I am reading from the tenth chapter of John:
It was winter, and the festival of the Dedication
was being held in Jerusalem. Jesus was walking in the temple precincts,
in Solomon's Cloister. The Jews gathered round him and asked:
'How long must you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah
say so plainly.' 'I have told you,' said Jesus, 'but you do not
believe. My deeds done in my Father's name are my credentials,
but because you are not sheep of my flock you do not believe.
My own sheep listen to my voice; I know them and they follow me.
I give them eternal life and they shall never perish; no one shall
snatch them from my care. My Father who has given them to me is
greater than all, and no one can snatch them out of the Father's
care. My Father and I are one.'
Once again the Jews picked up stones to stone him.
At this Jesus said to them, 'I have set before you many good deeds,
done by my Father's power; for which of these would you stone
me?' The Jews replied, 'We are not going to stone you for any
good deed, but for your blasphemy. You, a mere man, claim to be
a god.' Jesus answered, 'Is it not written in your own Law, "I
said: You are gods"? Those are called gods to whom the word
of God was delivered -- and Scripture cannot be set aside. Then
why do you charge me with blasphemy because I, consecrated and
sent into the world by the Father, said, "I am God's son"?
This talk is on "God Will Take Care of You."
It is a spin, it is not a talk yet. I cannot dignify it that way.
Now, I have tried to say four things: first, taking
care of yourself means you experience your experience. My father
was a nut on chewing your food. He would sit there and almost
count the times we had to chew before we swallowed. It burnt me
up as a kid. That came back to my mind last night as I was thinking
about experiencing your experience. I think my father wanted cows
and he got kids. I am not sure that is entirely true. Experience
your experience, and then, second, taking care of yourself has
to do with the Dark Night of the Soul, and third, it has to do
with meditation, and fourth, it has to do with the whole idea
of God taking care of you. But, I am not flowing I am not going
anywhere. I am saying the same thing each day. And if I am not
clear on that, T am sure I am going to go to pieces again in my
thinking.
Standing at attention to your life is something you
do not like to do. The bottom of that is the Dark Night of the
Soul. Standing at attention is the triggering of what I mean by
meditation. And meditation has nothing to meditate on except the
Dark Night of the Soul. Whatever machinery it uses, standing at
attention to the Dark Night of the Soul is meditation. I want
to put it that strongly. And the stirring of the waters of the
Dark Night of the Soul is Being's care for Being. That is what
I want to talk about for a little bit.
Now, the first thing I want to call attention to
is that God 1S the sovereign of your life. You have got no choice
about that. That is not true, that is a faith statement. But,
now I will change it. There is a sovereign that is unsynonymous
with any activity initiated by the subject: that is the absolute
sovereign. Now, when you say "God", that is a faith
statement. You do not experience it as God who is your sovereign
in the raw experience of the fact that you are not running your
life. Now, usually, a word that is a nice easy word to use is
"faith". But the trouble is we are so trained in abstraction
that we think of faith as a philosophical principle rather than
a reality that we phenomenologically are aware of. Now, even when
I say "I showed up a man rather than a woman", I tend
to think of being yanked out of my Mama's womb and coming out
male rather than female. That is a subtle form of abstraction
to the degree that I really experience myself limited in a concrete
situation by being male, and you damned women ought to listen
to this. At that point I am experiencing the overagainstness
that I am trying to talk about as sovereign. Male is just one
thing. I could go on with the fact that I am 64, 1 am not 24.
These days every time I come upon myself, I am nearing 64. But,
now you could go on with that. I want to make a short speech.
Now, maybe this is a better way of coming at it.
I go around filled with resentment all the time. When I peel back
the artichoke and get at the core, I find that resentment is to
the cognitive volitional aspect of my being as absurdity is to
the intellectual dynamic of my being. For instance, I am always
out to do something and as yet nothing has comeoff the way
I have set out to do it. Minus absolutely nothing. Do you understand
what I am talking about? There is a factor in every situation
that is unsynonymous with my own volition that enters in between
my deed and the consequences thereof. And that entree remains
unfathomably mysterious. It is the enigmatic power. Now, when
I say that resentment is the cognitive equivalent to absurdity
why, you can understand resentment! Here I am a being with consciousness
and therefore creativity, and in every, not every other, situation,
it is thwarted. And finally, I die and nobody asks me. This is
what I mean by the experience of a sovereign power. And of course
you and every man, whether he knows it or not, sooner or later,
has got to say before that one "Faith" or "Father"
or the equivalent poetry thereof. Now, about this you have got
no choice. I speak from "Faith". God is your sovereign
and God is my sovereign.
This is point three. People ask these days, "What
does it mean to trust? What does it mean to trust God? I am talking
about taking care of yourself. Whatsoever else it means, it means
that you self-consciously in every given situation acknowledge,
acknowledge, God's sovereignty. Never in my 33 years of marriage,
have I once picked Lyn up off the floor of despair. That is an
honest statement. Now that woman has stood and she very likely
knows that I know that secret. Now for my point. We were in a
group of people four months after John died, and she made a statement
that made me feel that John ought not have died. I cannot describe
the explosion that went off in me! It took me a long time to know
something about it, but do you know what the explosion was? I
went through hell to maintain the faith posture that I was not
simply the subject of fate but my Father was my father. Do you
hear what I am talking about? I believe that when you understand
the sovereignty of God you never again have any excuse about anything.
Do you understand what I mean? I am talking about trusting God.
I am talking about trusting God, not in some abstract theology,
but in the concretion of your life. If you can ever blame any
situation on anything, then you are not hearing what I mean by
trusting God. I am talking about taking care of yourself. You
get up one morning and you forget, and you say, "This is
a hell of a day." That is sacrilege. That is untrust of God.
This is the day God gave you. You let go one day, and you will
not notice it, but the next day when you get up you are exactly
that much shorter than you were the day before. You do it two
days in a row and you are that much shorter. You do it three in
a row, and then pretty soon you are there like a heap of shaking
palsy collapsed in life. You let one go and the trouble has started.
I could go on with that, I won't.
Oh, I have got to tell this, though, on myself. Slicker
one time told me seriously that I was the kind of a guy who shot
and killed the bearer of bad news. Just imagine the general who
is fighting a war and his whole right flank has collapsed. If
he does not do something about it, everything is gone, but he
shoots the guy who brought the news, because it is bad news. You
got that? And then recently, Slick, a few days ago I read in history
that in the old days generals did precisely that; they shot the
bearer of bad news. I suppose that is where the saying came from
originally. Well, you know that is not entirely true about me,
but Slicker has a point, as some of you have learned. Anybody
is welcome in my cubicle as long as they have good news. Well,
so that my boasting will be tempered, to the degree that Slicker
is right or in that situation where Slicker is right, that is
what I mean by lack of trust in God. Then it is that your caring
for yourself is in bad shape, real bad shape.
Now what do you mean when you say God cares for you?
If I were going on with trust I would deal with power and presence
of God, but I won't. To get this in secular language so you will
not think it is some religion stuck in here, Being cares for Being.
Now, you have noted that Being could care less about deeds and
could care less about knowledge. Have you noticed that? Evidence
of it is that the edges of the pyramids are beginning to round
off. Every deed passes away. Or, maybe the best evidence is this
fine body I have, which is my deed. One of these days they are
going to stick it in a 6foot hole and then finally it will
not be there anymore. Now what is my being? I do not want to deal
with it in abstract philosophy, but in concrete experience. The
way I experience my being is to know my knowing and to do my doing.
Do you grasp that? When somebody says, now empirically what are
you pointing to when you are talking about your being? Well, I
am talking about the experience of the intensification of knowing
and the intensification of doing, more concretely, of my knowing
and my doing. And, by "knowing my knowing", I mean standing
present to my knowing. I mean being in the sense of expression,
in the sense of manifestation, in the sense of presencing in whatever
form, my knowing. I used to sometimes say to Frank Hilliard, "Frank,
you and I must do something." Then the night before we would
sit down and make a model and then lay it aside and the next night
make another one. What you make models for is to bring them into
being, and the way you bring them into being is to appropriate
them in your being. That is knowing your knowing. This is why
abstract thinking of any kind whatsoever is finally naught. This
is what the existential dynamic, of our time, if we had eyes to
see and ears to hear, has taught us all. This is my being. Knowing
my knowing. Almost like eating my knowing. I do not want an idea
that I am not. This is what I mean by integrity.
I have often said to Slicker that he knew more
in RSI we called it "grounding" Slicker
knows more about grounding in his life than ~ anybody I ever met.
That is knowing your knowing. Whatever awe S1icker has comes from
this. One time, I remember Townley said that if there was ever
any saint remembered in our outfit, it would be Slicker. I thought
about that a long time, and I concluded that that is what he was
pointing to in Slicker.
Secondly, being does not care anything about your
doing. Somebody asks you now what do you mean? My way of knowing
my knowing is doing my doing. In some ways that is a little harder
to get said, but in another way it is not. It is the difference
between doing a job and sticking the one Godgiven life you
have even into washing a white linen handkerchief. The cross is
not something that happened two thousand years ago. It is at the
heart of Being itself when you stick your life, the one life you
have, which means stick your death into the least of all deeds.
That is your being, that is doing your doing. Now, what I am trying
to say is Being takes care of being. This is what I mean by endlessness.
You know your knowing and you do your doing. . . What does it
mean to take care of yourself? Very simple! You know your knowing
and do your doing and Being always takes care of being.
My last point has to do with this thing I read. I
have been taught in theology that I studied and probably by preachers
long before that Jesus never said he was the Son of God. I have
come back to that tenth chapter over and over again. The thing
that shocks me, is that he did 1.nake that claim. The fact that
he grounded it in the Scripture, that is beside the point at the
moment. That was strategy. No, it was not, it was saying, "Why
aren't you saying the same thing?" That is more than strategy.
He stood tip, "I am the son of God". It was the tenth
chapter that rocked me into seeing that precisely in the aliveness
of the Dark Night of the Soul, precisely there and only there
one hears the heavens open and the voice saying "Thou art
my beloved son". But the Jews could not hear that day what
Jesus had heard as he said "I am the son. I am the son of
God." What does it mean to take care of yourself? Well, you
cannot divorce it from standing at attention to life. It would
not even dawn on you to say "I am God's son". If the
meditation were not happening symbolically with the council that
is internalized in yourself, you would never agree or dare. If
you were not taking into yourself the humiliation and the weakness
and the resentment and the suffering and the dislocation and the
sense of ineffectivity and expenditure and unfulfillment, you
could not even dream of making such a statement. I wish for one
second I were not quite so fat and not quite so short. I would
like to stand tall before you. I am God's son. It is like in Faust,
the broken sword picked up with the hilt showing, there is the
cross and Satan flees. I am proud, as I hope you are proud, this
day and every day to be a son of God. I hope always when I feel
the pressures that I will not forget to throw my shoulders back.
I hope I do it so you can see it. I am a son of God. I am not
what you think I am. I am not what I think I am. I am not what
anybody thinks I am. I am what God thinks I am, therefore I say,
I am a son of God. Taking care of yourself.
I was going to have a quartet come out and sing an
old hymn "God Will Take Care of You" and that is not
an abstract pious statement.
JWM: Porter, come up here and give us the insight
you had on meditation.
PORTER: I wrote a couple of statements. The first
one, I think just got me into a further mess, but let me read
it because it is a Fart of the journey. We were talking about
the role of Satan in meditation and I wrote this: "Not only
is meditation the only point where Satan attacks, Satan's attack
is the only point where meditation happens. A concrete happening
which results in a threat to your relationship with consciousness,
that is, your relationship to the Dark Night and the Long March,
at the same time triggers meditation. That is, it triggers a dialogue
with your council that is the intensification of consciousness
which allows the defeat of Satan. And your meditative council
is built only out of such happenings. It is not just any group
of people, it is an alive community of those who have been helpful
in maintaining your relationship with consciousness. That is,
they are the successful combatants with Satan. Satan, therefore,
makes possible the intensification of consciousness through the
threat of nonbeing." Now, that little bit of writing
took me on some weird journeys. Now, I tried to get the insight
in about 5 simple statements. Now, I begin with myself (not myself
but my self) as a relationship to mystery. The content of this
relationship is consciousness or is the Dark Night and the Long
March. Now a self is also a relationship to this consciousness.
I find myself having to relate to the Dark Night and the Long
March and the content of this is profound consciousness. I suppose
you could say that it is integrity. Now, it is this relationship
which becomes threatened and must be cared for. I think the mystery
itself in daily events cares for the first relationship. That
is, mystery always sees that you stand present to life being the
Dark Night and the Long March. You do not have to worry about
that one. It is the second relationship that is the arena of taking
care of yourself. That is to say, I have to care for the profound
relationship. That is the activity that I engage in. Now, in a
strange kind of way, what Joe was saying about Being taking care
of Being also operates here, but somehow or other I have to get
involved in that care. A concrete situation raises the threat
to my Self, or to my radical integrity in the form of a vision
of life being other than the Dark Night and the Long March. And
therefore that becomes a threat to my relation to what is. That
is the Dark Night and the Long March. Or, it becomes a threat
to my integrity, it becomes a threat to my profound consciousness.
Meditation comes into play at this point in that it is the council
of wisdom which dialogues with whatever it is that is threatening
that relationship. I think that meditation is not a dialogue,
it is a trialogue. That is, my council gets in a conversation
with whatever it is that is threatening my relationship to being
the Dark Night and the Long March, that is, being life itself.
And it is as if I am a third party. My Self as a third party watches
that conversation going on. It is the meditative council arguing
or debating, or dialoguing with whatever it is that threatens
that relationship which is the process of my Self being cared
for. I suppose that is the sense in which you can say that being
cares for being. Now let me see if I can illustrate that.
Very early in the assignment process my name showed
up in Hong Kong. Now it went on quite a journey Hong
Kong, Singapore, Chicago, Singapore and something of this has
gone on at every point. My first reaction to that was "Well,
just be patient, it will shift". Now that was the concrete
incident at which Satan got in. That is, I discovered that it
was not the assignment or the possibility of it shifting but it
was my assumption, unconsciously at first, that there is a situation
in which the Long March and the Dark Night are more or less intense
than some other situation. That was the point at which Satan got
in through my armor. Now at that point my self was in mortal danger.
Now, that is the point at which I cranked up meditation. I am
not sure who all got into the dialogue but David Scott got into
it with "AHA". He was making me aware that that was
the threat, or that I was thinking rather subtly that there was
some situation that was less intense or more intense than the
Long March and the Dark Night. One of my meditative council comes
in and just says, "Aha!". And that becomes the argument
on that side of the debate. It is as if that was going on and
I was sitting there watching it go on. Now, at some point, the
decision I had on my hands was how I was going to relate to the
dialogue that was going on. My selfhood was at stake. My radical
selfhood had to do with sorting out all of what was going on and
ferreting out what indeed it was that maintained my relationship
to the Long March and the Dark Night. That is, it was that dialogue
going on between my council and the threat that gave me the possibility
of deciding. You can see that what was going on was sin, as I
was intrigued with there being something other than the Long March
and Dark Night. I was separated from life. That is, I was in sin
at that point, and so my meditative council, in dialoguing with
that threat gave the possibility of ferreting out what it is that
maintained my relationship with the Dark Night and the Long March,
that allows me to continue to stand in relationship with mystery
or the way life is.
JWM: That's great, Robert. David McCleskey
Where is David?
McCleskey: What got me triggered on the same thing
basically was that it starts with the intrusion of awe. It's the
bump in your life which he has just described in the assignment
illustration. And keeping that awe alive is meditation. Taking
care of yourself is, you don't shut that off. Quite often what
Satan says is "Oh, that wasn't really a bump." Or "You
ought to go on to the next situation." Those are all trying
to block off an initial encounter with Mystery. And then
he said Satan attacks only there. That is the only place where
he attacks. Meditation is the activity of keeping those things
alive. We were talking in the cubicle yesterday and the illustration
was mentioned of Liz Banks saying "Nonsense" to Satan:
that was meditation. That was a little poetry she remembered about
another occasion in which awe was encountered. And my last point
would simply be that it is always for the sake of continuing that
experience in the future for the sake of something else. It is
not just for the sake of having a fine meditative council and
I ought to have more fine meditative council, so I would read
more. Reading does not necessarily mean meditation unless that
is going on.
JWM: Gene Marshall.
MARSHALL: You can tell these comments all stem from
the same basic breakthrough, that Meditation is a dialogue between
profound consciousness and fallen consciousness. The dialogue
between profound consciousness and fallen consciousness, that
I am watching and dialoguing with is that point of trialogue.
In other words, fallen consciousness is the creation without awe
and the real creation or profound consciousness is in dialogue
with fallen consciousness. It iE4 like that dialogue is going
on out here and I am watching. My meditation is watching this
dialogue and my meditation is deciding to choose sides in the
dialogue. I say "Nonsense" to fallen consciousness and
"Amen, Praise God" to profound consciousness. I have
noticed that I tend to divide all the people on the entire earth
into two groups one group that I say "Nonsense"
to before they speak and then pick out a few things to say "Amen"
to, and the other group of people whom I say "Amen"
to before they speak and then pick out the "Nonsense".
That dramatizes how complicated meditation is. It is naming God
and Satan, hopefully correctly. If you watch this dialogue then
you have to name what is God and what is Satan. That is your job
just to give the name properly. You cannot trust
anybody entirely. Some people you can hardly trust at all.
Satan's job is to fool you. If he fools you, he wins. God does
not help you choose, but he gives you hell if you choose wrong.
He also gives you heaven if you choose right. It is sort of like
that. And so what it means to have God take care of you means
that He is constant wrath on fallen consciousness. You can count
on Him to clobber Satan. So if you get on Satan's side, you have
had it.
JWM: It occurred to me while they were talking that even though, at least I do not feel very skilled in the area we have been dealing with, it is absolutely crucial, and not simply for us but for the future. What if everybody who chose or who could discipline themselves in our group would write in that area? And then we would print it and take it home with us. Why not? And I went and tried to clean up my speech yesterday. I will write a page on that or something, too. Why don't we do that? Isn't it almost worthwhile in terms of where we are? All right, we will do that.