. To God, people are not just equal, they’re the same.

Remember Jesus said to love your neighbor as yourself—he didn’t say love your neighbor equally, with as much love as you dole out to all your neighbors. That’s not good enough. Love them the way you love yourself. That’s how God loves.

God is an awesome, astounding God. His ways are so simple, so subtle, and yet they’re so far reaching, so deeply wired into us, and the world around us.

Every thread, every weave in the fabric flows in and out of Him. Surrender to that, look behind the fabric and see what God first saw, the nothingness out of which the whole of creation came into being.

Allow yourself to be carried along in the flow, in the pattern of God’s plan. Allow yourself to be who you truly are, an extension of God’s energy in His creation, an extension of God’s will in His creature.

-Rev. John H. Newton

2/8/09: The Atonement of Christ

There was an ad popping up on our computer the other night. Is that what you call them? Pop-ups? With a Greco-roman era image of Jesus, and the headline, “The God Who Wasn’t there.”

See, one night we just kept getting this iconic image popping up on anything we were searching for, until finally I said, “I gotta know what it’s about.”

So Colin and I wikipedia’d, you see, this is evidence of how liberal a think I really am. I’m allowing a personal pronoun to become a verb. Nobody else plays as fast and loose with language as I do, way out there on a limb.

So Colin and I wikipedia’d this title, “the God Who Wasn’t There.” And it turns out to be a DVD documentary, supporting what is called the “Jesus myth hypothesis,” which is the theory that Jesus never actually existed. That the Jesus of the New Testament was completely made up, like the Frankenstein monster, out of recycled mythological body parts.

And this is a line of theological inquiry that started in the late classical period, after the Roman Empire had adopted Christianity as the official religion. At that point, Neo-classists suggested, and rightly so, that many of the claims that the early Christian church had made about the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth were derived from Greek mythology.

They suggested that the divine Jesus was based on older Greek models cosmic Christ figures. Much more so than, for example, the Jewish messiah, whom Jesus does not tremendously look like in what he’s doing and talking about in the New Testament.

Jesus is infinitely more like a peripatetic, which means travels around, Greek cynic philosopher.

And the cynics took as their model Socrates, who wandered the countryside with his disciples encountering and challenging the vested authorities of religion and culture wherever he found them. And that’s a lot more like Jesus, isn’t it, than the Old Testament version of the messiah.

In Jewish mythology, the Messiah really ought to come with flames and swords and heavenly arrows—driving out the Romans, cleansing the temple with blood and vengeance. That’s the messiah that everyone was looking for. And some still are.

And so what this video documentary is apparently trying to say is that the Jesus worshiped by the Christian church for many long centuries has really been a kind of conglomeration of Dionysus, Apollo, Mithras and Horus. All of whom had legendary virgin births, and were resurrection gods.

The documentary apparently points out that the birthdays of many of these figures was December 25^th, that they were often killed on a tree or a cross, that their births received visitations from wise men from the east.

And one interesting point that it offers, as proof of the nonexistence of Christ, is the question that if all of this stuff, Jesus was born of a virgin, acclaimed in the stars, resurrected. If all of this stuff is true, why didn’t Paul know anything about it? Well Paul did say something about the resurrection, but he did it in a very spiritual way.

He didn’t talk about the garden tomb or the angles. And he said nothing about a virgin birth or an immaculate conception. He said nothing about the wise men, or the shepherds being astounded by an angelic chorus line dancing in thin air.

He didn’t say anything about them, because they hadn’t been invented yet, or if they had, they were still very new, very localized myths about the master, the teacher. Jesus had not yet become the Greco-Roman savior of the universe. He was still the rabbi from Nazareth.

In Paul’s letters, the Jesus he knew, he knew only through conversations with Jesus’ relatives and earthly followers, his real life contemporaries.

Their Jesus was not the product of an immaculate conception. He was their local teacher and exorcist, a miracle worker. I’m not sure if his contemporaries even really grasped the Greek cynic side of his teachings. They weren’t that sophisticated.

So this documentary says that Jesus did not exist because of the way his second and third and fourth generation of followers started turning him into this virgin born Greek resurrection god.

Now, I didn’t see the documentary, so I can’t drawn many conclusions about its merits, but the director appears to view all forms of divinity as bogus, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Christian, Hindu, it doesn’t matter, and if that’s his position, then Jesus obviously is a make believe character, like the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy, or better than that, to be fairer to him, like Robin Hood or King Arthur.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, I really love it when I come across material like this that draws such an obvious, one dimensional conclusion about such an astoundingly complex subject. Like they say, hey look, everything in the Bible didn’t literally happen that way.

But I wonder what would happen if this director of this documentary, and the holders of the Christ myth hypothesis, were to actually grasp the radical nature of Jesus’ message and life and sacrifice. I think they would be amazed to discover how deeply, how significantly his teachings resonate with the need for people to find some bigger entity to attach themselves to.

Not to himself, he never pointed at himself, but rather to God. Jesus was only about pointing the way to God. And, yes, that finger went within. Not outward, not upward, but inward.

That’s how Jesus presented the teachings, the truth, that he had become aware of. He stood pointing a quiet finger at his own heart, and said that’s where God is, go there.

Now, how did people take that? Some people didn’t take it at all. Some people said he was talking through his hat. Some people said he was talking about love. Some people said he was talking God incarnate within himself. Some people said he was talking about atonement.

That’s the direction that won out. The majority opinion was that Jesus was saying I am a conduit to the divine, and my death, my blood has magical properties and will lead you to eternal life.

Now, in order to form that opinion, you’ve got to believe in a fall of mankind and a need for redemption. And those ideas are not only unpopular in Islam, a lot of people in a lot of social gospel denominations, not Catholics or Evangelicals or Jehovah’s Witnesses, but a number of mainstream denominations want to de-emphasize the connection between the crucifixion and redemption—the idea that Christ’s blood is the detergent that washes away our sins.

Here’s why. Atonement says, why are we saved? Answer: Because Jesus died and his blood got on us, and like magic, we weren’t liable for our sins anymore. We get to go heaven. So really, really believe—and as far as God is concerned, you’re in. Washed in the blood, a member of the fold.

Now, when some people—people like us, progressive, new age people, when we hear about atonement, we say what a barbaric idea, it’s like blood sacrifice, it’s like fox hunting and gladiators and Mel Gibson movies!

It’s brutal, and really tied to the Old Testament idea of the sacrificial lamb. And we’re right. It is. But it was one message, one way of explaining the death of Jesus to his followers who were grieving and needed a reason to go on.

To them, it made sense that Jesus had to die because we were all guilty of sin and God demanded justice, which meant a death sentence. So Jesus died and God said, oaky, nobody has to go to hell anymore. Just go to church and believe like you’re told.

But the real story of redemption is far more radical than that. The real story of redemption is not that Christ’s blood redeems you, it’s your own blood that redeems you. And that’s not me talking, that’s what Jesus himself said.

In our text today from the gospel of John, a group of Greeks, which is kind of like a gaggle of Greeks, but bigger; a group of Greeks come to the disciples and ask to see Jesus. They want an audience with the Jewish sage.

And when the disciples bring the Greeks back to him, Jesus says the strangest thing. He says, “Verily, verily I say into you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain.

“But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life, lose it. And those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

How are you saved? Jesus doesn’t say, I’m going to die, my blood will crash over you like a wave and carry you to heaven. He says, those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. And hate your life is Gnostic code for see your body, your stuff, your life as an illusion.

In the gospel of Luke Jesus says, if any of you want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their crosses and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.

How are you saved? Not by the blood of the lamb, no lamb, no barbecue. You’re saved by giving your own life up. That’s it.

Jesus said to the rich young man, you’ve done all the good deeds, obeyed all the laws, forget about it. Give away everything that holds you back, your money, your career, your status. Give it up and follow me. Because if you want to save yourself—you’ve got to give yourself away.

And that’s about all Jesus ever says about salvation—you save yourself not by taking care of yourself, not by striving, by worrying about being financially sound or religiously or politically correct. That doesn’t mean anything to God.

You save yourself by giving yourself away, for free, with no expectations of any reward except—you’ll realize that you and the Father are one. And that was Jesus’ view of heaven and redemption. Nothing else. Give it all up and follow me. Plain and simple.

It must sound repetitious. I say the same thing every week. Jesus says give yourself up, stop thinking with your own brain, stop making plans for yourself and being disappointed when they don’t come true.

Stop seeking material stuff, and start seeking wisdom. Seek God’s wisdom, the wisdom that he already planted within you. Right where you’d expect to find it, wouldn’t you?

The wisdom of God is not that Jesus was in the world, but that Christ is in the heart. That Christ mind, Christ consciousness redeems human life by giving it dimension, meaning and direction. By giving it the ability to surrender itself, and be transformed, not by blood, but by spirit.

Let God do that for you. Let God transform your life by you turning loose of your self.

Saint Augustine said, “God triumphs over the ruins of our plans.” Give God a triumph, by giving Him your life. His incarnation in this world begins the very moment that you do.

12/7/08: God is With Us

The term or title Emmanuel, which gets shouted about so much during the Christmas season, is actually a name, like Francis or Jesus or Samuel. But like every Hebrew name, Emmanuel has a symbolic meaning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s made up of two Hebrew words: “El,” which is the most ancient Hebrew word for God, and “Emmanu,” meaning “with us.” God with us.

The name is only used one in long single passage of the Hebrew bible, in the book of Isaiah. The name Immanuel is understood by Jewish commentators to refer to a male child born during the reign of the eighth century king of Judah, King Ahaz.

Isaiah says that the boy, probably the future king Hezekiah, represents God’s promise that he will save Israel, from the mounting peril that surrounds them, the military might of the Assyrian empire with only one condition.

That is that God is only able to affect this salvation if Israel willingly sincerely turns back to Him in devotion and service. Otherwise, Assyria will become the instrument of Israel’s destruction.

And so in the Hebrew bible, the Old Testament, the prophesy of Isaiah went that as a sign, unto that young woman over there, whoever it was, probably one of the wives of King Ahaz, it was unto that young woman, that a child would be born, and his name would be called Emmanuel. And that’s God’s sign that he is willing to save the nation.

That means that if you believe that God is really with us, then you and I, and all of us, will weather this present storm that is suddenly appearing on the horizon. And that’s what the prophecy is.

Now fast forward some seven hundred years to the author of the gospel of Matthew. Because the term is only used once in the New Testament, and that’s when the angel Gabriel appears to Joseph in a dream, and he says, “Don’t be concerned that Mary is pregnant. Because it’s all being done to fulfill an ancient prophesy.”

And then the quotes, or rather paraphrases, because in Matthew’s version he substitutes a word, and then he recycles the prophecy of Isaiah.

He says, “Look! A virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us.’

And when Joseph woke up, he was convinced by what the angel had told him in the dream. And he did as it had commanded, and took Mary as his wife, and she bore a son, and they named him Jesus.”

Now the first thing that leaps to our attention is that in neither case do the parents actually end up naming the child, or children, Emmanuel.

In the eighth century BC, the child who shall be named

Immanuel ends up being called Hezekiah. And seven hundred years later, the child that Gabriel foretold would be named Emmanuel was called Jesus.

Now, this Emmanuel business never comes up again in any New Testament literature. Not in any of the gospels, canonical or otherwise.

It’s only at Christmastime that we even talk about Jesus as Emmanuel. And to us, it’s not a name anymore, it’s become a title. Like savior, like messiah, like Buddha. It describes the way that we experience the presence of God manifested in Christ, and the Christ community.

But here’s the interesting part. What the angel in the gospel of Matthew was actually doing was using this ancient prophecy as an argument to persuade Joseph into accepting the child Mary was carrying as an evidence of Emmanuel, God abiding with us. And if he accepted that, then he would receive the child as a divine son.

And just like in the time of Isaiah, that child was a sign that God was willing to save his people from the new Assyrians, the Romans, or else He was willing to allow the Romans to become the instrument of Judah’s destruction.

So Emmanuel, as Jesus, was to the community of Matthew, is a promise of God’s salvation in exactly the same way as Immanuel was in Hezekiah was centuries before.

But this time there was a difference. Because this prophecy  was written after the historical time limit had passed. Remember, Matthew was probably written around sixty or so years after the crucifixion, some thirty years after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. So Rome had already been the instrument of Judah’s destruction.

The symbolism of God’s salvation, of Emmanuel, wasn’t going to come true in the restoration of the Jewish kingdom. That wasn’t going to happen. There was no more kingdom of Israel left, the Romans destroyed it.

In fact, there were very few Jews left, or even Christians, and they’d  been scattered all across the Roman empire. But this idea of Emmanuel, God is with us, became internalized. It was picked up as a spiritual theme.

And the followers of Christ came to realize that God was not with us in any institutional way, because we were mostly Jews and ex-slaves and mixed race people, imbedded in a culture, along with the Assyrians, and Romans and their traditions.

God was within us not because we had stayed pure and separate. God had chosen to become awake, incarnate within the human community, regardless of ethnicity or religion or tradition. That’s why Isaiah’s prophesy still makes sense to us. Because God is here in our midst, God is speaking to us, and he’s speaking in a thousand different voices and languages.

And that internalization of the Emmanuel concept, the God is with us, within us concept, is really the basis of Christian mysticism, isn’t it? Saint Francis, Brother Lawrence, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila.

Their spiritual practice was experiencing the presence of God. And in a very real way, their experience of God was their salvation.

But it only works as salvation if you have faith in it. Why? Not because it’s phony, not because you have to pretend, not because Emmanuel is like the magic feather in Dumbo, you can fly as long as you hold the feather in your trunk; accept that when you lose it, you discover that you never really needed it anyway. Emmanuel isn’t like that.

Emmanuel is something that we genuinely need, the presence of God with us and within us. But it only works as salvation if you have faith, because faith opens the door to the realization of God in anybody. In Christ. In you. In me.

Faith opens the door of our understanding, the door of our lives to God, and then God enters, because God won’t come into your life if you don’t ask him.

God is like a vampire. That sounds kind of absurd on the face of it, but hear me out. A vampire cannot enter into your house unless you invite him. Did you know that?

Just as long as you stay tucked up in your bed with your crucifix and garlic, with your doors locked, refusing him entrance, the vampire cannot enter your home.

Now, you go to his castle and dig up his coffin, you may be in for trouble, but a vampire cannot enter your house unless you have invited him to do so. Read Dracula. See the movies.

Well God is just like the vampire. He will not enter into your life uninvited, which is kind of a scary thing. Because even though God is the omnipotent, omniscient all powerful one, he’s kind of put the responsibility back onto us.

God will not crash the door down and bully his way into our life. You have to invite him in.

And when is a good time to invite God into your life? Anytime he comes calling. Anytime that he’s there, and he’s always there. God is always with us.

As Christians we want to say that our experience of the presence of God is through the mystery of the incarnation, the coming to Christ mind, divine mind, through the imitation of the light of the world, Emmanuel.

Because in case you hadn’t noticed, Christmas, as a celebration of the mystery of the manifestation of God’s consciousness in human mind is a pageantry of light. And all of our imagery of the incarnation, of Christmas involves light.

Starlight, candlelight, the light of the world is awakened right at its core, its womb is a cave in Bethlehem, because God, like a vampire, entered, invited, into the life of a Palestinian peasant girl.

And the progeny of that encounter with the holy spirit drained her life away, and refilled it with God’s life, God’s mind, God’s own being. That’s the mystery of the incarnation.

That what lies behind the celebration of Christmas. Is it so different from other religious celebrations at or around the time of the winter solstice? No.

The big difference is how personally we take it. How we relate the return of the light in the dead of winter, to coming alive as the light of the world through the incarnation.

Emmanuel, God is with us. And it’s always about a child, in Isaiah, in Matthew, even today it’s about a child, because it’s always about the result of God’s presence being born all over again in the consciousness of a people.

And so that’s why we try so urgently to keep Christmas alive, in our hearts, in our homes, in our spiritual practice, in our community.

Because in a world that is becoming increasingly hostile to myth and religion as ways to God, or higher power, or inner being, or ultimate reality, or whatever the currently accepted phrase for God is—

In a world that is hostile to myth and religion, Christmas is our final fortress; at least it seems like that sometimes. It’s the place where we make our last stand, and we do it with lights and noise and bravado and real conviction and a deep, deep devotion.

We do it with joy and loving kindness and a reaffirmation of our belief in world peace. We do it with enthusiasm, with all our hearts and imaginations.

Christmas is Emmanuel. It’s a month-long celebration of God coming to dwell with us. Anything else that we think ought to go along with that:

Consumerism, concertos, corporate dividends, compassionate politics, everything that we add to Christmas has to advance the idea that God is present, that God is within us, loving every individual, friend or enemy, with whom we share this earth.

Charles Dickens wrote in the last paragraph of his novella A Christmas Carol, as a reassessment of the transformed Ebenezer Scrooge, who had learned the true meaning of Christmas all in one night. And he concluded his description with these words:

“It was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive had that knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us.”

We are facing an Assyrian menace ourselves, just on the horizon of our cultural landscape: world wide economic collapse, terrorism, global climate change.

The Assyrians are all around us, we’re outnumbered, outclassed, haven’t got a chance—but we’re going to make it. How do I know that? Because look! Unto that young girl over there will be born and they shall call him Emmanuel: God is with us.

There’s hope is the air. We’re going to get through this. Just believe. Open up the channels that spill the divine into the human—believe in God, believe in yourself, believe in the child Emmanuel just now being born, somewhere, somebody’s son or daughter.

Believe in the love that wraps the whole story up and holds it together. God is with us, and his hopes, his love, his dream is ours. 

- Rev. John H. Newton

9/21/08: The Virtue of Selfishness

Think about the word selfish. We know what selfish means, don’t we? It’s a bad thing. We don’t want to be selfish. It’s a negative attribute.

 Selfish rhymes with elfish. Silly observation, but true enough. Elfish means to be elf-like. English, as irregular as its verb conjugations can get, is a consistent language. Elfish means to be elf-like. Selfish means to be self-like. Is that a bad thing? To be like your self. To be a representative of yourself.

 Many years ago, Ayn Rand wrote a book called “The Virtue of Selfishness,” in which she extolled the usefulness of selfishness in evolution, in human development.

 Is representing our-self a virtue? Or is it a vice? It all depends, doesn’t it, on the self, that you’re promoting, identifying with and manifesting in your relationships with people and the world and God.

 If you’re representing and promoting the self that does the eating and the defecating and the getting jealous and angry and vengeful and screw the world if I can’t get what I want—then, no, selfishness is not a good thing. It’s ultimately a very destructive thing that leads to suffering and ignorance.

 But if the self that you identify with and represent and promote in the word is the Christ self, the Buddha self, or the God self—an inner self of love and commitment and acceptance, then yes, selfishness is a virtue. Promote that self all you want. Parades. Brass bands. Billboards. Spare no expense. It all depends on the self that you’re holding up for all the world to see as the real you, the you God manifested you to be.

 So, if all of this is true, the all of the people who follow a God path, with faith and love and peace, all of those groovy spiritual people—all people who have a spiritual practice, a quest, a religion, all of those people ought to be, by definition, virtuously selfish.

 But they’re not. We know they’re not. We’re not fools. Nothing is more easily corrupted or causes greater harm than religion. Why? Because some spiritual people, not enough to tip the balance, but enough to taint us all—some spiritual people are not deeply committed to a path, some (and maybe this is real advanced), some people don’t even recognize a path, they don’t know where they’re at, where they’re going, what they’re looking for.

 Somebody said, and I owe him royalties for repeating it so often, somebody said that it’s hard to find something when you don’t know what you’re looking for. So selfishness like that is going to turn a little directionless—purposeless.

 Another reason that every spiritual person doesn’t exemplify that positive sort of selfishness is that some people, even the super pious, are frankly hypocrites—not true believers at all.

 Who’s more dangerous, by the way? A true believer or a hypocrite? A hypocrite is, because at least you always know where you stand with a true believer. Hypocrites are too hard to read. They’re like chameleons. They’ll become anything you need them to be in order to get what they want.

 For still other people, selfishness is not a virtue because they live in a world of continual neediness. And nothing kills spirituality like feeling needy.

 One of the first steps in spiritual awakening is to recognize the sufficiency of life—to experience gratitude for the providence of God’s creation. And then you build on that. Spirituality takes confidence to kick in, and really start making a difference.

 So there are lots and lots of reasons why, for some of us, very nice respectable people—not murderers and arsonists—lots of reasons why for so many people, selfishness is not a virtue.

 One particular syndrome that I have noticed, and see a great deal of in my own generation is something that I have come to call spiritual bulimia.

 Now, everybody knows what bulimia is, it’s a serious eating disorder, psychological dysfunction in which people binge eat and then purge their overindulgence.

 What they do is they don’t eat, don’t eat, don’t eat. Then they eat, eat, eat, eat, eat, and then they vomit, vomit, vomit. And then they start all over again. That’s bulimia.

 Some people practice their spirituality in just that same way. In fact, it’s epidemic among celebrities, but it rampaged just as virulently when I was in college, in the 60’s and 70’s. People would show up on campus, heads shaved, dressed in orange saffron robes, banging tambourines—six months later, they return as Moslems, Seventh Day Adventists, or Rastafarians.

 I knew a guy in the early 70’s at San Francisco State—his name was Rama Lama. He was an incredibly colorful character. Well, chromatic actually. He was in a TV class I took. He dressed totally in silver. Long, silver lamay coats with silver fringe on the sleeves and shoulders, silver pants, silver cowboy boots—he had silver hair as long as Greg Allman’s. And a long greasy beard which he would dye or spray paint silver as well.

This guy claimed to have been made an emissary of an interplanetary peace commission—and while he was human, he was in close contact with cosmic entities. Oh, and he drove a pre-war silver Studebaker panel truck—one of the coolest cars I ever saw.

 So this guy Rama Lama sat next to me in a TV class. And I talked to him frequently. But then, one day, a new guy comes in. Short hair, clean shaven—Brookes Brothers suit, button down shirt and tie. And he sits in Rama Lama’s seat.

I said, “Hold on greenhorn, that there is my pal Rama Lama’s official seat,” and he said, “John, don’t you know me, I’m the former Rama Lama—this weekend I picked up a hitchhiker over in Sausalito who told me that he was sent to take over for me, and he relieved me from duties as an intergalactic space emissary.

“So I gave him the car, the suit, the hats and boots—and he’s the new Rama Lama. I’m now Jerome Cotswald.” And he became pre-med student, a registered republican and went on, I’m told, to become a very wealthy society gynecologist back East.

Spiritual bulimia. He glutted himself on the super saviors from outer space—it obsessed him, saturated him and eventually he had no choice but to spit it up—and start over again with a new cosmic religion—respectability. And individually, this isn’t an unusual story for somebody in my generation—it’s just more dramatic, more exaggerated than most.

We overindulge ourselves—food, drugs, sex, religion. Then we repent, switch to exercise and Zen macrobiotics and become obsessed with good health, longevity and political correctness.

Why do we do it? Not because of neediness. We are one of the most coddled generations in the history of the world. We did it because we never learned how to delay gratification. We never learned how to earn things and accept the outcome of the game.

I was listening to Colin explain something that he learned in a psych class at college—he asked, “Do you know why we test on laboratory rats and not laboratory giraffes or earth worms? Because rats learn in exactly the same way that human beings do.

“We teach them to learn that when you press down on a bar, a piece of cheese pops out a chute. We don’t teach them to learn that when you press a bar, no cheese pops down a chute. Or that if you don’t press a bar, a piece of cheese will sometimes pop out a chute. That’s not how rats learn. They only learn through instant gratification. They only learn a lesson if it’s proceeded by a piece of cheese. You can’t teach a rat that seven minutes later cheese might come out. That’s abstract thinking for a rat. They want it now.”

We’re just like rats. We want it now. We want spiritual enlightenment now. We want success, love, peace, joy, now. And no matter how inevitable it is, and no matter how much Jesus or Buddha or Socrates tell us that enlightenment, peace and joy are already here, that they’re within, that they’re eternally present—right now.....it still takes too long.

We are a restless, inattentive generation. But with a soul, a self. A soul that feels empty sometimes. A self that can’t be filled or defined. Can’t be identified with permanent principles and symbols and practices. So what do we do? We try to grab whatever is present whatever fast fix we hear about, read about, whatever’s novel, new or alternative. We binge and purge—we join cults and inculcate ourselves with arcane knowledge—exotic, esoteric doctrines and dogmas and beliefs—for six months or six years—then we vomit it all up. And start over again.

Now may be a path. But it’s a rat’s path, it’s a laboratory maze. The spiritual path that our souls seek, requires more of us than reacting to instant gratification as an indication of our success. What we want takes reflection, introspection, imagination.

We are entering a new kingdom, a new reality—not just getting plopped down into somebody else’s test run. You ever feel like that? Like you’re not living your own life? Like you’re just chewing up and regurgitating somebody else’s rules, somebody else’s game, somebody else’s vision of life? You probably are.

We’re addicted to stimuli—to the prompting of advertising, media, politicians, celebrities. Their life is ours. Their thoughts are our bibles, blueprints for our own plans, goals and expectations.

Does that cycle seem familiar to you? You know why I call it a spiritual dysfunction? Because its wholeistic, it effects every part of our lives: cars, fashion, ethics, religions, spouses, families, loyalties, we live in a disposable society—and it’s not seen as bad, as a drawback to our development.

It’s an easy, painless solution to an age old problem. Do you have issues in your marriage? Get a new one. Discard your job, your hometown, your friends, get new ones. But you know what? Your new friends, wife, hometown, job, religion are going to look a lot like your old ones. I guarantee it. You know why? Because you chose them, just the way you did the ones before those. Using the very same criterion.

I think we like things that way. We like living in a disposable world. Spiritual bulimia is not a disease to us, it’s the way we process things. Ingest and divest.

So what is the appropriate, therapeutic response to spiritual bulimia? What’s the cure for this strange spiritual malady? Simply this: practice the presence of God.

Experience the daily, focused presence of God in your life, and you will not take in any more than you can chew, and you will not regurgitate—you will not spit out all of your beliefs in a spewing torrent or anybody because that’s not the way God does things.

Experience God in nature: balanced, lovely, all embracing. Experience God in yourself: calming, enlightening, loving. Experience God in religion: in the beauty of tradition.

Integrate those experiences, add new ones. Experience God in shopping, in lawn bowling, in line dancing. The point is you experience God—that’s the consistency despite the irregular verbs—the God you experience is the same God with a billion faces.

The key to curing spiritual bulimia is to never let God out of your sight. To see Him everywhere. Treat everyone everywhere with the same spirit, and courtesy, and mindfulness as if you were entertaining God—and two or three of his select angels, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Sleepover too.

Because you can’t get too much God—you can’t overdo God’s presence. In fact, God’s presence is unavoidable, it’s our experience of that presence that we can turn on and off.

Forget about all of the side dishes and appetizers. Forget about doctrine, dogma, practices, rituals. Focus on the presence—you’ll never overeat, you’ll never binge and purge again.

Walk through life with the God self central to your experience, your perception. Become God selfish, and with the power that you’ll discover you can generate, transform your world.

 

-Rev. John H. Newton

 

 

7/27/08: What Makes You Happy?

 

What would it take to make you happy? Now I phrase that very carefully, because that’s the way that we usually think about happiness. We’ve got to get some stuff first before we can be happy.

 

We’ve got a list, like a Santa Claus Christmas list: I want a bigger house, better job, sexier wife. We have conditions to set down before we will allow ourselves to be happy.

Now you might say, no, no, these are serious demands. Without those things, I can’t possibly be happy. I’ve convinced myself of that. But is it really true?

 

Quite a few years ago, Bobby McFerran had a top forty single, everybody at the time was singing it. It had a reggae beat, or maybe calypso. It went, “Don’t worry, be happy.” That’s a philosophy. Or at least a definition of happiness. Happiness is the absence of worry.

But you say, but a bigger house and a better job is the stuff I worry about! If I had that stuff, then I’d be happy. But would you? How many rich people do you know? Are they uniformly happy?

 

Do they not have divorces, law suits, illness in their family? When you have stuff, you’re always worried that somebody’s gonna take your stuff, or that the stuff you have won’t be sufficient for the new lifestyle you have.

More money doesn’t mean that you’re going to be satisfied. In fact, I think just the opposite syndrome seems to occur. The more you’ve got, the more you need. The more you have to worry about.

 

And to bolster against the inevitability of losing it all, the more money you’ve got, the more money you need. Because you’ve increased your necessity.

Buddha said that happiness is the absence of desire. The less you want, the less you desire, the happier you are. Why? Because you haven’t got anything to lose. You don’t stay awake at night wondering if a burglar is jimmying the lock on the garage door where you keep your new Ferrari.

 

Jesus said, “Don’t store up treasure for yourselves on earth where moths and rust corrupt, where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasure in heaven, where neither moths nor rust corrupt and thieves can’t break in to steal. Because where your treasure is, there your heart will also be.”

So the smart money seems to be on defining happiness in the negative. In other words, happiness is not the presence, but the absence of something. Happiness is the absence of worry, fear, suffering, desire. Happiness is the absence of pain, mental or physical pain.

 

So who are the happy people? They’re the ones who haven’t got all that negative stuff going on in their lives. They don’t have negative emotions. They don’t get negative feedback in their relationships. They don’t feel like failures, no matter what anybody else says. Their life isn’t all cluttered up with unnecessary social and personal baggage.

 

What does that mean? It means that when you eliminate all the negative stuff, what you’re left with is happiness. Happiness is your natural state.

It’s the way that God created you, happily, and you came out happy. Only something went wrong. You got smacked on the butt by the doctor, and all your troubles started. People have been smacking you around ever since.

 

And if happiness is yours by nature, in your nature, as a part of your nature, then nothing external to you can ever attain it, or produce it, or discourage it, or prevent it. Because the only thing in the world that can make you happy is you. God already did it. If you’re not happy, you’ve got to reawaken it.

 

It’s like you’ve got a garden--we’ve all tried our hands at gardening--and you want some produce, you want things to grow. Say you want to grow happiness, or buckwheat, or tomatoes.

 

The only place where they can grow is in your own soil, watered by your watering can, weeded with your hoe, fertilized by your manure. And whatever’s planted in your garden, that’s what’s going to grow.

And if the analogy holds true, then what grows in your garden is you. It’s what’s been planted by God inside of you. It’s what’s eternally been there. It’s the real you.

 

That means that the price of wheat in China can’t prevent your garden from growing. Whoever’s in the White House can’t prevent your garden from growing. Somebody who refuses to recognize your gardening skills can’t prevent your garden from growing.

 

And the flipside of that is your mate, your guru, your minister, your counselor, can’t make your garden grow. That’s not how it works. The nature of the garden is what’s within it. Even when it’s dormant, seed like, unenlightened, un-awakened.

 

Because if it’s really your garden that we’re talking about, not your neighbor’s garden or Martha Stewart’s garden, if it’s really yours, then the only person who can grow it is you.

 

Get distracted and look away, or turn your back on it, and you’ll never grow your happiness or your petunias or rutabagas. You need to focus on what’s in the soil, not on what’s anywhere else.

 

There’s no outside help, there’s no hindrance, there’s no nurture, there’s no anything else that can ultimately affect your garden. And there’s no experience, no place, no person on earth that can create happiness for you.

 

Now I hope that this isn’t off putting or daunting to anybody. But, if you’re old enough to have had one significant relationship with anybody in your life, you know that the track record for anybody else making you happy is pretty meager.

 

Now does that mean, therefore, that you don’t need other people in your life? They’re useless. They’re useless to you. Certainly not.

 

Other people bring pleasure and companionship and beauty into your life, just don’t expect them to do what only God can do. Let God be what only God can be, in the only place where He serves any purpose in this world. In you.

 

Because, there is one relationship that you can get yourself involved in, and it’s guaranteed—and nothing else is—to bring you to your happiness, to allow your happiness to blossom, to come forth, to grow within you and all around you. And that is your own daily, focused relationship with God, the God within yourself.

 

In our text this morning from Psalm one, the Psalmist says, “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the Lord, and on His law they meditate day and night.

 

“They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper.”

 

Now, wait a minutes, I thought we just said that prosperity doesn’t bring happiness? That’s right. It doesn’t. It’s the other way around, happiness, being attentive to the God within yourself, delighting in the Lord, brings you spiritual prosperity. And spiritual prosperity allows you to accomplish everything that you put your hand, your mind to.

 

Now, notice I didn’t say it allows you to accomplish anything you attempt, anything you desire. It doesn’t.

 

Because when you are attentive to the God within yourself, what you attempt to accomplish is what God, instead of you, designed you to accomplish. It’s not just what you want to do. It’s not just what you want to achieve or possess.

 

But, hey! Those things don’t last, but the thing that god is accomplishing in your life, the things that he designed you to accomplish are meant to last.

 

Because they’re eternal things, because they’re participating in the ongoing process of creation, in God’s own creative process, with God’s own mind, and God’s connective, positive, spiritual power.

 

Deepak Chopra talks about this. He says, more or less, that at the deepest level of being, at the core, where it counts, everything is united and whole.

 

So that, at that level, if you have an idea, it’s God’s idea. If you make a request from God when you ask for anything from the universe, it’s simply a matter of the one asking the one. God is asking God.

 

And there’s always a response to that. It may not be the response that we expected, but it’s the right response.

 

So, if all of this is true, if happiness is already within you, it belongs to me, it’s my creator endowed right, why ain’t I happy?

 

People say essentially that to me every day. I’ve done everything, they say. Yoga, Pilates, plastic surgery, tranquilizers, psycho therapy, aromatherapy, Mexican serape therapy, waffles that are big and syrupy therapy—everything imaginable, but I’m still not happy.

 

Jesus says, quiet down. Go within. Go within and awaken to the God within you. Don’t take your orders from society, from your peers, from the establishment. Jesus refused to use their economy, their religious system, their standard of personal success.

 

Jesus said use the new standard. Love. And he didn’t mean getting love, he meant feeling it, giving it, embracing it as a lifestyle, as a way of expressing and modeling the presence and the behavior and the will of God.

 

That’s how you’re going to find true happiness. That’s how you’re going to activate your happiness. The happiness that’s within your self.

 

How do you do that? By turning on the love, empowering the love of God that’s been lying dormant, and letting that love bubble out of you, spill out of you, all around you, getting everybody all wet, drenched in your kindness, your lack of selfishness, your generosity, your acceptance.

 

Release your death grip on the world’s standards today. Release your anxiety, your worry, your concern about what other people have, what other people think or say.

 

Pursue, discover and awaken your own inner happiness, and let the flood tide carry you to where God wants you to be, to where God always intended you to be.

 

-Rev. John H. Newton

 

 

Live the Christ life.