Love at ground zero

A few days ago a member of our sangha wrote asking me to help her get a handle on troubling feelings of anger, despair and confusion. She asks a radically urgent question, radical in the true sense of the word’s roots–the question gets at the root of who we are and how we manifest in these disquieting times.

A person she held as a good friend sent her an email in which she endorsed the thinly veiled bigotry we have seen so often splashed on the screen of our collective consciousness, filled with anti- Islamic, anti-progressive, and anti- affirmative action banalities. She describes feeling offended, angry, confused.

The deeply hurtful part came in a passively vicious personal dig.

In her email to me she asked “how would a pragmatic apohatic mystic hold the feelings I’m feeling?” We can rephrase this question simply as How can I deal with this? or Should I erase this person from my life?

These are urgent questions. As the voices of intolerance hijack our attention, these may be the most burning life questions we face today. We may find ourselves, in unguarded moments, asking how we feel about the plans to build an Islamic center at Ground Zero.

This collaborative post attempts to answer these questions.

Many of you who read this blog or attend our meetings may be aware that I have found tremendous resonance in the traditional spiritual teachings found in many of the world’s mystical traditions. Over the past few years I have struggled to understand and communicate the unifying message at the heart of these traditions.

A few months ago I read Raymond’s Sigrist’s book In Love With Everything. The struggle ceased. Raymond writes, authoritatively, eloquently and with dry wit, what I had been trying to articulate for years. Raymond presents a clear and engaging approach he calls “practical apophatic mysticism” which draws lucidly on Taoist principles to highlight the core message discovered by traditional mystics all over the world.

I emailed Raymond to see if he would help me answer this question. He agreed.

What follows is tag-team blogging: Raymond responds to the deep substance of the question, and asked me finish up with some practical techniques.

Feel free to add your comment to this post below, as Raymond may very well respond to them.

Raymond’s response follows.

photo by Justin Gaurav Murgai	via PhotoRee

Recently a reader of my book asked a daunting question: how is it possible to embrace people who we find to have despicable behavior? The subtext of this insightful question contains a related question: why should we; is there an authentic imperative to do so?

There is very little we can do right now at this moment about the perceived flaws we notice in our thinking and in our behavior. At this moment it may also be very difficult to see that there might actually be nothing fundamentally wrong with this apparently bad behavior. We don’t like the way we are, and we think there is an imperative to change it.

Yet some of the mystics say that there is an ability to nearly completely free ourselves from the suffering caused by these perceived flaws and these perceived imperatives. And so some of us become extremely interested in finding out if this is really the case. We are arguably not any better (more noble) than anyone else; we are merely curious about these reports of people who can live with an unshakable sense of well-being no matter what happens to them, and who have a knack of effortlessly embracing the totality of human experience.

Some of these mystics tell us that the root of a person’s ability to effortlessly embrace and become fond of every being, and everything else about this world, lies in the ability of the person to recognize, despite numerous flaws, her own immutable perfection. No matter what she does or fails to do, her fundamental moral status does not change. For a comparison, if someone goes over a waterfall and drowns, we do not make any moral judgment against that waterfall. It is behaving perfectly naturally. With a growing ability to realize immutable perfection comes the increasing understanding that the only difference between we humans and a waterfall is that we can learn to love life more, or can learn to love it less.

photo by Wonderlane	via PhotoRee

This ability to see that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with any of us is very difficult to acquire.

If I were able to recognize my being as something which is immutably perfect I obviously would not need to improve anything about myself. What is interesting is that I can move in a direction in which a sense of that non-contingent perfection increases. I can move in a direction in which there is a sense of my value which is completely non-performance dependent.

Ironically before we go about the task of realizing how to more perfectly love ourselves and everyone else we need to clearly recognize that we do not need to love ourselves and everyone else. The sense we are getting, or will be getting from the ground of our being, is that nothing we do will cause us to become any more, or any less lovable. The love we are increasing sensing is completely non-performance based! (Admittedly this growing sense of our impeccability may merely be a neurological dynamic that can be accessed with a certain amount of skill. But even if that is all it is, it is still an uncanny natural wonder and an extremely adaptive human behavior)

As we follow this path we will be practicing an unusual formula. By the use of “skillful means” we will be trying to increasingly and more enduringly realize that we don’t ever need to change anything. But if we want to, we can work on changing ourselves so that we increasingly learn to realize that very fact that we need to change nothing. As the realization becomes more comprehensive, we will find ourselves enjoying ourselves more and more. We will find ourselves more satisfied with the totality of life, all of the good of life, and all of the bad of it.

photo by r000pert	via PhotoRee

Although when I am able, I do enjoy categorically experiencing a love for all beings, I do not sense that there is anything morally wrong with not loving some of them. And in fact I find it essential to love that part of me that does contain some measure of hatred. Paradoxically, if I am able to love that negativity in me, my love will begin to expand naturally and it will increasingly include many more people. Not that I should include everyone as a person that I am fond of; it is just that it is quite enjoyable to do so when this phenomenon spontaneously occurs.

Assuming the first sentence above at the beginning of this essay can prove true to experience, how do we acquire that astonishing ability? How to realize we are perfect right now, right now despite what appear to be numerous and obvious flaws? How to rid ourselves of negative self-judgment?

But before we go on we best recognize a danger in this exercise. We best be aware of the psychological instability that is caused when we start dismantling the values we have depended on to structure our experience of life. Life in the raw is a raging river of apparently chaotic phenomena. Our values are part of the structures that contain life within comprehensible and meaning-rendering channels. Removing these needs to be a careful process. Free of fundamental self-judgment I am very prone to becoming completely insane.

That danger noted, in my experience unconditional love is a gift, not a command. Is there anything we can do to open ourselves enough to accept this invitation, this offer to realize a non-mandated and effortless love?

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Thank you Raymond. We are all grateful for your clarity.

The second, concluding post, will highlight a few of Raymond’s key points and offer simple tools we can use to “open ourselves enough the accept this invitation.”

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About Raymond Sigist. Raymond says about himself: “I write about apophatic mysticism and have published a book on this subject: “In Love With Everything–Apophatic Mysticism– The Benefits and Dangers of Love Without Reason.” Raymond has some excellent essays posted on Scribd, which I highly recommend reading. Raymond maintains a very useful website on apophatic mysticism here. He also has a Facebook page. Raymond is incredibly accessible. I have benefited from email contact with him, and I don’t think he would mind engaging in some dialogue with you in the comments section of this post.