The paradigm, for its validity, depends entirely upon its practical application, or actual experience of increased aliveness of the true self beyond all abstractions. As such, the true self and its "I-Thou" dynamic, being alive unto itself, the paradigm for presence-based attachment experience remains a loose construct constantly re-informed by experential outcomes.

More on the relationship between false-self and internal dialogue, and the way they appear differently within a psyche that has had the "good enough" attachment experience during crucial developmental periods . . . .

When a parent brings empathetic presence to a child in an emotional crisis, at least two basic things, or dynamics, happen:

The child experiences his pain as seen and felt/understood within the mind and heart of the parent, even while limits on behavior are being sustained, or especially so, since the child cannot feel safe unless the parent shows a wise use of power in differentiating between unacceptable behavior and acceptable feelings; this distinction saves the child from toxic shame and allows his mind to remain open to his heart during the conflict.

Laden as this exchange is with the parent's imperfections, the child will experience a lack of attunement that both calls for further interaction/repair, and the growing acceptance in the child that the parent is her own separate person. As such, the child has the experience of making himself known to someone who finally, but not always completely, gets it, preserving the boundary of a self that can be known but not fully inhabited by another, and that can be accepted as vulnerable and in a dynamic, life-giving process.

When the parent brings presence to the child's experience, the child's attunement to his own soul is resonated, and so this attachment process not only is the expereince of being held within the parent's heart and mind, but is also the quickening of the child's sense of soul as presence speaks to presence. The child's capacity for conscious presence is increased, where the soul is increasingly embodied within the nervous system, in response to the parent who can viscerally understand and appreciate (not agree in terms of behavior necessarily) the child's unique point-of-view.

When this occurs over and over and over again, with many mistakes and repairs, the child's growing nervous system becomes acquainted with the freedom of letting go, of easing back/trusting into the soul's presence, which allows the heart and mind to flourish according to natural grace, and predisposes the entire organism to transcendental grace.

And so the internal dialogue becomes less intense, less survival-bound, as the soul emerges into organismic awareness as the true self, with the polarized energies that fuel the id being more readily alchemized into further presence as the space of presence in which conflict arises doesn't collapse out of conscious awareness so easily. In this way the inner workings of the body-mind become more friendly with the soul's way of being, imparting an ability to stay in presence while being active.

WC: I ran across this beautiful little quote by Etty Hillesum that seems to me to be an easy and helpful way to view the whole internal dialogue subject:

quote:

I have by now the final remedy. It is better in a little corner to crouch on the ground and hunched like that to listen to what's inside of me. Mere thinking will never avail. Thought is a beautiful and proud occupation as study is concerned. But you can never think your way 'heraus' of difficult emotional problems. Something else needs to be done. You have to make yourself passive and listen. Get into touch with that little piece of eternity inside of you. (...) Lord, rather give me wisdom, instead of knowledge. (September 4 1941)

If we can remain aware of it, I think many people (myself included) would admit that we are very poor listeners. Of course, that�s a bad description of the phenomenon. We�re actually very good listeners when listening to something that intrigues or interests us, such as someone telling a very compelling story. But I think it common for people (as least dysfunctional people) to be of an orientation intent of spreading themselves out there, doing the talking not the listening, and trying to be ratified or affirmed by the other. This is an active orientation that you might expect from people who are trying to actively solve a problem or break through some barrier. Listening is, by nature, a more passive activity where we give the other prominence over ourselves, where we raise the other up by giving them our attention and putting our felt neediness on the back burner. Listening thus feels like the opposite of healing. We feel we are diminishing ourselves, not building ourselves up.

And so I now see the internal dialogue as being symptomatic of being in the orientation of the talker, not the listener. The internal dialogue seems like a symptom of a desperate need to do something to fix ourselves, even if it is trying to inspire, motivate, or shame us into fixing ourselves by constantly reminding us of our flaws. And such desperate need rarely, if ever, works, and if it does it is probably only because our flailing about has activated the sympathies of some compassionate soul who then comes to our aid.

I have thought and thought and tried and tried about thinking and thinking and fixing and fixing and all to little or no avail. I like the idea of listening as a way of healing. I like the idea of when I�m filling my head with thoughts to be able to just say �Shut up and listen, will ya?� Would it be so strange to have problems solved or at least alleviated by listening? Isn�t that what this whole religion thing is about --everywhere, and for all time -- that there is wisdom outside of ourselves that we can have access to? If, I might add, if we will just shut up and listen. I do think our head talk is symptomatic of our desire to be heard as a way of healing, and I�m doubtful of this approach ever working.

Where am I?

Who am I?

How did I come to be here?

What is this thing called the world?

How did I come into the world?

Why was I not consulted?

And if I am compelled to take part in it,

Where is the director?

I want to see him.

Soren Kierkegaard
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soren_Kierkegaard

I like that quote for Kierkegaard.

I'm pretty nim when it comes to eastern thought, but I think this 4-tiered approach to reality has some merit: Accepting Emptiness

I'm not really in the material tier (#4, I guess), but I'm certainly a "head" case at level #3. And I can see that I'm badly in need of living from the soul more. And if dreams are in the territory of soul then maybe something big a'brewin' 'cause my dreams have been intense for years now. I think every night when I go to sleep they're calling out the calvary, pulling out all stops, and grabbing every hand they can get to try to splash a little cold water in my face to shake me out of the pedantic think-place that I'm usually in.

Inviting trust into the thinking and the thoughts and the thinker is an enormous problem for most of
my freinds/aquaintances with very fine minds who are humanistic and philosophical and scientific in outlook. They have deeper thoughts about morality and ethics and the nature of reality than most Christians, so I agree with Ken Wilber when he says,
"Make no mistake, this is an expression of God!"

All of Kierkegaard's questions are answered in the bible. Having attended seminary, I'm sure he knew that. He had what twelve steppers might call a weak second step.

The kundalini essay on that site is very good, describing my experience to a "T".

"Some misunderstandings concerning religion" seems like someone who is confused and needs to hang out more at this website. "The eucharist is a sham" is not something the Dalai Lama would say. Only a Christian would say a thing like that. Dead giveaway.

fishing_4_jack_catholics.com

"Some misunderstandings concerning religion" seems like someone who is confused and needs to hang out more at this website.

I don't know, MM. I mean, which is it? Are they as Wilber says, "an expression of God," or are they so in error that they need to hand out more at this website? I don't think we can have it both ways. But I do find a certain "something" clinging to much of eastern thought. Some of it is just plain leftist politics. Other times it is, admittedly, a perspective so foreign to me that I have a hard time relating to it. So I try to stretch and see what happens down the road in terms of understanding. But I had read only that one essay on that site so now you've piqued my interest about Some Misunderstandings Concerning Religion:

quote:

Well, in a sense I am. Isn't religion always about psychology, for the simple fact that religious feelings and religious knowledge can only be experienced in the psyche of the individual? We are talking here about internal emotional and cognitive states. These states can only be adequately described in psychological terms. As a psychologist of the religious experience I am interested in questions like: what happens to the psyche when we have a religious experience? what are the psychological dynamics that provoke religious feelings? can we also describe the religious experience in neuro-psychological terms, in terms of altered chemical states or waves in the brain? Perhaps we must not even shun the ultimate question: is religion not merely something psychological? Are not all religious concepts like Ultimate Reality, God, Pure Consciousness, Nirvana etc. a posteriori rationalizations of internal psychological states?

I think that's a good observation and one that is often on my mind. We would probably consider a deep and debilitating sense of shame and personal valuelessness as a spiritual problem. But what if � snip, snip � a surgeon could cut just a couple neuronal connections in the brain and solve the problem? Would that problem have still been spiritual in nature? Are there then any problems that are spiritual in nature?

quote:

Do not get me wrong: I do not thinks so. But as a scientist I must admit that it is a point of view that can easily be defended in a discussion.

Then why did you say it? Sheesh.

quote:

Religious investigators, who have made a diligent study of the soul, have declared that the soul, this principle of living, is something which we share. Your soul and my soul overlap. Beyond the ego there is an 'I' more 'we' than our separate 'I' and 'you'.

And I often wonder how much our political, social or economic leanings effect our religious beliefs. Why must we all "be one"? It sounds great, at least aesthetically, but is it any more than that? That's why I don't have a lot of confidence in eastern thought. Everything seems to be "one with this" and "one with that". But the nature of existence is hardly oneness. It's separateness as in separate identities. It seems to make so little sense to say "Well, we're really one, so you can sort of ignore or discount the human experience that you're having now." If there is a God, and if He created this earthly experience for us, then it must have meaning. And even if Carl Sagan is right and the universe just sort of "plopped" out of nowhere, this is even more reason to think less about a purported "connectedness to it all" and to investigate further the incredibleness of being alive in distinctive identities. There's not much sense in the idea of "we're all one" in an atheistic universe. And, to my mind, there's little more sense to it in a universe made by God because then we're simply saying that what God created isn't really all that importand. The goal in life really is to escape our natural reality and plunge our minds, as best we can, deep into some altered-mind realization of what is real, which sounds odd to me from the get-go.

quote:

If we truly want to communicate, if we want to feel close to one another and connected, in short if we want to feel love and friendship in our dealings with one another, then we shall have to communicate with each other on 'soul level'.

And it's not that I'm against digging deeper down so that we can release compassion, for who cares how it is done as long as it can be done. But I see too often an abdication of reason and intellect which such an orientation as stated in that above quote. Sometimes the compassion of a cultist, of a Moonie, for instance, isn't all that compassionate. But it's a nice illusion, and one can keep all kinds of illusions running if one dispenses too much with thinking and reason.

But that said, I do recognize my own imbalance (bringing us back to topic) in being too head-bound. But often I do not think others see that they are sometimes "soul-bound". How could this ever, of course, be a bad thing? But we were put, purposefully or by accident, into this duality-based world and although we may think we can escape the nature of this via thoughts and realizations (and who can doubt that some have?), until we actually do we are still in need of our mental faculties and (and I think this is a big point) simply abdicating our mental faculties is not the road to enlightenment. And in that vein I might say that instead of erasing, denying or ignoring our internal dialogue as a way to healing and piece, perhaps we need to understand it. Perhaps there are some lessons to learn from it. And being silent and listening to perhaps the source of this internal dialogue (rather than the nuts and bolts of the actual dialogue itself) could be the way to learn from it.

The author is obviously spiritually aware, but I don't reach the same conclusion that the priest's nervousness performing mass means that the eucharist
is a sham. It may rather be evidence and imprimatur of authenicity. Thomas Merton felt inadaquate and unworthy to perform the mass. He even passed out from the heat one summer day performing the mass. We know from physics that the observer has an effect on the observed. Maybe the priest was picking up the doubt and fear from this Buddhist who, while imagining it to be a sham, is nevertheless sitting in the middle of one.

He wants to want to believe. There are likely many levels of interperetation of just what takes place
at the mass, but if people really believed what the catechism says, we would require football stadiums for attendance.

The word for today is "Wax on, wax off!"

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

I'm reading yet another of Ken Wilber's books, and he seems to be the proponent of the idea that spirituality is all about levels and stages, and while I believe that he has discovered a very important truth, Christianity, including saints and mystics, is predicated more on a relationship with God than on becoming God. According to Paul, there are glories to be revealed which we cannot take in,
but if I were going to become a capital "G" god, then Jesus would have said this plainly. Nothing wrong with aspirations toward sainthood, as we could always use a "few good men" and women today.

caritas, mm <*))))><

The author is obviously spiritually aware, but I don't reach the same conclusion that the priest's nervousness performing mass means that the eucharist is a sham.

Yes, quite right. Had this guy been buckled into a space shuttle, and noted the nerves and possible irritation of fellow crewmates at t-minus 10 seconds, I guess he would have deduced that the astronauts believed that there was no such thing as outer space and that they believed the rocket would crash into a crystal sphere or something. Had he watched some 9-year-old get up and give a presentation on dinosaurs to his fellow classmates, he no doubt would have reached the conclusion that the kid didn�t really believe in dinosaurs because of how nervous and fidgety he was.

It reminds me of that Star Trek episode (what doesn�t?) where the landing party is somehow in a recreation of the shootout at the OK Corral and Spock becomes convinced it�s all some kind of illusion, but the bullets have already killed one crew member. So what gives? Well, Spock decides that the bullets can only do damage because they believe the bullets are real. So he does a mind meld on everyone and implants a post-hypnotic suggestion that �the bullets are not real�. Yep, you guessed it. The bullets passed right through them and then they went on to kick the butts of the Earp posse.

WC, you'll note the tight fit that all this has with the ID. You do, don't you? Man, it all seems to obvious to me. Can you believe this guy, MM?

When the priest performs the mass, it is warfare of a spiritual nature, a declaration repeated for two thousand years that Jesus is in fact the Lamb of God
who was slain for remission of sins.

When the statistical probability of the fulfillment of messianic prophecies is taken into consideration by the rationalist, there is no other conclusion than that the identity of the messiah has been revealed to mankind. The inner dialogue has no argument or retreat from this fact. It is the Great Fact of all time.

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/5951/MP.html

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotton Son, that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have evrlasting life." -John 3:16

Blessed are those who can recieve it!

caritas,
mm <*)))))><

Let me grab something that Teresa of Avila said and something that Eric said and stick it here:

Teresa of Avila said here:

quote:

52)One should pay no attention to the intellect for it is a grinding mill.

Eric said elsewhere (he�s not a saint yet so he just gets italics, not a quoted block): This is my problem. My mind will never shut up. If I tell it to shut-up it will then start to analyze why I told it to shut up.

But I do think there is a path this way. I think it is very narrow and one can get lost on the way. Koans being an example.

For each his own path though I guess.

The intellect can indeed be a grinding mill. I�ve been yapping fairly garrulously recently and yesterday I felt entirely caffeinated and sort of shaky, and yet I hadn�t drank a drop of caffeine nor O.D.�ed on Sugar Smacks for breakfast or anything like that. This was surely the result of the grinding mill, and it can grind quite hard at times. Just like a runner who can push through yet another mile despite his or her body pleading with him to sit down in a nice comfy chair and grab a remote, so the brain (unfortunately, I guess) can find a second wind.

First off, we are all so very different. We all have different tolerances for various activities. Some people can be the life of the party -- or think things like job interviews are actually fun. These are sick, sick people. But it�s probably fairly safe to say that we all have a certain amount of creative energy to spend and some spend it dancing, some spend it talking, some spend it making love, some spend it rearing children (see the previous item for why), some spend it hiking in the wilderness, and some spend it thinking. More likely we all spend that creative energy in various ways. But I do think we have a quota to fill, of sorts. And when we�re not filling our quota of creative energy the wheels will start spinning in our head.

So I�m VERY much in agreement with the two saints quoted above. Be careful of the grinding mill. And yet, I think Eric rightly reminds us not to be too fast in pushing it away. It is a path, although it might be a quite narrow and treacherous one.

Hello again, friend. I see you�re back after over a week�s absence. There�s a lot on my mind now. A lot that brings me joy, a lot that frightens me, and these two are usually one and the same. Just receive what you are given in life. Trust Divine Providence to always, and I mean, always put into your life that which you need most in order to originate, activate, and proliferate love. And I�ve had a bit of success lately doing just that.

But I�m a sprinter, not a long-distance runner. Fits and starts. Hot-blooded passions interspersed with stretches of doubt. I feel the eye of my mind turning inward to me; my needs, my concerns, my hopes, my dreams, my life. And then I start to do the absolutely worse thing (at least for me) possible. I try to manage that life, to control that life and the circumstances surrounding it. Trust brought me forward, so why let go now?

I don�t know. Maybe it�s my way of slowing down. Of retreating. Of letting, if only for a moment, fear to overcome me. And in this process returns an old friend, the internal dialogue. And it slaps me in the face almost like never before what that is all about. It�s about a lack of trust. It�s about a lack of complete trust in the Universe. It's not about a lack of trust in me. Nor in my friends. Nor in my neighbors. Nor in my True Self. Nor in my ego. But in The Big Guy. I no longer believe that all things work out for maximizing love. I, instead, see, and find, a piece of that love and then wish to put the brakes on. Not retreat. Just stop the forward motion, for ahead, I think, there is likely disaster. So it�s best to stop right here with a little joy rather than to risk losing it all. And to do this one has to jump right off the trust train and begin to manage and control. And doing that takes a lot of thinking and considering. And it ain�t the kind of thinking and considering that, at least these last several days, has brought me much peace and joy. It�s the kind of thinking and considering that is cyclical. It goes nowhere. It feeds on itself. It�s the kind of thing that must happen when there is a lack of trust. We brace for impact.

Today I will trust. And as soon as I do I can be 100% sure (and this is not an exaggeration) that the internal dialogue will go away.

Harmony

Hello, I.D., hello
Haven't seen your face for a while
Have you quit doing time for me
Or are you still the same spoiled child

Hello, I said hello
Is this the only place you thought to go
Am I the only head you ever had
Or am I just the last surviving friend that you know

I.D. and me
We're pretty good company
Looking for an island
In our boat upon the sea
I.D., gee I really love you
And I want to lose you forever
And dream of the never, never, never needin� my I.D.

Hello, I.D., hello
Open up your heart and let your feelings flow
You're not unlucky knowing me
Keeping the speed real slow
In any case I set my own pace
By stealing the show, stay below, below

Great peace and trust be with you, WC, for I know you know this old friend so very well too. As do others.

Peace to you as well, Brad.


One potentially useful way to experience the internal dialogue nearer to its roots is to sense the energy of passion, or how energy must first split, or polarize within the body before internal dialogue has any juice for its functions. We tend to view the mind-body as a dualism, or experience it as such, even when philosophically recognizing problems involved with that paradigm. However, the ongoing tension of craving-aversion is the sort of visceral, cellar door of the mental chatter. Polarity arises as passion within the body, and as id within the mind, although we depend more on the former moment to moment, while ascribing numerous and sundry meanings to the latter, only occasionally noticing that our personal pet notions are generated out of mostly automated neural activity - sort of like mistaking a billboard advertisement for a destination. By the time this primary energy has been translated into id, we are already asleep at the wheel, captive to the trance and unable to see our enslavement.

I see this as signs of our fallen nature, or symptoms of being separated from God via the good/evil polarity and the incongruency of subconscious will/intelligence and its compromised, conscious expresson. On the psychological-archetypal level, the polarity applies not to evil in the metaphysical sense, but to the split off, or exiled aspects of will/intelligence; however, from a Thomistic view, if I'm not mistaken, even evil is insubstantial in terms of having originated from the uncreated good only to reach a point of severe distortion. But in my experience, evil occupies a domain quite different than the exiled parts of the human psyche, as the latter reveals itself to be life-giving once befriended. Evil, OTOH, is quite a loathsome and grissly intruder, although capable of numbing our conscience in quite subtle ways, as C.S. Lewis describes so well in "The Screw Tape Letters."

But the id is basically symptomatic of a dormant heart, one that isn't awake to its alchemical purpose wherein passions unfold their primary longing for giving and receiving love via God and fellow creatures.

And so I'd invite a practical consideration of the id along these lines of trusting passion to unfold its distortions back into a realization of essential goodness, or natural grace realized in the heart. We resist both our cravings and aversions. We crave, but in externalizing it, we resist its fuller inner disposition, or how its wants to live inside us. We feel aversion to something, but then moralize that response and end up resisting our resistance.

Another important discovery for me has been the book "Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within," which deals rather deftly with this tendency to resist the first, bodily impulses of experiences out of fear, and how to restore trust by sensing how wanting and not wanting in any form ultimately leads back to the goodness of natural grace we are endowed with, and which always exists right in the heart of the desire, regardless of its degree of distortion.

But in my experience, evil occupies a domain quite different than the exiled parts of the human psyche, as the latter reveals itself to be life-giving once befriended. Evil, OTOH, is quite a loathsome and grissly intruder, although capable of numbing our conscience in quite subtle ways, as C.S. Lewis describes so well in "The Screw Tape Letters."

I'm still wrestling with that one, WC. And in Danny's dream thread, Phil mentioned something about our dream world being a place where good/evil can be battling it out. Well, words to that effect, I think. And I mentioned that if you could see the dream battle that has been going on in my head the last four years, you'd find perhaps air-tight evidence for this conviction. But I think of evil not as a positive force (a "thing"), but rather as the effect of being more distant from love. We think that, say, a wolf isn't perhaps doing evil, even if it were to snatch a child and eat it. But is a wolf distant from love? It wouldn't seem so if the wolf is simply fulfilling its wolf nature. Life hurts. We bleed. We die. That's a fact. But if a wolf could consider other choices besides eating a child, would that then make the action evil? Perhaps so. And that would mean that the wolf was, or could be, aware of a more loving choice. It could, for example, make a living off of animals that had fallen off of cliffs or something. But has a thing called "evil" really entered the scene or has, rather, a thing called "ability to choose love" entered the scene? I think the latter.

Anyway, this is a diversion from the I.D. topic, but I thought what you said was very interesting.

But the id is basically symptomatic of a dormant heart, one that isn't awake to its alchemical purpose wherein passions unfold their primary longing for giving and receiving love via God and fellow creatures.

Yes. I think that's a fine insight, WC.

Another important discovery for me has been the book "Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within," which deals rather deftly with this tendency to resist the first, bodily impulses of experiences out of fear, and how to restore trust by sensing how wanting and not wanting in any form ultimately leads back to the goodness of natural grace we are endowed with, and which always exists right in the heart of the desire, regardless of its degree of distortion.

I like that thought, and I think I agree with it. I think a lot of times that our first impulses are often really our second or third impulses, which isn't such a bad thing because it can lead to a introspection to balance and give wisdom to our impulsiveness. And I think many of these "first" impulses are merely the result of deformity. That is to say, we can develop bad habits. Hey, life is tough. It's easy for our impulses to get deformed, I think. And I think that unless we're consciously and willingly pouring in amounts of love into our lives, and the lives around us, that we will tend to take the very long road to transformation. Our impulses will bounce us around and may a "rock bottom" or some form of Grace (which I do believe in�it's happened to me, I think) pulls or startles us out. But I do believe that if you were to pour love and wisdom into a baby starting from day one that you'd inevitably end up with the formation of what we would call a "good person". How could it be otherwise? And if you do the opposite, you then create a long and difficult road toward the transformation to love. But not an impossible road by any means. And because we see so much pain in suffering in this world, we might even imagine that our full love and compassion could never be found unless it could respond to at least some of this. Maybe we would all lapse into hedonism if it were otherwise. I don't know.

So I do see much wisdom in learning to trust our first impulses and, probably as adults this means reconnecting to some of those first impulses. One can (err, that would be me) introspect oneself almost totally out of first impulses, or impulses of any kind. That's one extreme. I think we all perhaps know people in our lives who are the other extreme. It would seem that some type of balance would be optimum. Introspective sorts need to learn to let go. Let-goers need to learn to think before jumping into the shallow end of the pool. And where the I.D. comes in in all this, I'm not sure. But I'm sure that whenever there is imbalance there is something in us desperately trying to get balance back.

Our movements and thoughts are mostly not our own creation, but automated. Just try stopping your "own" thoughts, or move only when you consciously intend. All day, and night, we are in a drama that we don't author, and hardly ever awaken from, a polarization of internal dialogue in the mind and passion within the body that generates the psuedo-energy/awareness of zombie-land. We exist without consent.

For instance, notice any thoughts about the statement above. Watch them. Notice how automatic they are. Not a bit of freshness in them. All of it just a reaction to uncertainty driven desparately to close the circle that never closes, asleep at the wheel of an out-of-control car. Really no different than the sleepy drive to work managed by the body while consumed with the internal dialogue to the hypnotic tune of our favorite polarizing news station.

Every effort to step out of this is more of the same.

This is the sleep of fallenness, the I.D. created self without the uncreated Thou. It is dying: all indications of our need for the Other - not of our own making - who continually sustains this somnolence, where any real awakening lies beyond our own faculties. We are asleep and can't awaken ourselves.

Our own attempts appear as light, yet we're asleep in a darkness we can't be aware of, until the light of God, appearing as darkness to our fallen, ID-based faculties, reorders them according to a means we cannot know.

Pain by itself only drives us deeper into sleep, with more meaning and purpose a sure sign of resisting this infliction.

The self is dying (losing meaning, almost awake: yet bound to dreaming), and fighting dying (asleep in apparent meaning which is only a slightly altered dream), which are these irresolvable poralities creating lack and conflict continually per its fallen nature. Self cannot complete itself, but if it did it would cease to exist. In this state, the self remains fragmented, unable to reconcile opposites without dissolution, where existence depends upon this automated condition without Thou as the center only He can generate and awaken. As such, inherently conflicted polarities thrive upon the automated self-effort which sustains the hypnotic drama.

This is why the Christian mystical path is primarily about the Dark Night passages where pure faith is generated through grace, and not about consolation of the self.

Buddhists describe the psychology of fallenness quite well: a self that can't restore itself to unity; but make the mistake in viewing that self, or objectless/nondual awareness, as an inherently unified potential, uncreated state, which from the Christian pov is still a creaturely i.e, intentional, venture within a deteriorating, polarized, mind-body process. For St. John of the Cross, there appears no such remedy for the self within objects of awareness, with the Dark Nights defined as the Holy Spirit's transforming presence beyond even the organism's automaticity (governed by the kundalini), and certainly beyond the hypnotic tendencies of the self.

So here is St. John of the Cross' poem, "The Dark Night," (also posted under the thread by his name), which both consols and frightens those of us drawn by God to this prospect, as the self's existence is in peril (it is this way all along, but allowed to sleep in a Q for execution without knowing it); this death can't happen existentially, as the false self arises out of automaticity, but that dread is felt, especially among the elderly as they begin to lose its fragile moorings via deteriorating sense faculties. We feel the dread in isolated moments, and so God's way of regenerating us in Truth as the false self dies is the only and merciful way.


"The Dark Night"

So dark the night! At rest
And hushed my house, I went with no one knowing
upon a lover's quest
-Ah the sheer grace! - so blest,
my eager heart with love aflame and glowing.

In darkness, hid from sight
I went by secret ladder safe and sure
- Ah grace of sheer delight -
so softly veiled by night,
hushed now my house, in darkness and secure.

Hidden in that glad night,
regarding nothing as I stole away,
no one to see my flight,
no other guide or light
save one that in my heart burned bright as day.

Surer than noonday sun,
guiding me from the start this radiant light
led me to that dear One
waiting for me, well-known,
somewhere apart where no one came in sight.

Dark of the night, my guide,
fairer by far than dawn when stars grow dim!
Night that has unifed
the Lover and the Bride,
transforming the Beloved into him.

There on my flowered breast
that none but he might ever own or keep,
he stayed, sinking to rest,
and softly I caressed
my Love while cedars gently fanned his sleep.

Breeze from the turret blew
ruffling his hair. Then with his tranquil hand
wounding my neck, I knew
nothing: my senses flew
at touch of peace too deep to understand.

Forgetting all, my quest
ended, I stayed lost to myself at last.
All ceased: my face was pressed
upon my Love, at rest,
with all my cares among the lillies cast.

and so God's way of regenerating us in Truth as the false self dies is the only and merciful way.

And surely as important, if not more important, is the true self living and emerging. I don�t think any of us can make a life for ourselves just by burning away the negative. If things are burned away, if things become dark, it is surely so that our light can then emerge.

I do believe I�ve had my own Dark Night. And I�ve come to believe that Dark Nights are there to a good extent (if not almost completely) because it is our selves drawing away and hiding and deeply considering. We probably need this time to integrate and understand that dark and unsettling feeling that emerges as we shift orientation away from our old ego-based lives to a life that we frankly can�t often yet image. And so I see one explanation for the Dark Night being that we detach from one thing but have yet to attach to the Other. So in this mode of "dangling" we�ll find that Dark Night, which is a deep call to burn away some old beliefs and expectations, certainly, but perhaps more a Darkness that engulfs us because we somehow sense that there is no going back and yet we�re not all sure about what forward is. We have to jump off that cliff, even if we do not see any ground below. And so it is so easy to stay in that Dark Night�even for decades. Our limited imaginations and our just plain stubbornness can keep us here for quite a long time, I think. I do believe a great deal of that darkness, if not most of that darkness, is our inability to let go of our own plans.

Yes, John shows it is both a loss, and an illumination of Christ's hidden presence, but quite beyond our ability to see it. As such, it isn't about the intentional burning away of the negative sourced in the self's plans. So it isn't something we accomplish, or bring about by shifting our awareness, at least as I've experienced it so far. So I wouldn't characterize John's Night as a place of stuckness for lack of willingness to let go of the familiar. We can certainly resist it, or confuse it with existential despair, but it isn't brought about by our own doing, nor do we move through it under our own power. This is a Night mostly under the control of God, and the self can no more navigate it than it can stop the internal dialogue, the latter a sign of our fallenness. Even the letting go is largely a result of His Presence in us beyond our faculties - more a being drawn, but without knowing how this happens; hence the need for dark faith, which is itself a gift.

This is a Night mostly under the control of God, and the self can no more navigate it than it can stop the internal dialogue, the latter a sign of our fallenness. Even the letting go is largely a result of His Presence in us beyond our faculties - more a being drawn, but without knowing how this happens; hence the need for dark faith, which is itself a gift.

WC, the more I think about the power of god and his/her/it ability (and desire) to create independent, free-will creatures, the more I�m astounded by this. I�m astounded not only by that this is, but by how this can be.

I�ve been touched by many stories here as Shalom Place by those who have been touched deeply, profoundly, and most mystically but what seems to be God. And I�ve often noticed how this touching can be a bittersweet thing. We can be jolted out of our complacency by such a touch, but we can also get quite addicted to that touch. (And so I do agree with Phil and you that learning to relate to life beyond our peaks and valleys of experience is surely one of the goals of existence and thus our ability to love. And certainly a Dark Night could be like a "crash course" in attaining this.)

And given that, at least as quite imperfect loving beings (which most of us are), God touching us directly might be more than we can take, it has occurred to me that prayer is quite a wise medium for communication, and that evolution is quite a wise way to create. And I think this latter is particularly so because it allows truly a loving distance between creator and created. Just how would a Divine Being create a free-will creature who wasn�t immediately overcome by his/her/its glory? Well, crank up a thing called nature and let it roll out humans beings somewhat (but not completely or perhaps even mostly) out of the direct influence of that creator. Then when a sentient being is produced, and when it learns to relate back (with the help of gentle promptings), the true cycle of loving creation will have been completed.

And this is a quite long way to address your comment of "This is a Night mostly under the control of God". The universe is surely completely under control of god, but we humans have surely been given a big dose of free will. I think we have surely been given a big dose of being allowed to freely make our way toward love and being embraced no matter how completely we do so. And so I find it hard to imagine that a Dark Night is completely under the control of God because a Dark Night is so often overpowering and smothering, and that clearly does not seem like the nature of god. This is one case where I gladly say that a Dark Nights is the result of a combination of stubbornness (me) and confusion (partly god�s doing because I�m not all-knowing). And I do believe that Dark Nights are positively transformative, but I do believe that if one stays in a Dark Night for long periods of time that this is simply a function of our resistance and/or our inability to simply let go or imagine living beyond our ego and willful desires.

One thing to notice might be how conscience functions separately, or independently from the internal dialogue. Of course, our heads can swirl when trying to make the moral decision, but usually we already sense what that is, and the attempt of bringing ourselves, or all the parts, into conformity follows. Intuition also appears a kind of pre-reflective knowing.