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Loaves and fishes

The line that stands out for me in the good old loaves and fishes story, is when Jesus asks everybody to sit down.

Make the people (ἀνθρώπους here. contrasted with the ἄνδρες of the next clause) recline. Now there was much grass in the place

In case you don’t know the set up, someone Jesus really loved, and needed in some special way, had just been executed. This was the first many close friends that were going to get killed, in the course of this grand scheme. Jesus was sad. He just wanted to go as far away from every living person and grieve.

But he had rock star status, already. Even though he had found this deserted field, in the middle of nowhere, everybody – I mean, lots of people – found him. Clung to him. Needed him. Not moment’s peace, to be sad. Maybe a little self pity even. But then he did the real miracle – the one that we must also learn, the one bit of magic that will let anyone create something from nothing:

and he had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.

You turn your attention away from yourself, away from your sorrows, and when you look up, you will see a crowd of lost people, waiting for your word. And when you see them, you will feel flush with power.

The scene is this: a totally unplanned “event” in a totally inappropriate place for this size crowd. And Jesus’ managers – the apostles – started to worry about logistical catastrophes.

At this pint in the story, I see the Woodstock music festival. An inordinate crowd of, who knows, not particularly organized people, driven by hunger – spiritual hunger – to a nowhere place, to here a nowhere man, in terms of his likelihood of earthly success. Hadn’t the flower children been seeking, so far, in vain, something to unify them, to give them the feeling of unity? No one had proposed such a thing. It wasn’t even an official movement.

Meanwhile, a couple of stoner producers, most likely motivated by greed, decided to have the first rock Fest. Again, God’s choice of leaders always falls to the least faithful. But it happened. And like the Jesus story, no one was prepared for what really happened. A city of 500,000 people rose up from a dream, and all had a heightened consciousness, all at once.

A theological question : who was Jesus at Woodstock ? Well, John Sebastien delivers the message to “sit down. ” He let the crowd know that they were no longer a crowd, but an living, loving community. And the stage producer was constantly getting on the mic and reassuring people that there was food and water coming in, from nowhere. But it did come. And doctors and medical supplies and blankets. All impossible. All unplanned.

The answer is that nowadays, everyone is Jesus. Everyone has to do the job of taking care of one another. Jesus was there to show us our own responsibilities.

But Jesus said, “You feed them.”

The food was already there. It was the disciples faith  (our faith) that was missing.  And, it was the disciples immediate reaction, that of all children, to wonder that the responsibility was upon them, not upon someone in charge.  What seems like adult common sense, in this case, is the child’s abdication, the leveling of yet another excuse, hidden behind human legitimacy, the exonerates them from any action:

“With what?” they asked. “We’d have to work for months to earn enough money to buy food for all these people!”

It’s an engrained reaction, in a society of people who do nothing, because the do not want to believe in anything. If you are given a great opportunity to be faithful, quickly find an exit.

And now, the magic comes from the group, not the guru. The faith comes from within. They found a way, the found enough, they fed the people, somehow, from nowhere, from nothing.

So, we should take this as a miracle?  A bit of magic? Jesus said, “aberra cadavera” over the five loaves and two fishes, and, just like the magician’s top hat, the baskets became bottomless?

No.  You missed the point. It’s supposed to be a real, useful example of how when we step out of our fear and disbelief, “miraculous” things to happen.  Of course, they aren’t that miraculous: they happen because we work together, we gather together what we have, and through collective imagination, and a willpower derived from hope, we make the impossible, possible. Actually, this happens all the time: someone says I can’t, someone who loves them says yes you can, and, behold, they do. Woodstock was an amazingly profound example of this. People died, and babies were born, all on a grassy field, in a chance meeting of 500,000 believers.

 

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Notes on Maureen Dowd’s “Who Do We Think We Are?”

The first line that tripped me up was:

in this century we have had only three brief moments when a majority of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things were going: the month W. took office, right after the 9/11 attacks and the month we invaded Iraq.

I unconsciously rewrote the line, replacing satisfied with dis satisfied. Take a moment, and work the sentence in your mind, like this

  • the majority of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things are going, in the month George W. took office
  • the majority of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things are going, right after the 9/11 attacks
  • the majority of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things are going, the month we invaded Iraq

I don’t think Maureen worked this out well enough for us: does it say that Americans were most satisfied with America, when things were the worst, since it was prefaced by  “chronic disillusionment” i.e. dystopia fits our disillusionment, therefore we are happy(?)

I think it demonstrates something more subtle – that the majority of Americans are happiest when we have black-and-white leaders, who rule by decisive, overt force (as opposed to ruling by secret-directive drone assassination), when we are pissed of, and can see the enemy clearly, and when we take off the gloves and kick the world’s ass.  The reality is Team America – not ecumenicism, world-mindedness, and peace politics.

And it belies another underlying truth: that liberal America lives inside a well-walled fantasy world, where Obama brought change for the good, where Occupy Wall Street changed Wall Street, and Egypt was liberated from oppression.  Didn’t happen – except in the digital media world.

Which connects, in my mind, to another tract she follows in the article:

Young people are more optimistic than their rueful elders, especially those in the technology world. They are the anti-Cheneys, competitive but not triumphalist. They think of themselves as global citizens, not interested in exalting America above all other countries.

This isn’t a “good thing” (we really do want it broken down in the George W. fashion: good v bad). It’s a collective hallucination, perpetrated in the device-world. Worse than Orwell could have imagined (he only had big bulky TVs to base his dystopia on.  These small, sleek brain-control devices are much closer in size to bacteria!), the world-within-the-world of device-logic, device-communication, device-policiticism, has made those would would Act for Change, not act at all; rather, key-punch, key-enter, their virtual activism. In the end, nothing gets done, really, and nothing is wrong, virtually.

I also love the Walter Percy quote:

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

While she heaps this anti-awareness entirely upon the millennials (which misses her age-group by just a finger-breadth?), it is probably the same old “me-generation” started back in the 70’s by Eric Fromm. We all believed Mr. Rogers when he told us we could be whatever we wanted to be, and the implicit cognate idea: everything you do should be about your own becoming.

Lastly, I want to jab Nathaniel Philbrick, who, speaking of our Founding Fathers/Mothers, writes:

They weren’t better than us back then; they were trying to figure things out and justify their behavior, kind of like we are now

I think Patrick may be one of those millennials, who constructs excuse-houses of cards.  My response: they were better than us; they were more thoughtful, more educated, and more ethical, by a degree which is simply unrecognizable to us, in our modern highly mis-educated unintelligence. Benjamin Franklin was an amazing person – not just really cool,but by deed, word, and legacy, an amazing person – who strove only to be better and more accountable, and, who actually did the work! We don’t have leaders like that, nor did Egypt – which is why these new age revolutions fail, but our crazily idealistic one did. Same goes for Thomas Jefferson: despite the modern critique, fostered probably just to make us not look so bad, is that we was secretly married to a Black woman, and had children by her, but did not acknowledge it publicly.  Seems to me more like he lived his beliefs, only they weren’t beliefs –  they were his feelings – in the only practical way possible in a time where his wife would probably have been killed publicly, despite any valiant efforts on the part of Tom.  My point, however, is that he was a kind of genius, and a seer, far beyond anyone we know of today, save possibly Noam, the Wise, or Ralph, the True.  But even those guys don’t seem to be able to make a real revolution happen.  No, there is something else in the recipe for Patriot that we can put a finger on.

 

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more on 3-in-1

Can we share Jesus’ nature ? The part that was Man?  And if the Holy Spirt is in us, do we not all simultaneously share in the moment of the Holy Spirit?

If there are three beings in one God, each one must have a unique nature , which the other does not share. We are humans. The Holy Spirit is within is, and we are ” within ” God.

and if God is Love, and it is our mission – the mission assigned to all humans who are awake – to love, and only to love, then we do have a part of God’s nature. a true part. we can have some small feeling of what it is like to be God like. if we love.

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Dr. Bronner

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emanuel_Bronner

Emanuel H. Bronner (born About this sound Emanuel Heilbronner (help·info),[1] February 1, 1908 – March 7, 1997) was the maker of Dr. Bronner’s castile soap.[2] Bronner, whose parents were killed in the Holocaust, promoted a belief in the goodness and unity of humanity.

He started his business making products by hand in his home. The product labels are crowded with statements of Bronner’s philosophy, which he called “All-One-God-Faith” and the “Moral ABC”. Many of Bronner’s references came from Jewish and Christian sources, such as the Shema and the Beatitudes; others from poets such as Rudyard Kipling. They became famous for their idiosyncratic style, including hyphens to join long strings of words and the liberal use of exclamation marks. In 1947, while promoting his “Moral ABC” at the University of Chicago, Bronner was arrested and committed to a mental hospital in Elgin, Illinois, from which he escaped after shock treatments.[1]

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Holy kiss, unholy kiss

Jesus turned things around. He was a mover. Not a radical Jew, but a Jew who loved his faith, and because of this love, wanted to help it to evolve. Maybe , revolve. In that sense, I am a revolutionary.

When Judas hands Jesus over to the soldiers, when he exposes the true sociopathy of betrayal of the one we love, he told the soldiers , “the one I will kiss is the one.” The signal of betrayal was a kiss. In the same way that most rapists are known to their victims , we know our betrayers most intimately. Possibly, they could not betray us otherwise.
But then, in the second letter of Paul to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “greet one another with a holy kiss.” If this had been spoken, instead of written, the emphasis would be on the “holy” to remind us of the unholy kiss that started this whole thing. And to remind us that things must change.
The rest of the passage says, “mend your ways, encourage one another, agree with one another, live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you.”
This is the new testament. The new kiss.

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Not exactly monotheism

The claim that Christianity is not monotheistic would engender the longest most useless monologue from any Christian-with-a-capital-C or Christian theologian So don’t claim that. Unless you have the patience. The Creed has always been: credo in unum Deum.

But it is a mistake to equate that with the groundbreaking monotheism of the Jews: in those early times the Jews were absolutely unique among all the polytheistic religions, because of this single god, with an unpronounceable name. The thigh is : that is true monotheism.
Jesus’ words caused a great panic among the Jews, when he said, unequivocally, that he was God. Actually that alone would not have precluded monotheism. The problem was, he went on to talk about Abba, his Father-God, exactly as the Jews did. So, this presented a conundrum – a logical impossible duality. Of course, when he then finally introduced one more wrinkle, the Holy Spirt, he stuck the logical world, including the Christian faith that ensued, with a long explanation, which still confuses people today.
Let me apologize for my first paragraph. In no way is my intent to dismiss those who, in their devotion to the understanding of the mysteries of faith, have created the explanation of “three-in-one”. I only seek to admonish them, with love, to open their minds to a grander possibility.
In fact, the actual words of Jesus went far beyond three. He told us that we are all a part of one body, his body, the body of God. So, instead of three-in-one is should be All-in-One. I take that expression from Dr. Bronner, an Essene, maker of the soap that appears in all health-conscious stores. Read the bottle some time!
So, it is actually much better than monotheism , and beyond the simplicity of polytheism. Actually – and here is more heresy – it is very thoroughly explained in the Vedanta: that there is no separation between the individual and the universe. That’s a poor explanation of one of the deepest theologies known, but the idea is key: that we are all one and that One is what we call God.

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feed the poor

It’s that time of year again – starting with Black Friday (really? we don’t see any ominous symbolism in that name?), we shop like frenzied pigs at the trough, up until Christmas. In addition to our copious shopping, we have quite a few discussions about the poor. We hear admonitions at our church, synagogue, or yoga kirtan about mindless waste and the care of our less fortunate brothers and sisters. Finally, we are prone to feelings of love and tenderness towards people, at this time of year. These feelings are deeper than at other times during the year.  Or, they may solely occur, for certain individuals, at this time of year. There have been scholarly articles, and yes, even blogs, written about the cause of these feelings, as well as the causes of the other two dynamics I mentioned. These dynamics are cross-cultural, at least for  capitalist Judeo-Christian nations: the same currents are felt in Bethlehem and Singapore. You know all this. IN fact, you know everything.

But ultimately, collectively, nothing ever changes, nothing has ever changed, as a result of either the glory or the shame. The people who volunteer at the soup kitchen do indeed get a warm feeling which suffices for them for the remainder of the year.  But, the soup eaters themselves simply return the next day and the next day, and don’t really feel that much more loved, by virtue of the presence or absence of one more affluent soups ladler like you. Jesus is attributed with saying,

The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me. Matthew 26:11

That phrase has provoked me for most of my life. While there is a lot to be surmised about it, I want to stick with the point that, apparently, nothing is ever supposed to change, at least with regard to the poor, so saith the Prophet. Like Buddha Gotama, Jeshua is letting us down gently by saying that this Earthly life is going to have suffering. You can not end the suffering,  You can not solve poverty.  Apparently.

But the second part, but you will not always have me, is, I think, an admonition to work, to always work, to carry the torch, in the name of whatever you choose to associate with me, in that phrase. Jeshua, “God with us”, is the “easy button.”  When you have The Great Moral Leader right there with you, you won’t slack. What will we do now that Mandela is not keeping his eye on us?  What did we do after Gandhi Gi was out of the way? Yes, the poor and the oppressed were still there.  But, nobody took care of them anymore.  Nobody brought them up at dinner.

Actually, it doesn’t matter to me if the Jesus scripture supports what I am saying.  It is just a springboard to foment discussion among my peers.  My point is this: do it yourself.

The People say, “The Government should feed the Poor.” The Pope he say “The Church should feed the Poor.” Who is this “Government” person?  Who is this “Church” guy?

They are our scapegoats.  Our way out the back door. They are supposed to be We, the People – but that has been so untrue for so long, it sickens me a little to even repeat it. Hearing people say “We the People” has even made me a little bitter over the years. While it is impossible for anyone but you to fix your broken accountability mechanism, there is at least one little aspect of this Government co-dependency you might be able to fix pretty quickly.

You don’t know how to go the Poor.  You don’t know how to find the Poor.  You don’t know how to feed the Poor. Do you. But the Government seems to know.  “They” (I won’t use “We”) have the resources and staff and organizational ability to organize a program like, say, food stamps. But, still, the real Poor don’t get fed. The Church runs places like Camillus House.  Here is Miami, Camillus House is in the heart of the real Poor – in Overtown. “They” (the Camillus Organization) provide meals to society’s offcasts.  Bien hecho, Church.

So, you can certainly donate money to the Church and pay your taxes (or, support social works with your ballot).  But, why do you need these organizations? You really can’t find the poor?  You really don’t know how to feed the poor? Now, here is a distinction I make between the Poor and the real Poor: there are lots of people who, after living a modest, but comparatively comfortable life, get laid off their job, or get that foreclosure notice. I call this “hard luck”, but I don’t call it really poor.  These people can qualify for any number of assistance programs – and be approved.  They get help from the Church and the Government and their families and neighbors.  The real Poor, on the other hand, did NOT have a relatively comfortable life, ever. The real Poor were abused, malnourished, surrounded by drugs and death, most of their lives. The real Poor are not quaint intellectuals, fallen from Grace, like Robin Williams, in The Fisher King.  No.  There are millions of people in this world who will NEVER make it out of the quagmire of abject poverty. Millions of people who have chronic drug addictions (not like Lindsey Lohan), and are therefore banned from both Government programs and Church programs, “left out to die on the mountains of the heart” (Rilke). These people require the one thing that We cannot seem to give: a personal investment in an untidy relationship. You know, the real Poor need someone to confide in, someone to care.  And if you open that door, they will confide in you, call you, ask you for money, ask you to give them a ride to their drug dealer, show up at your home.  Yes.  That is caring for the real Poor,  But – you don’t have to do that!  Just start out by finding them, and feeding them!  Oh, where are they, though?

Christ!  They’re everywhere!  The Poorest of the Poor lie on the sidewalks of my city, to the extent that I have to step over them.  Are you blind? Do you step over them?  Do you have conversations with your friends about whether or not to give money to “beggars.” Well, I say, give them money. I say, go home, fill up a bag with good – hell, drive to Whole Foods and drop $50 on a bag of healthy food, and drive back to you-now-exactly-where, and hand the bag to someone.

Once you cut the middle-man, the Great Scapegoat – out of the picture, you can immediately start feeding the poor.  Just feed them.  Don’t blame the Government – and yes, the Government should feed the poor!  Don’t blame the Church – and yes, the Church should feed the poor! Get out of that cycle. Go feed the poor.

sneaks out of Vatican at night to feed poor

 

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Kingdom Come

Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done – on earth, as it is in Heaven.

Christian don’t really understand this passage – it is locked in an antiquated style of English, with far too much reliance on a level of grammar that has gone lost in our times.  It means:

Let your Kingdom come, let you will be done – let this happen on earth, as it happens in Heaven.

Thus, Christians are tasked with making the Kingdom of God happen on Earth – that is, here, now, where we stand.  Make Heaven happen on earth, In this way, Jesus has the same  “good news” as Buddha.  Both were reacting against religions (Hinduism and Judaism)  that preached enlightenment AFTER death. The radical message that both preached was –  don’t wait!  Get enlightened now!  Before you die!

In the Kingdom, All are enlightened. To be enlightened means to see as God sees – that all Things are only one Thing, that all bodies are actually one body.  And this is not a metaphor. When we see as God sees, we see not as “through a glass darkly”, where individual shapes move about, darkly, ominously; rather, we see a visual field, we hear an aural field, within which we can choose to distinguish individual elements, or not.  Of course, there are phases we must go through to get to this sense of awareness: the first phase is to feel a sense of love for everything.  To love as God loves. As J.D Salinger writes:

J.D. Salinger

“I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”

And this is what Nietzsche meant by “Übermensch”. Shaw unfortunately was too arrogant to try to understand German when he mistranslated this to “superman.” Indeed, it is easier to understand this word if you are from California: if someone says  “Über schwag”, it means “of the highest quality; at the point of highest development”.  So, an “Übermensch” is not above human – just really, finally, a human – no longer a beast. It’s not a question of evolution.  it is a question of growing up, all the way, into a full understanding of who you are in relationship to where you are.

And so, we seek to live daily on a higher spiritual plane.  The first step is to forgive.  The second is to love. The third is to forgive because you love. The fourth is to forgive others, because there are no others – they are we. And so, the fifth step to finding the Kingdom is to love others as you love yourself. The sixth step is to practice – to discipline yourself to think this way all the time, so that it becomes automatic; it becomes “easy”. The seventh step is to make it – to live, to help us all live. The eighth step is to clear some space out, so you can space out. The ninth step is devotion – pary at all times.  The tenth step is surrender – breath out, let go.

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This Self cannot be gained by one devoid of strength

Nayam atma balahinena labhyah – This Self cannot be gained by one devoid of strength
– Mundaka Upanishad iii:2:3
This mantra has always appealed to me, made me feel good when I think about it, say it… I think I like it because of two reasons:
the phrase “this Self” strikes me as personal – not pondering over some metaphysical conundrum, but rather something from myself, like my ear or my leg.
there is also the feeling that the writer of the mantra is writing from experience – a long trail of experiences, which were not easy.
I think about when my guru recently described someone as “strong, strong.” The person she is describing is, indeed, a strong , strong yogi. He looks it. There is no doubt. But I immediately thought, “not ever so strong as you.” Because the strength fired by passion is what the mantra is referring to – clearly. We all know that, seen from far above, the strong man is indistinguishable from an ant. Indeed, proportionately, the ant is much stronger. But both Man and Ant can be brushed off the surface of the earth by the eyelashes of Satan (I use this name because it invokes fear in many people, from diverse cultures.)
Because the strength of the Upanishad mantra is that strength needed to combat the greatest power in the human universe – fear. Fear of This Self. When you are alone, are you alone? No. You are always trapped with You. It is in utter aloneness that humans feel the most wretched, nauseating fear, and this is because they do not recognize the frightening being that surrounds them in this aloneness. It is us. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Incidentally, my dad used to read me Pogo, incessantly, insistently. He wanted me to know something. “We have met the enemy and he is us.” What the mantra is saying, however, is that we do not run from This Self – we must gain it. Tame it? Embrace it? Yes. I think so. And for this, we need that special strength. Do you know what it feels like?
Because you have to feel it once, before you can recognize it. It’s likely not one of those alternative strengths that someone has preached to you in the past, like “moral strength” or “strength of character.” No. Indeed, this strength feels exactly like physical strength, only, inside you. It feels like the cows are tied to your arms, and pulling you apart. But, you feel the sinews wrap around the pain and the force, and counter it. We who practice Ashtanga and Yi Jing Jin feel it in our practice, once we have surpassed the deceptive feelings of physical strength.

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Zen Koans

— communication between the Master and apprentice. translated by my lifelong friend, Chiung-Ju

# “Please make my heart return to tranquility?”
“Please bring your heart here, I will make your heart return to tranquility.”

# “What is free in a moment”
“Who is tying you?!”

# “What is understanding?”
“Buddha was never confused.”

# “Where is the clean-pure land’s whereabouts?”
“Who has befouled you?”