So said St. Francis: a koan of christendom that invites meditation.
Francis saw fraternity and sorority everywhere.
Creatures ( living and nonliving) are brothers and sisters in the Order of Creation. Adjusting the statement slightly we may pose the challenge this way: ‘Who we are looking for is who is looking.’ Yet, our ordinary conscious experience is of separation, difference and individual expression.
What experience inspires this insight on the part of Francis?
His vision was penetrating and went beneath the surface of form and function, speciation and diversity. The entire Cosmos was personal. In the eyes of wolves, he caught a glimpse of ein sof, the unknowable One. In Sun and Moon, he saw the illumined face of love.
All the exquisite forms and variety formed a choir chanting in unison of the passionate Heart tuning the music of the spheres. Going well beyond expectation and learning, labeling and categorizing, Francis discerned essences.
Doing so requires letting go of our clinging to unique and divided identity.
It means examining oneself and seeing the degree to which we imprison the mind and soul in ideas about self and other.
We each weave clever and elaborate fictions designed around a history of experiences and language, strokes and slaps delivered by the environment through which we travel. We embody the mandate to separate and judge and build a system of dichotomies – good & bad, beautiful and not, right and left, right and wrong, valuable and not, worthy and unworthy, intelligent and not, ad infinitum.
As Francis knew intuitively, contemporary research is likewise showing how wrong we have been about assumptions of the comparative intelligence of nonhuman beings.
One case in point is the wisdom of crows: their capacity to use tools and problem solve equal to the capacity of young children. Elsewhere, there was a recent study of the dance of bees and how they compete in their dancing to democratically choose the best next site at which to build a hive. Once decided, after feverish “debate through dance,” they all lift as one body and move together to the new site. All of this is further impetus for our grappling with what Francis saw empirically without the lenses of science as support.
How, then, do we cultivate the sense of the grander truth that lies within appearances and divergences?
It begins by practicing the “via negativa”, systematically dwelling in the tensions forged by our false dichotomies and dissolving them.
The challenge is to annihilate limiting paradigms by rising up to a third position neutrally suspended above them. Each time we do so, we open our aperture wider and see a bit more clearly what is really there. We lift the veil that our thinking manufactures and throws over the real like a heavy cloak that obscures it.
This is a Western expression of jñāna yoga or “knowledge of the absolute”: discerning the difference between the real and the unreal.
One example: we pose the dichotomy of sentient – non-sentient. We see rocks as non-sentient, trees as sentient yet less so than birds and mammals. We create taxonomies of like and unlike that, while convenient for study, fuel our perception of difference as primary.
Using thought differently, we can confront our convenient divisions and resolve them in a higher sense of unity.
How?
One meditative stream of thought: Dispensing with sentience as the frame altogether, rocks and trees, insects, birds, mammals and human beings are Presence, amalgams of earth, air, fire and water. All were hewn from the same stuff.
I celebrate the variety and I see their unity. We are all sons and daughters of the Sun/Son. We are energy enlivened with purpose, ordained by first cause and evolving along lines laid down before the first micro-second of the universe. We are Light, mineral, Mind, Heart, and a vastness emerges among us.
We can learn much by incorporating this Christic jñāna yoga into our contemplative round.
What/ who we are looking for is already and always is with us.
“interior intimo meo et superior summo meo” (“higher than my highest and more inward than my innermost self”) (St. Augustine, Confessions III, 6, 11)
© The Harried Mystic, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
Read Full Post »
The Harried Mystic 