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april - june 2008 vol. 21 no. 2 RADICAL GRACE a publication of the center for action and contemplation non-dual thinking
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april - june 2008 vol. 21 no. 2

radicalgracea publication of the center for action and contemplation

non-dual thinking

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The Center for Action and Contemplation

A Christian center forwarding the integration of social action and contemplative prayer

The CAC supports a new reformation—from the inside:

• In the spirit of the Gospels• Confirming peoples’ deeper spiritual

intuitions• Encouraging actions of justice rooted

in prayer• With a new appreciation for,

and cooperation with, other denominations, religions, and cultures

Managing EditorVanessa Guerin

Editorial TeamAndrea Briggs, Shirin McArthur, Rich Meixner, Stephen Picha

Design / LayoutMonique Estrada

ArtworkCover: “Half Empty and Half Full,” watercolor by Vanessa Guerin.

“Seeing and Being Seen,” p. 14, collage by Sara Fusté, 2008. Used with permission.

PhotographyPhotograph, p. 4, by John Harvy, 2007. Used with permission. Photograph, p. 11, by Henry Hoffman. Used with permission.

3 ANDBy Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM

4 THE PARADOX OF NON-DUALITYBy Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO

5 METANOIABy Cece Shantzek

6 SEEING WITH THE EYE OF THE HEARTBy Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault

8 THE HUMAN FACE OF GODBy Walter Wink

10 THE INFINITE ZEROBy Beatrice Bruteau

13 SEEING AND BEING SEENBy Sarah Fusté

14 OUR DISPOSITION IN LIFEBy Fr. Michael Demkovich, OP

16 NON-DUALISM AS A PRACTICE FOR SPIRITUAL PROGRESSIVES

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

18 BRAIN HARMONY: TOWARD NON-DUALISTIC THINKING

By Nancy K. Morrison, MD with Sally K. Severino, MD

INSIDE RG

RADICAL GRACE is published quarterly by the Center for Action and Contemplation. Radical Grace is an on-going means of relationship and com mu nication with the CAC community. Friends making a financial contribution will receive a year’s worth (four issues) of Radical Grace. A gift of Radical Grace is available for the suggested amount of $25.00 per year.

Radical Grace (USPS 023-275)Published quarterly by Center for Action and Contemplation1705 Five Points Rd. SW, Albuquerque NM 87105-3017.

Periodicals Postage Paid at Albuquerque NMPOSTMASTER: Send address changes to: RADICAL GRACE:

1705 Five Points Rd. SW, Albuquerque, NM 87105 [Not a mailing address]

A collision of opposites forms the cross of Christ. One leads downward preferring the truth of the humble. The other moves leftward against the grain. But all are wrapped safely inside a hidden harmony: One world, God’s cosmos, a benevolent universe.

Center for Action and ContemplationTelephone: (505) 242-9588 Fax: (505) 242-9518

[email protected] • www.cacradicalgrace.org

EDITOR’S NOTE

Non-dual thinking, the theme of this edition of Radical Grace, is a challenging, but elusive, concept. It

seems paradoxical; however, the diverse articles in this edi-tion give us insights into ways we can incorporate this trans-formative practice into our lives. Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault in her article, “Seeing with the Eyes of the Heart,” shows how Jesus teaches on non-duality through the parable of the landowner and the laborers (Matthew 20: 1-19). Sarah Fusté writes in “Seeing and Being Seen” about her time on a CAC-sponsored 9-Day Internship in Juarez, Mexico. Fr. Thomas Keating proposes that we can learn to live “a life that is neither dual nor non-dual….” These and all the contributors are clearly individuals who have been think-ing non-dually and inspire us to do the same.

~ Vanessa Guerin

Corrections

• In the January, February, March 2008 edition of Radical Grace, “Inside RG,” p. 2, indicates that the article p. 29 is “Right Seeing: What One Learns from a 9-Day Internship” by Andrea Briggs. However, the article p. 29 is “Mirror Medallion” by Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM.

• In the same issue, Dyck Vermilye’s first name is misspelled in the caption of the photograph p. 10.

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AAnd teaches us to say yes

And allows us to be both-andAnd keeps us from either-or

And teaches us to be patient and long sufferingAnd is willing to wait for insight and integration

And keeps us from dualistic thinkingAnd does not divide the field of the moment

And helps us to live in the always imperfect nowAnd keeps us inclusive and compassionate toward everything

And demands that our contemplation become actionAnd insists that our action is also contemplative

And heals our racism, our sexism, heterosexism, and our classismAnd keeps us from the false choice of liberal or conservative

And allows us to critique both sides of things And allows us to enjoy both sides of things

And is far beyond any one nation or political partyAnd helps us face and accept our own dark side

And allows us to ask for forgiveness and to apologizeAnd is the mystery of paradox in all things

And is the way of mercyAnd makes daily, practical love possible

And does not trust love if it is not also justiceAnd does not trust justice if it is not also love

And is far beyond my religion versus your religionAnd allows us to be both distinct and yet united

And is the very Mystery of Trinity

Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM

ND

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By Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO

THE PARADOX OF NON-DUALITY

reflection of self. At the very least, the physiological development of the brain and nervous system seems to be required for such an evolved state to become permanent. The body has to be prepared to endure the more intense communication of the Divine. This requires those who are in a non-dual state to be able to move freely back and forth. To conceive of a permanent non-dual state of awareness as the goal of all spiritual striving may not be as conformed to

reality as to live the non-dual state of mind inside an active life of immersion in the ups and downs of ordinary experience.

Perhaps it might be useful to orient practitioners to the paradox of living a life that is neither dual nor non-dual, just as some spiritual traditions affirm that the Absolute is not this, not that—or similar to the statement, not one, not two. These paradoxes point to the fact that God is beyond all that exists and be-yond all categories of being and non-being, as well as in all that exists.

Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO, a Cistercian priest, monk, and for-mer abbot, is the founder of Contemplative Outreach, an organiza-tion that teaches Centering Prayer. Fr. Keating has written numer-ous books, including Open Mind, Open Heart. Together with Fr. Richard Rohr, he will be presenting at the CAC summer confer-ence, The Inner Room, June 27 – 29, 2008. For more informa-tion or to register for the conference, please visit www.cacradicalgrace.

The state of non-duality is addressed in most of the advanced spiritual traditions of the world religions. It is sometimes referred to as No Self or Emptiness, as

in Buddhism. It refers to the death of the false self or ego and the diminishment or extinction of the separate self sense, along with the abiding sense of unity with Ultimate Reality. Unity with Ultimate Reality is usually explained as full enlightenment, or in Christian terms, the grace of the Ascension, a state of union beyond inner resurrection.

Non-duality is clearly a state beyond what is called in the Christian contemplative tradi-tion “Transforming Union.” The Cistercians, Franciscans, Carmelites, and other religious groups have described this state as “bridal mysticism.” It involves the union of love with God in which the will and intellect are united to God, whether in inte-rior trials such as the feeling of God’s absence or the delights of mature, apophatic contempla-tion. The unifying force of divine love draws and unites the soul into ineffable experiences of union with the Beloved and forgetfulness of self. They re-main two however. The soul, except in brief peri-ods of ecstasy, is aware of itself in union with God as Bridegroom or the Beloved.

St. John of the Cross in the “Living Flame of Love” hints at higher states of union, but is not explicit. Some of the Beguines of the 12th and 13th cen-turies wrote explicitly of the Transforming Union as initiating a further journey into states of unity consciousness that parallel the descriptions of no self or enlightenment found in Buddhism, Advaitic Vedanta, or Sufi literature. Here there is no self at all. In general, most mystics believe that the no-self experience cannot be permanent in this life. They affirm that periods of a few hours, or even a few days in exceptional cases, can take place without any

Shaikh Kabir Edmund Helminski, Ven. Bhikkhu Ajahn Sona, Fr. Thomas Keating OCSO, Rabbi Ted Falcon

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are each of the candidates, and so is our current president. This presidency has been a tough one for me. The President doesn’t share my values. I don’t like what he does, and so he teaches me by contrast about who I want to be and what I must do in the world. He has also helped me to learn that I must honor his humanity and I must claim in me that which I detest in him. What in me wants to create war? Wants to see my interests above the interests of others? Wants to deny his very personhood?

Sometimes, I am graced to learn from those who teach with wisdom. I can also be graced to learn from those who teach by contrast. Those who do things that are against my values teach me well who I want to be and awaken in me a desire to work to become the change. They offer fresh clarity about what I believe, and can wake me up to how I feel called to serve. God can work in the darkest night to bring about transformation.

Luke 11:23 states: “He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me, scatters.” I understand this to mean that when we forget we are one body, we are lost. When I per-ceive myself to be “against” anyone, I perceive my-self to be separate from God, and for me there is no greater pain.

In this season of taking sides and good/bad, right/wrong thinking, I ask to be freed from my stories and my turmoil as the world unfolds. I ask to trust that God’s grace is here, with and among us, and to remember we will learn even more in the years to come about who we are and what world we want to co-create together—some by wisdom and some by contrast.

These can appear to be scary times for those of us attached to the idea of safety and peace for the planet and her peoples. I pray that we are up to the task of standing together for peace, of finding the way around the differences to the basic truth that we are more the same than different, and that we can’t get there alone.

Cece Shantzek is the Conferences and Events Manager of the Center for Action and Contemplation.

By Cece Shantzek

METANOIA

On the way to Morning Prayer recent-ly, listening to election coverage on the radio, I heard an interview with a man who was offering some very

strong opinions about social issues, and his views couldn’t have been farther from mine. As I listened, my jaw tensed, my stomach clenched, and I was shaking my head while grumbling my objections at the radio. My ego wanted to reject him, insist he was “wrong!” My heart closed, and my temper rose. The urge to dismiss people who have different views—especially when those views counter stories I am very attached to—can be so strong!

I turned off the radio, and sat with what was hap-pening in me. I didn’t want to spend my morn-ing—maybe even my whole day—mentally warring with a stranger and/or the idea of the people “out there” who believe “those things.” But it’s so easy to get derailed by the things I think I am right about. Still, staying in the place where separation is real for me—in my dualistic or split mind—is too pain-ful! If the Truth converges, where do I converge with this man? In reaching for our commonalities, I could find that he seems afraid—and to that I can relate, since the way he sees things sure feels scary to my little self!

In this election season, as I have watched speeches and debates, I have felt this same tension in my-self. I have the urge to line up behind the person I think would make the best candidate, and to stand against the others (creating “us and them”). When I listen from a place of attachment to my stories, I feel stressed out and worried. What if we end up with four more years (or more) of war? A president who isn’t interested in helping the poor or the marginal-ized… or me? What if…

I can’t feel better about any of it until I wake up to the fact that we really are safe. When I can look through the lens of non-dualism, I can see that ev-erything has its place in God’s universe. If there is nowhere God isn’t, how can I ever not be safe? I am not my body, and I am not my thoughts about myself. I am but a droplet in the ocean that is the Body of Christ, and so is the man on the radio. So

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picks up reality in a much deeper and more integral way than our poor Cartesian mind even begins to imagine.

The heart can pick up subtle signals from all lev-els of reality, not just from what’s happening in the rational. The intellect is a part of it, you notice; but the field of perception goes far beyond just the ra-tional. The heart picks up from the emotions, from our sense of proportion, from intuition, from im-ages and archetypes. And most important, it keeps us aligned with our innermost, with what we truly know.

Unlike the egoic operating system, the heart does not perceive through differentiation. It doesn’t di-vide the field into inside and out, subject and object. Rather, it perceives by means of harmony. It’s like hearing the note G played and instantly hearing a D and a B around it that make it into a chord, that join it to a whole. When heart-awareness becomes fully formed within a person, he or she will be operating out of non-dual consciousness. But it’s not simply a higher level of the same old mind; it’s a whole new operating system! That person does indeed see from a perspective of singleness—and just as Jesus called for, there is now no separation between God and humans, or between humans and other hu-mans, simply because separation isn’t factored into the new operating system. It is no longer necessary for perception, so it simply falls away like scales from the eyes.

This seems like a very fruitful approach to the teachings of Jesus. “Blessed are the pure (i.e., single) of heart, for they shall see God,” he says in the Be-atitudes, but who would have believed that he is not talking about perfecting one’s virtue, but about up-grading the operating system! And yet the metaphor seems to work and brings an underlying coherence to what he is about. His whole mission can fun-damentally be seen as trying to push, tease, shock, confirm, and wheedle people beyond the “limited analytic intellect” of their egoic operating system into the “vast realm of mind” where they will dis-cover the resources they need to live in fearlessness, coherence, and compassion—or in other words, as true human beings.

There’s an interesting confirmation of this from

By Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault

SEEING WITH THE EYE OF THE HEART

One of the things I most appreciate about the computer era is that it fur-nishes us with a whole set of new and wonderful images with which to en-

vision the spiritual life. So here’s a computer meta-phor: we human beings come into existence with a certain operating system already installed in us. We can make the choice to upgrade.

The system already installed in us is a binary op-erating system. It runs on the power of “either/or.” People frequently call it the ego, but I prefer to stick with my metaphor and call it the “egoic operating system.” It comes by its dualism honestly; the “bi-nary operator,” as it’s called, is built right into the structure of the human brain.1

But we do have the capacity, if we so choose, to shift to a whole different basis of perception. We come into this life with another operating system already lying in latency, and, if we wish, we can learn to steer by it, understand through it, and ultimately discover our deepest sense of identity within it. This other operating system (we can call it the non-dual system or the unitive system, if we want) is the op-erating system of the heart.

The egoic operating system is particularly related to the mind, to the “binary operator” built right into the human brain. The heart has a different way of perceiving. Rather than dividing and conquer-ing, it connects with a seamless and indivisible real-ity through a whole different way of organizing the informational field. And it’s ours for the choosing.

Let’s talk a bit about this other system. I used the word “heart” to describe it, and that probably requires some deconditioning because in the West we customarily see the heart in a very clichéd and sentimental way. We play it off against the mind, so that a person is “in the head” if wedded to cere-bral thinking, and “in the heart” if oriented toward feeling. We almost always think of the heart as the center of our personal emotional life. But this is not the way the wisdom tradition sees it. In wisdom, the heart is primarily an organ of spiritual perception, a highly sensitive instrument for keeping us aligned, as we journey along the horizontal axis of our life in time, with the vertical axis of timeless reality: the realm of meaning, value, and conscience. The heart

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an unexpected quarter. You’ll often hear, in connection with the teachings of Jesus, that he came to this earth calling us to repen-tance. “Repent” is a very popular word in our Christian lexicon, particularly in evangelical and fundamentalist quarters—“Repent, for the day of the Lord is at hand.” But what does the word actually mean? The answer may surprise you.

The Greek that it’s translating is metanoia. And guess what? It doesn’t mean feeling sorry for yourself for doing bad things. It doesn’t even mean to “change the direction in which you’re look-ing for happiness,” although it’s often translated that way.² The word literally breaks down into meta and noia, which depending on how you translate meta (it can be either the preposition “beyond” or the adjective “large”), means “go beyond the mind,” or “go into the large mind.”³ The repentance that Jesus really is talking about means to go beyond your little egoic operating system that says, “I think, therefore I am,” and try out the other one—the big one—that says, “I am, therefore I think.”

Christians aren’t commonly used to hearing that Jesus was re-ally about transforming our operating system. Admittedly, it’s an unusual take on the subject. But one of his parables speaks to this clash of operating systems in a way that is simply unmistakable: the notoriously challenging laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20). Nearly every Christian I’ve ever met has found this parable by far the most difficult to understand and accept. You’ll see why when you read it:

A landowner went out early in the morning to hire workers for his vineyard. He agreed to pay the workers a salary of a silver coin for the day, and sent them to his vineyard. He went out again at about nine in the morning and, seeing men idle in the square, he said to them, “You two, go to my vineyard and I will pay you what is just.” So they went. The owner went out at midday and at about three in the afternoon, and he did the same. . . When evening came the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the workers and pay them their wage, beginning with the last and ending with the first.” Those who had come to work last turned up and were given a denarius each, a silver coin. When it was the turn of the first, they thought they would receive more; but they too received a denarius each. On receiving it they began to grumble against the landowner. They said,“These hardly worked an hour, yet you have treated them the same as those of us who have endured the day’s burden and heat.” The owner said to them, “Friend, I have not been unjust with you. Did we not agree on a denarius a day? So take what is yours, and go. . . Don’t I have the right to do as I please with my money? Why are you envious, when I am kind?”

Probably more than any other teaching in the gospels, this parable tends to defy all logic and common sense. People unani-mously exclaim, “It’s not fair.” But from the point of view of con-sciousness training, it begins to make sense. This is perhaps Jesus’ most koan-like parable: As long as you’re using the egoic operating system, you just can’t get it. You will see the owner’s action as un-fair because you’re keeping track of more or less, better or worse, first versus last. And that is a function of the operating page 22

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oughly familiar with figures of speech, and never confused them with reality. If you asked a Jew if God was walking in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day because the noonday sun heat was dis-agreeable (Genesis 3:8), they would have dismissed the question as impertinent: Of course not, that is only a figure of speech.

But Ezekiel is not beholding a figure of speech. God really seems to be turning a human face to-ward Ezekiel. Whatever else God might be in the wildness of nature and the blackness of interstellar space, when God wishes to manifest divine reality to Ezekiel, it is in the “likeness as it were of a hu-man form.”

What does it mean to say that God is revealed as human? Why does God turn a human face to Ezekiel? Perhaps because becoming human is the task that God has set for human beings. And human beings have only a vague idea what it means to be human. Humanity errs in believing that it is hu-man. We are only fragmentarily human, fleetingly human, brokenly human. We see glimpses of our humanness, we can dream of what a more humane existence and political order would be like, but we have not yet arrived at true humanness. Ezekiel’s vision intimates that only God is, as it were, Hu-man, and since we are made in God’s image and likeness, we are capable of becoming more truly hu-man ourselves. As Gerd Thiessen notes, people were once especially eager to find the “missing link” be-tween primates and human beings. Now, however, it is dawning on us that we ourselves could be that “missing link.”

Furthermore, we are incapable of becoming hu-man by ourselves. We scarcely know what human-ness is. We have only the merest intuitions and gen-eral guidelines. Jesus has, to be sure, revealed to us what it means to live a fully human life. But how do I translate that into my own struggles for human-ness? Curiously, I know more about God, thanks to Jesus, than I do about myself. Metaphysically speak-ing, God is the ultimate mystery, but to myself I am an even more impenetrable mystery. Who am I? I have accepted my parents’ answers, my culture’s

By Walter Wink

THE HUMAN FACE OF GOD

One of the greatest mysteries in all Scripture is the enigmatic expression, “the son of man.” In Hebrew it means simply “human being,” “mortal,” “son

of Adam,” or “child of the human.” God will only address Ezekiel by this name, and does so 93 times. For his part, Jesus is depicted as speaking of himself as “the son of man” 84 times.¹ “The Human Face of God” is a title I have chosen for this article, for I believe that we are today witnessing a revolution in the God-image.

In Ezekiel’s vision of the divine throne chariot, we encounter one of the most significant visions in the Bible, one of the most influential visions in all hu-man history. This vision is the fountainhead of Jew-ish mysticism. An entire library of writings derives from it right up to the present—an unbroken chain of esoteric traditions lasting 2,500 years.

I want to focus on just one aspect of this rich vi-sion (Ezekiel 1:26-2:1):

And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like a sap-phire; and seated above the likeness was some-thing that seemed like a human form. Upward from what appeared like the loins I saw something that looked like fire, and there was a splendor all around. Like the bow in a cloud on a rainy day, such was the splendor all around. This was the ap-pearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord.When I saw it, I fell on my face and I heard the voice of someone speaking. He said to me: “O mortal (ben adam), stand up on your feet, and I will speak with you.”

At the center of the vision, the qualifications and hesitations stumble all over themselves: “And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like a sapphire; and seated above the likeness of a throne was something that seemed like a human form.”

And this is the revelation: God seems to be, as it were, Human.

This is not just a figure of speech. Israel was thor-

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answers, the answers of mentors and peers and colleagues. But how do they know? What are the exact outlines of my true form? What is the visage of my real face? How can I find out, unless God reveals it to me? For who else could possibly know what is stored up in the divine image inside me, except One who is the divine image inside me? As one of the most remarkable lines of Scripture puts it, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed, we will be like it, for we will see it as it is” (1 John 3:2).²

Perhaps some day we might become more fully human. For now, we are only promissory notes, hints, intimations. But we are able to become more human because the Human One has placed within us the divine spirit (Ezekiel 37:5, 14).

If God is in some sense true humanness, then divinity inverts. Divinity is not a qualitatively different reality; quite the reverse, divinity is fully realized humanity. Only God is, as it were, HU-MAN. The goal of life, then, is not to become something we are not—divine—but to become truly what we are—human. We are not required to become divine: flawless, perfect, without blemish. We are invited simply to become human, which means growing through our mistakes, learning by trial and error, being redeemed over and over from sin and compulsive behavior, becoming our-selves, scars and all. It means embracing and transforming our shadow side. It means giving up pretending to be good instead of real. In this vision, then, God represents the archetypal image, “as it were,” of individuated human being, reaching out through Ezekiel to God’s people with a humanly impossible task: that of becoming human.

Eastern Orthodoxy has long taught that the goal of human ex-istence is to become “divinized.” I have a deep respect for the spiritual disciplines that the orthodox mystics have developed in order to further this process of growth into God. But I have no idea what divinization signifies. When people say Jesus is divine, or the Son of God, or God, I have nothing in my experience that can help me comprehend what they mean. It all sounds too much like the language of Greek polytheism, in which gods impregnated mortal women, who bore beings who were half human and half divine. The interminable debates about the two natures of Christ seem to be totally off the mark, an irrelevancy carried over from a worldview that is now virtually defunct for all but the truest of true believers, and a stumbling block to all dialogue with other religions.

I do not know what the word “divine” signifies. But I do have an inkling of what the word “human” might entail, because we are made in the image of God, Human One, and there have been exemplary human beings, in our tradition and these of others.

Central to the Eastern Orthodox tradition is a statement by the church father Athanasius that Christ became as we are that we might become as he is. This has usually been interpreted as mean-ing that Christ became human that we might become page 11

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men’s rites of passage

This is not about religion, but about

spirituality, about age-old traditions that guide us into manhood, about

coming to trust that there is something much greater at work in our lives than we

could ever imagine.

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ceptions and unrealistic orientations. We endeavor to stop objectifying the Ground of Being. We are the Ground of Being. It is not Somebody Else.

So, we do not arrive at “realization” of the Non-Dual by trying to go toward this putative Other. Rather, we have to let our surface consciousness sink back and down into our center or root, our Self as Subject, not object. You can’t regard it or address it—make it an object for your consciousness. You have to realize it by being it subjectively.

The Infinite, the Absolute, can be “known” only as Subject, and this means that we have to be the

subject. We must forsake (fast from) objec-tifying It. This is why the real culmi-

nation of the Mysteries appears in the Christian tradition as Holy

Saturday. The Great Sabbath is the Infinite, the Absolute Re-ality, the Nothing, the Great Zero. When the last attempt at definition and regard dies, the Clear Light of the Ultimate Reality spreads without limit. Then, from That, all the glory of the

Finite rises again. It’s all the One Reality, no duality. And

You, yourself, are That.

The Indian sages call It Brahman, that which grows. The Platonists called It

Ousia (Being) or To Hen (the One) or Agathon (The Good). Thomas Aquinas called It Esse, the infinitive of the verb To Be. These are all good, especially The Good (‘God’ is a contraction of that), but I like Essebest of all because it indicates the dynamic aspect in its infinitude. Infinite Dynamic! Well, I mean ‘dy-namic’ not just in its root meaning of potentiality, but in its current connotation of motion, energy; and together they make “creativity.” Shiva dances!

Richard Simonelli says a very wonderful and im-portant thing in a recent piece in Raven’s Bread. He had gotten comfortable with “God in me” and “I am in God.” (Even that took considerable working up to).

By Beatrice Bruteau

THE INFINITE ZERO

Reading a book about zero recently, I was struck by a passage remarking that math-ematician Gottfried Leibniz thought that the imaginary unit (the square root of

minus one) was “a bizarre mix between existence and nonexistence, something like a cross between 1 (God) and 0 (Void).”¹

Cross? Or maybe crossing of? Or cross composed of the Infinite and the Finite? When you superimpose on that cross the figure

of a human being, you see that the icon says: “Hu-man Being, You are That!” What looks like two realities, separated as far from one another as possible, is really an im-age of oneness. Because what a cross is, is an intersection. And, Human Being, You are the Incarnation of the intersec-tion of the Finite and the Infinite, the point that is common to both lines.

As our topic for this issue of Radical Grace is “Non-Dualism,” I shall meditate a bit on the intersection of crossed lines and our unwill-ingness to acknowledge the wholeness of our reality.

The temptation for us is to identify with one aspect of the Non-Dual Real-ity and disregard the other. We like to say “Thou art the Potter, we are the clay.” We project the aspect that we are not used to experiencing as our own reality. We make it into an Other and, standing afar off, we look toward It. Sometimes we even imagine It regarding us.

The usual dualisms are of God and World, or the Absolute and the Relative, or the Infinite and the Finite. But, obviously, the Absolute can’t have a “re-lation” to the Relative, and the Infinite can’t not-be the Finite.

The effort of the spiritual life, therefore, is to dis-abuse ourselves of these misperceptions and miscon-

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dust, and our God-Reality is One, and we are That.1. Charles Seife, ZERO: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Viking, 2000), p.135.

2. Richard Simonelli, “A Great Gift,” Raven’s Bread Vol: 12 No: 1, Feb. 2008, p.1. (Obtain from Raven’s Bread, 18065 Hwy 209, Hot Springs, NC 28743).

Dr. Beatrice Bruteau is a pioneer in the integrated study of science, mathemat-ics, philosophy and religion. She has a background in Vedanta Hinduism and Catholic Christianity, as well as the natural sciences. Dr. Bruteau has pub-lished twelve books and more than one hundred articles. Her essays have ap-peared in journals such as International Philosophical Quarterly, Cross Currents, and Cistercian Studies.

But then came the withdrawal of the boundaries. The “knower” was “no longer present as a separate entity. It is then that the two ins begin to fade. Fi-nally, they are gone.”²

No me, no God as Somebody Else. Just Be-ing, just Esse. As the Ox Herding pictures show, No Ox, No Man, an empty circle. The Great Zero, Infinite.

Nevertheless, after this realization comes the re-turn to the village, the resurrection in a glorified finitude, with “bliss-bestowing hands.”

Now we must listen, Israel, and remember, Human Being, that we are not dust, and our destiny is not

THE HUMAN FACE . . .Continued from page 9

indicates that humanizing humanity is one of God’s central concerns.

What Ezekiel saw was the human face of God.God as humanity needs to know God in order to become what God calls us to be. We become what our desire beholds. So the mystic is the one who chooses to seek the God who freely offers us the gift of our own humanity, not as something to be attained, but as a pure revelation. God is, as it were, a mirror in which we find reflected our own “heav-enly,” that is, our potential, face.1. Those wishing to pursue this theme may turn to my larger study, The Hu-man Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man, (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2001). 2. Author’s translation.

This essay is excerpted and edited from “The Son of Man: The Stone that Builders Rejected” by Walter Wink in The Once and Future Jesus, by Robert W. Funk, copyright © 2000 by Polebridge Press, pp.165 -169. Used with permission of Polebridge Press.

Walter Wink was, before retirement, a Professor of Biblical Literature at Au-burn Theological Seminary in New York City for nearly 30 years. Author of over a dozen books, he is best known for his trilogy on the “principalities and powers” that can grip human society and his interpretation of Jesus’ teach-ings on non-violence. His latest book is The Human Being: Jesus and the Enigma of the Son of the Man (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2001).

divine. I hear it saying rather that Jesus became like us—people living within the constraints of earthly reality—in order that we might become like him—fully human. But that way of speaking is still too mythologically literal for me. I would prefer to say, Jesus incarnated God in his own person in order in order to show all of us how to incarnate to God. And to incarnate to God is what it means to be fully human.

But we risk losing the numinous reality under a barrage of words. Ezekiel was not struck by an in-teresting new idea. He was, rather, struck to the ground. The vision overwhelms him, like a blow to the solar plexus.

When the One-as-it-were-in-human-form now addresses Ezekiel, it does so as a parent to a child: “Ben adam [“child of the Human One”], stand up on your feet and I will speak with you.” As a “chip off the old Block,” this offspring of the HUMAN will henceforth not be addressed by his given name, but only as the child of the Enthroned One. In the moment that one faces the Glory of God, the Off-spring of the Human is born. To see God as Human is to begin to become what one sees, for our image of God creates us. What is born is a person able to face and to carry this numinous power. The Hu-man Being is thus related somehow to the divine image or imago dei as an aspect of the Self arche-type. It bears within us all that has been potential from the beginning, but that has not yet come to conscious awareness and accessibility. By addressing the prophet as “offspring of the Human One,” God

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By Sarah Fusté

SEEING AND BEING SEEN

This collage is like a dream for me, a quilt of symbols and colors that arose from my subconscious, holding meanings that reveal themselves slowly. It came together during a day of silence at the end of the 9-day internship here at the CAC, after several days in Juárez, Mexico.

THE BLACK AND WHITE ADDAM’S FAMILY: This symbol represents the parts of my life that look on passively, that don’t see, the parts that are happy in their black and white, controlled reality. This part of me wanted to go home when I saw a mouse darting along the wall in my bedroom, when I felt a January-cold draft blowing in through a wide crack along the frame of the kitchen window. It didn’t want to believe that Elodia was leaving her home at 9:00 pm to sell homemade burritos for $1 apiece after a long day of caring for her kids and grandkids, nor did it want to see the soccer-playing German Shepherd snacking on a dirty diaper in the courtyard of her cement-block house.

THE GERBERA DAISIES POKING COLOR INTO A GREY EXISTENCE: These were the moments when love and life appeared, undaunted by my desire to push the discomfort away. An old woman with dark bangs tied back in a barrette, letting go of her four-footed cane, swaying and clapping while singing, El amor de Dios es maravilloso, el amor. . . .The grinning little second-grader in a navy blue sweat suit with her tiny silver front teeth grabbing my hand and pulling me into my spot for kickball. Sunlight catching the green and brown shards of glass pressed into the top edges of the courtyard walls and causing them to shimmer with light.

THE EYES HALF IN THE LIGHT AND HALF IN THE SHADOWS: This picture speaks to me of giving and receiving. I saw and gave effortlessly, introducing myself to a child, pulling threads with the women to create a tablecloth fringe, jumping in and playing musical chairs with gusto. But being seen and receiving came with much more difficulty. “Thank you so much for coming,” the oldest woman began, her tiny face deeply creased with wrinkles. Why do I want to reject her gratitude? Thank you for eating our food, filling our little homes with your bodies, using our only plumbed toilet? One by one they touched us, hugged us. The chubby-faced woman with dark skin and gold teeth grabbed a hold of my arms and wished me children within a year. Over thirty women filed by and blessed us. I felt my face moisten. This is what was always true. We have always been unworthy, yet we have always been deeply loved.

THE MYSTERY OF CONSCIOUSNESS: We saw the fence in El Paso, between Mexico and the United States, a short, white barrier with motion detectors and SUV border patrols stretching out into the desert. Beyond the stark social justice issues that we grappled with on this journey, what a symbol this is for my inner reality. I try to split into being good, or being a failure, and I see that neither and both are true. The fence is really just sticks in the sand. I am both light and darkness, color and black and white; I want to be seen and I want to hide; I am absolutely determined to remember this but I also want to forget. Yet when the consciousness breaks in, the bigger sense of all of me being loved simply and wonderfully by a Great Lover, it is a grace, a shimmering moment.

NO SIMPLE SOLUTIONS: Perhaps the greatest wisdom that came to me during and since the experience of this 9-day internship was that I can say I don’t fully know—I don’t know how this will change my life; I don’t know how to put words to the experience; I don’t know all the reasons for my going to Juárez; I don’t know why I cried so much. Yet I can also say that I know a little—I know that this is changing my life, the way I choose to shop, the mindfulness with which I eat, the way I pray; I know that pieces of this experience cracked through my mind and are slowly kneading my soul; I know that Juárez brought to life a thousand distant stories and left me somewhat raw and awake; I know that my sobs one night came partly from my deep sense of con-nectedness to these women living so courageously and so acceptingly, and partly from the gnawing question: “Are my hands clean?”

This collage seems to be an honest picture of my inner life—an invitation to see who I really am, and then to allow myself to be seen by the loving God who is transforming me. Sarah Fusté is a work intern at the Center for Action and Contemplation.

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By Fr. Michael Demkovich, OP

OUR DISPOSITION IN LIFE

G iven the relationship that exists between the ground of the soul and its divine source, we are transformed in such a way as to transform our world. This means that there needs to be a moral or ethical dimension to life. Meister Eckhart’s spirituality maintains a bal-ance between the inner ground and, at the same time, how we relate to the world in

which we live, without becoming lost in that world. This balance conveys a unity or non-duality in Eckhart’s spirituality, his sense of life. He presents this in the themes of “unattachedness” and “ownerlessness” in developing one’s disposition in life.

UNATTACHEDNESSThe term gelâzenheit with its root form lâzen, as well as the similar term

abegescheidenheit, describes a central attitude, or moral disposition, in Eck-hart’s mysticism. Eckhart’s intention in using gelâzenheit and abegesche-idenheit is confounded by such will-filled terms as surrender, disinterest, self-abandonment, renunciation, and detachment. It is instead best to understand these two terms in light of their fundamental openness to the divine will, comprehended in the highest part of the soul. Reiner Schür-man captures the truest sense of these terms when he states: “It [gelâzen-heit] designates the attitude of a human who no longer regards objects and events according to their usefulness, but who accepts them in their autonomy.”1

OWNERLESSNESS For Eckhart, any selfishness or any posses-

siveness is an obstacle to a pure spirit (ledic gemüete). At the same time there is a positive

dimension which recognizes the particularity, or uniqueness of every person, even the persons of the Godhead.

What is a particular characteristic of Godly nature in us is action with-out possessiveness. What is seen as peculiar to Godly nature in God and in the individual human person is this “living without a why,” that is, without possessiveness, yet secure in one’s true possession, God.

Our true disposition in this life brings us to a simple unity of two, human and divine, that remains distinct yet one. Being unattached and ownerless allows us to be and not to be, to find our true self not outside of God but in God.

1. Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, Reiner Schürman, trans. and comm. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p.16.

A version of this is found in Introducing Meister Eckart by Michael Demkovich, OP, (Novalis; Saint Paul University, Ottowa, copyright © 2005) by Michael Demkovich and U.S. edition by Liguori Publications; Liguori, MO, copyright © 2006 by Michael Demkovich, pp. 165 – 166.

Fr. Michael Demkovich, OP, is a member of the Dominican Order of the Province of St. Albert the Great. His works include The Quest for the Self in Work: Connections between Spirit and Career and Introducing Meister Eckhart. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

US edition, Liguori Publications-cey

Canadian edition, published by Novalis

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Separate yours elf fr om all twoness .Be one on one, one with one, one fr om one. Meist er Eckhart

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YHVHin their mind required putting down the religion of the Jewish people)—and the particular need to see Judaism as a religion that had been superceded and the Jews as stuck in illusion for not following Jesus.

As a Jew I watch with horror as the State of Israel engages in similar demonization of the Palestinian people in particular, and of Arabs and Muslims more generally. Israel is following (or sometimes lead-ing) the West in its inability to see the beauty and wisdom of Islam and the unjustifiable suffering of the Palestinian people living in exile or under the Occupation.

I’ve found that overcoming this tendency towards inner splitting, projection onto others of what one dislikes in oneself, and subsequent demonization is extremely difficult to heal. In the decades before I became a rabbi, when I worked primarily as a psy-chotherapist, it often took years of work with an individual client to make much progresss on this dynamic. Trying to heal it as a mass phenomenon is even more complex and takes even longer.

I started by imagining I could contribute to this healing by working for a renewal of what was best in Judaism. The Jewish Renewal movement I helped build sought to return to the original spiritual alive-ness of Judaism in order to overcome the spiritu-ally deadly, boring, materialistic and chauvinistic versions of Judaism that had emerged in the post-Holocaust era and had succeeded in driving away from the Jewish world our most spiritually sensitive young people. Following the wisdom and insights of my teacher and mentor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and my guide in renewing Judaism, Hasidic master and rabbi Zal-man Schachter Shalomi, I helped build a Jewish re-newal community in San Francisco and Berkeley that would reclaim the spiritual life blood that had made it possible for Jews to survive 1700 years of Christian abuse and stay loyal to their own tradition when it would have been far safer to convert to the Christianity that ran the world around us. In my synagogue I taught not only about the wisdom of

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

NON-DUALISM AS A PRACTICE FOR SPIRITUAL PROGRESSIVES

The terrible misappropriation of religious and spiritual traditions in the contempo-rary world to support violence and hurt-fulness towards others is not without its

foundations in our own traditions. The splitting in our consciousness between the good parts of our-selves that we can accept and the evil or hurtful or distorted parts of ourselves that we tend to deny and repress into unconsciousness, the projection of our dark side onto some “evil other,” has shaped the so-called “war on terrorism,” so that our own collective national violence, both institutional and military, is ignored, while the violence of others is defined as their central and defining characteristic.

This dynamic has distorted every form of nation-alism, and every form of religion, though it is char-acteristic of secular enterprises as well. Anyone who has spent time in academia, or professional orga-nizations, or mainstream American politics watches these same projections onto those who hold dif-ferent theories or approaches. Demonization of the other is often the prerequisite for one’s own psychic survival (and indeed, one’s employment). The war in Iraq, its possible extension to Iran, and the huge efforts in the West to demonize all Muslims is a tes-timony to how well secularists can repeat and even intensify the distortions of religious communities. The huge attack on religion today from the likes of atheists Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and others is merely the secular version of this same dynamic, which has long played a role in the lives of religious traditions—in this case demonizing the religious.

Jews watched with dismay when the current Pope revived permission to use the version of the Good Friday Mass which specifically calls for the conver-sion of the Jews. “Why the Jews,” we ask, “and not the Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, atheists, etc. etc. etc?” But of course we know the answer—the long history of Catholic demonization of the Jews, the attempt by the earliest Christians to downplay Jesus’ Jewishness and to form a separate religion (which

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17Judaism, but also the wisdom of Jesus, insisting that his teachings often extended and deepened some of the elements of our own tradition, and I sought to draw also from the wisdom of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, women’s spirituality, and Native peoples around the world.

We in the Jewish Renewal movement recognized that part of the task was to challenge and in plac-es change the traditional Jewish liturgy. The places where it read that God chose us from all other na-tions were rewritten to say that God chose us WITH all other nations. In my book Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation I show that the need of Jews to assert “chosenness” was a response to the demonization experienced in the larger world, and was actually survival-functional when Jews were relatively powerless. Today, however, this chosenness functions in a distorting way when Jews are exercis-ing power over others as in the State of Israel.

Ironically, the very prayer (“Aleynu”) which starts with this kind of chauvinism then goes on to the deepest truth when it asserts: “and you shall know this day, and think about it in your heart, that the transformative power of the universe (YHVH)¹ is also the shaping power of the universe (Elohim); in the heavens above, and on the earth beneath, there is nothing else.” Nothing else? The Kabbalists and other mystics picked up on this fundamental non-dualistic vision. As one Kabbalist put it, “God forbid you should say of the rock that it is only rock, when we know that there is nothing that is not God.”

Jewish mystics could quickly affirm God as ev-erywhere, and find Biblical validation: “Holy, holy, holy, the transformative power in its multiple mani-festations, the whole earth is filled with God” (Isa-iah 6:3). Jewish Renewal quickly grew as it became clear that non-Jews were as welcome as Jews in our community, that there was none of that negativity toward the other that one found in traditional and suburban synagogues.

Imagine my surprise and dismay, then, when I found that many rabbis and activists of this, our own Jewish Renewal movement, were unwilling to stand

up against the oppression of Palestinians and have our movement take unequivocal stands in favor of Palestinian rights. They would not even do so to identify with Tikkun magazine, which had been doing that by creating what we called “a progres-sive middle path” which recognized that both sides have a legitimate narrative, and both sides need to do public repentance and atonement for having in-flicted pain and cruelty on the other. While the end of overt anti-Semitism by Christians in the post-Holocaust world had made it easier for Jews to wel-come Christians into their families and into Jewish Renewal synagogues, the ongoing struggle in the Middle East provided a new location for this deep tendency in human beings to split the good and evil in themselves and project the evil part onto others. We could no longer see our own culpability as Jews, but only the horror of Palestinian violence. As Jews celebrate the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel this May, 2008, few will give focus to the other side of that event, the Nakba or Tragedy that was caused by Israeli expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestin-ians from their homes, and the refusal of the Israeli state to allow back into their homes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had fled to avoid the growing violence. The resulting 60 years of suffer-ing by the Palestinian people will be absent from the consciousness of most of the Jewish community. Sadly, this is true of the bulk of the Jewish Renewal world as well. The power of splitting, projection and demonization has not been sufficiently overcome

by a theology of oneness and non-dualism.This is one of the reasons why I’ve joined with

Benedictine Sister Joan Chittister and Professor of Divinity and African American Studies Cornel West to form the Network of Spiritual Progres-sives (NSP), an international organization of people who not only are committed to a non-dualistic vi-sion theologically, but who want to work together to transform our political and economic realities. Our central mission is to popularize the notion of a New Bottom Line, so that institutions, social prac-tices, legislation, corporations, economic page 21

“God forbid you should say of the rock that it is only rock, when we know

that there is nothing that is not God.”

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three and a half pounds of cells and their links to one another. Nothing of this person could be told from this now lifeless organ. I could not know if this was a happy or tragic life, a man or a woman, a simple or complex person. All I knew of this indi-vidual was the generous act he or she made in do-nating this brain to help me become a physician.

Forty years later I remain intrigued and, as a psy-chiatrist, with my colleague Dr. Sally Severino, we continue our study. Great technological advances made during the 1990s (the decade of the brain) provide us a greater understanding of how the

physical structures give rise to the mind and how it keeps the body functioning.

When we were first-year medical students look-ing down on top of the brain, we clearly saw two seemingly identical halves. Approximately equal in size, the two hemispheres work at all times to keep the body functioning, processing input from outside and inside the body. Then, we referred to them as the left and right hemispheres of one brain. Now we understand them as two brains, each with some similarities to the other, but each brain function-ing differently. We are, in our most basic anatomy, dualistic.

The left brain controls movement on the right side of the body and takes in information from the right side of the world. The left brain contains the centers for language and mathematics. Since most of us are right handed and because scientists value language and mathematics, we dubbed the left brain the dominant one.

However, as we go about the business of living, the right brain is often dominant. Strange as it may seem, the right brain literally cannot speak for itself because it does not have language. Working faster

By Nancy K. Morrison, MD with Sally K. Severino, MD

BRAIN HARMONY:TOWARD NON-DUALISTIC THINKING

In September 1968 I (Nancy) began medi-cal school. Like most medical students, gross anatomy loomed as the most daunting class, a rite of passage to becoming a physician.

However, neuroanatomy turned out to be even more challenging. The human brain is so complex that medical schools set up a separate neuroanatomy course with faculty who specialize only in the brain.

That first day of neuroanatomy class, six of us sat at a rectangular table and in the middle of that table in a basin lay a human brain, wrinkled, pink and

covered with a thin transparent covering. Because I was the only woman, the guys delighted in taunt-ing me to be the first to pick it up. And perhaps to prove myself, I did.

Being at the far end of the table, I had to stand to pick it up. Its weight stunned me. Imagine picking up a volleyball that weighs three and a half pounds. The numerous folds of the brain are nature’s way of packing millions of cells with their billions of connections into a highly dense organ that will fit inside your skull. During that first class we learned the areas of the brain we could see by looking from the outside of it. We devoted only one day to the “gross anatomy” of the brain. We spent the next five months learning the complex connections inside.

After class, I returned alone to our table. I picked up the brain again, this time not to study the struc-tures but to contemplate the wonder. Here in my hands rested the organ of another human being’s consciousness. During this person’s life, every emo-tion, painful and happy, every thought, simple and complex, every memory, essential and mundane, ev-ery movement, graceful and clumsy, emerged from here. All of human life is orchestrated from these

Contemplative prayer provides the opportunity for our two brains to communicate and harmonize.

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“snake” and the next second to carefully locate the snake. Then a few more seconds to think clearly: do I run, kill it, or stay frozen until it moves away?

After this kind of adventure we work to reestab-lish calm. We take a great story back to the family and the community. We tell it over and over. Other snake stories are told. Gourds making rattling sounds become a part of our rituals. The snake and our life with snakes become both practical and symbolic.

The formation of the symbol lets us know that the right brain has been heard and that the two brains have been harmonized.

In earlier times this is how we brought our right and left brains together. These processes took us out of a state of fear, a state driv-en physiologically by cortisol and adrenalin. The story-telling and sharing through rituals created a state of connection, calm and peace between our two brains and among people. This state is dominated physiologically by oxytocin which is the hormone that mediates peace and love.

When we don’t bring our two brains into harmony, we live in

the thoughts, emotions, and physiology of fear, and the two brains must find a compromise way to un-derstand the world, our self, and the people with whom we live. Dualistic thinking is this compro-mise. We must think quickly and simplistically. The emotional right brain stays too alert. The language of the left brain seeks labels: good or bad, us or them, safe or dangerous. In this state of fear the labels take on harsh and literal realities: all or noth-ing, do or die, right or wrong. In fear we allow no gray, no complexity. We lay down memories based in fear. We form judgments. We know a fear-based truth.

When Jesus tells us that the truth will set us free, he did not mean this fear-based “truth.” The truth that sets us free is the truth we discover when we live in states of love, calm and peace. Jesus reflects this when he tells us the greatest commandment is to love God, self and others. To truly love, we must slow ourselves down and give our right and left brains time to communicate fully with one another. In states of calm and

than the left, the right brain deals in emotions and images, giving rise to our intuition. The right brain alerts us to danger and change. In a moment of fear the right brain will trump the leisurely thought and equations of the left brain every time.

And our right brain is largely devoted to under-standing and reacting to human relationships. It res-onates with and reads all the nonverbal communica-tions from people around us. Our relationships are put into feelings before being put into words. We know the feel of another person before we know their name.

When you gently pull the two hemispheres apart, you see the small band of nerves connecting them, the corpus callosum, which literally means “hard body.” The band is also called the commis-sural magna, “the great join-ing together.” While this small band is the largest single bundle of nerves in the entire body, it is all that allows the two brains to communicate and potentially to bring themselves into harmony.

Now knowing so much more of how differently these two brains operate, we wonder how the lightning-fast right brain, with no language as we know it, can talk to the slow, lumbering, conscious-thinking left. Some of our conscious thoughts are irrational be-cause the two brains don’t have time to communi-cate. Much of our brain-work is never conscious. How our two brains coordinate and harmonize into our complex and wonderful ways of knowing is a great mystery.

In our modern, fast paced world, we esteem short-cuts of thought and unconsciously settle for simplis-tic compromises. In multitasking, no task receives in-depth attention. Our two brains must come to a compromise about information coming from both in too short a time. This process is called stress. And stress, in a small or a large degree, is really fear.

When we lived as roaming nomads, probably only a few thousand years ago (or with native peoples only decades ago) fear played a life-saving function. The sound of a rattle shot fear into the right brain which informed the body to stop still. The thinking left brain took that fraction of a second to register page 20

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nity for our two brains to communicate and harmo-nize. In our contemplation we recognize the fear that we have learned to ignore. We can move into an emotional and physiological state of love and see complexity, beauty and interconnectedness.

And we must also pray in community. The way,

which is Jesus, unfolds when two or more of us gather together. When we gather we do the ancient rituals that harmonize our two brains. We sing. We tell stories. We sit in silence together. And when it is safe, we look into one another’s eyes with love and share the sign of peace. In a state of harmony and love we see the wisdom of St. Paul: “…there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one…”

In love, we are in harmony within and we are in harmony among ourselves.

Nancy K. Morrison, MD, is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Sally K. Severino, MD, is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque. For more information about thier work visit www.neurospirit.net. On June 26, 2008, they will present with Fr. Richard Rohr at a pre-conference workshop entitled “Sacred Desire: Finding God and Good Within” at the Hotel Albuquerque. To register, visit www.cacradicalgrace.org.

harmony in our right and left brains, our dualis-tic thinking gives way to a deeper way of knowing. Our knowing becomes love-based. This way shows us unity and not divisions. We see our deep inter-connectedness. We know one another as children of God in a precious world of beauty and potential

peace.In the state of love and the pace of patience, a full

truth can be known and told. There is truth in our fear-based moments, but only a simple truth of the moment. A truth developed in love and internal harmony is a redeemed truth that restores the full-ness of our human soul.

We also carry within us states of earlier unre-deemed fears. Our modern fast-paced life often keeps us in fear and hence in a dualistic view of the world. We are moving at life threatening speeds. By this we mean that we threaten our ability to know a full life, full truth, because we can’t bring our selves into harmony and peace.

To restore our inner harmony, we can follow the gospels that tell us that Jesus took time away for prayer. Contemplative prayer provides the opportu-

BRAIN HARMONY . . .Continued from page 19

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In a state of harmony and love we see the wisdom of St. Paul: “…there are no more distinctions

between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are one…”

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politics and personal behavior are all judged to be efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power (the Old Bottom Line), but also to the extent that they maximize love and kindness, generosity and caring for others, and ecological and ethical sensitivity; en-hance our capacity to respond to others as embodi-ments of the sacred; and enhance our capacities to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radi-cal amazement at the grandeur of creation. To make that practical, we’ve developed a Spiritual Covenant with America that lays out the kind of changes that would be needed if we were to take this New Bot-tom Line seriously.

Starting from the non-dual assumption about re-ality, we in the NSP insist that our well-being as Americans depends on the equal well-being of everyone else on the planet. We are one, not just theoretically but practically. Consequently, we are urging a fundamental rethinking of foreign policy to replace the notion that our “homeland security” can be achieved through domination, whether that be military domination, as in the current think-ing of the Bush Administration and the Lieberman wing of the Democratic Party, or through the softer domination that many liberal Democrats advocate when they talk about using diplomacy and eco-nomic power, but still share the same aim of having the U.S. get its way and have dominance over others in the world. The NSP is calling for a new para-digm that sees our security as best achieved through a strategy of generosity, in which we care for every-

one else on the planet, and do so not only because it’s in our interests, but because they are us, in the same way that my hand or arm is part of me.

To make that practical, we are advocating for a Global Marshall Plan, to be accompanied by fun-damental changes in our trade arrangements with the world, and delivered in a spirit of humility in which we abandon all thoughts that somehow the advanced industrial countries, because we have more money than the countries we’ve prohibited from developing, are somehow on a higher mor-al plane. On the contrary, a change in our foreign policy must start with a public atonement for what we in the West have done to the rest of the world, and an acknowledgment that at least some of the countries which are “underdeveloped” from a ma-terial standpoint are far more developed morally or spiritually than we are.

I used to denounce interfaith efforts as attempts to get at the lowest common denominator, and hence spiritually and politically boring. But in the NSP I’ve come to see how important it can be for Jews, Christians, Muslims and others to work together in practical ways, to take our non-dual consciousness and manifest it concretely in the world. I hope you, dear reader, will consider joining the NSP and help-ing us build this venture.1. YHVH stands for the Hebrew letters YOD HAY VAV HAY. While Christians say Yahweh and may write YHWH, there are no Ws in Hebrew.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine, chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and author of 11 books, most recently: The Left Hand of God. He invites you to read the Spiritual Covenant and the Q&A about the Global Marshall Plan at www.spiritualprogressives.org and then to write to him personally at [email protected].

CAC Interns Winter 2008: Back Row (l to r) Brenda Griffi n (California), Rob Fusté (Michigan), Ken Reno (Albuquerque), Mark Harvey (Missouri) Front Row (l to r) Jeffrey Hall (California), Sarah Fusté (Michigan), Vanessa Guerin (Winter Internship Facilitator).

Through the practice of contemplative prayer

and act ive engagement with challenging issues and

marginalized people, you can strive to become contemplative

in your actions.

Through the practicef t l ti

CAC 9-DAY INTERNSHIP

ichigan) Ken Reno (Alb q erq e) Mark Har e (Misso ri)

2008 DatesSpring ‘08 Apr 25 - May 4

Summer ‘08 Jun 13-22 (FULL)

Fall ‘08 Sep 17-26

Internships are $750.00Application process is required.

Internships are limited to 10 participants. Download an application form on the CAC website

w w w . c a c r a d i c a l g r a c e . o r g

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system you’re using. The binary mind always perceives from a sense of scarcity and keeps track of the score through comparison and contrast. If the situation looks unfair to you, this is an infallible litmus test that you are still in your binary mind.

The only way you can “crack” this parable is to shift your perspective so that you see the glass as half full rather than half emp-ty. When you approach the story from the perspective of fullness, you see that there’s enough for everybody, that the good of ev-eryone has been tended, and that all along it had never been a question of competi-tion, but an invitation to participation and exchange. But that kind of seeing is only ac-cessible within that other operating system, the non-dual knowingness of the heart. This parable does indeed offer fair warning that what Jesus is up to is hugely more subversive than “Jesus is nice and he wants us to be nice too.” Like any good Zen Master, he is out to completely short-circuit our mental wiring so that we are catapulted into a whole new way of seeing and being.

1. For an excellent overview of current neuroscience and its implica-tions for spiritual transformation, I am much indebted to my brother John K. Simmons, Chairman of the Department of Religion at Western Illinois University, for sharing with me his paper “Neu-rotheology and Spiritual Transformation: Clues in the Work of Joel Goldsmith.” The binary operator was first identified by neurologists Andrew Newberg and Eugene D’Aquili as one of the two impor-tant cognitive operators within the brain. Its role is “to organize complex incoming stimuli into basic polar opposites.” Their research entered the general public conversation as the cover story in the May 2001 issue of Newsweek magazine, called “God and the Brain: How We’re Wired for Spirituality.”

2. This is Thomas Keating’s preferred interpretation in his many teachings on Centering Prayer and the spiritual journey.

3. For this insight, I am indebted to Marcus Borg, who first offered it in conversation during a retreat we shared in Portland, Oregon, in January 2002. He develops it further in his book The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003), p. 180.

“Seeing with the Eye of the Heart” is excerpted and edited from Chapter 3, “The Kingdom of Heaven is Within You,” in The Wisdom Jesus by Cynthia Bourgeault (forthcoming from New Seeds, an imprint of Shambhala Publications, August 2008, copy-right © by Cynthia Bourgeault).

The Rev. Dr. Cynthia Bourgeault is a retreat and conference leader, teacher of prayer, writer on the spiritual life, and Episcopal priest. Some of her books include Mystical Hope, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening.

SEEING WITH . . .Continued from page 7

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APR 3-5HAWAII ECUMENICAL CONFERENCEHonolulu, HIContact [email protected] www.himonline.org

APR 12CAC OPEN HOUSEAlbuquerque, NM www.cacradicalgrace.org

APR 18THE EMERGING CHURCHHouston, TX Life Revealing Communitywww.lrchouston.com

APR 19THINGS HIDDEN BOOK TOUR STOPHouston, TXLife Revealing Communitywww.lrchouston.com

APR 21HOW DO WE BREATHE UNDER WATER? The Gospel and 12-Step SpiritualityAbilene, TX • McMurry UniversitySponsored by Abilene Association of Congregationswww.cacradicalgrace.org

MAY 30-JUN 1THE ENNEAGRAM AND PARADOXAssisi, Italy www.cacradicalgrace.org

JUN 2-8SLOVAKIA MALES FINLAND (20th anniversary of the Thomas Mass)

JUN 27-29THE INNER ROOMAlbuquerque, NMTogether with Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSOwww.cacradicalgrace.org

Page 23: RadGra_2008_Q2

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The Four Noble Truths are the distilled essence of Buddhist teaching. In these talks, each is of Buddhist teaching. In these talks, each is introduced and explored, with emphasis given introduced and explored, with emphasis given to the presence of these truths at the heart to the presence of these truths at the heart of Jesus’ call to awaken to God’s presence in of Jesus’ call to awaken to God’s presence in every detail of our lives.every detail of our lives.

CONFERENCE ATTENDEE REFLECTIONS:CONFERENCE ATTENDEE REFLECTIONS:

“Both challenging and enlightening.”

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INCLUDED IN THIS SET: “Receive and Refl ect: Practicing Awareness,” which contains a teaching by Fr. Richard on contemplation,

including practical contemplative exercises.

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PERIODICAL NEWScenter for action and contemplationPO Box 12464, Albuquerque, NM 87195 • (505) 242-9588w w w . c a c r a d i c a l g r a c e . o r g

deepen your contemplative practice

Immerse yourself in the daily practice of prayer and meditation under the guidance of Fr. Richard Rohr and Fr. Thomas Keating. This conference was created to demonstrate to those in 12-Step spirituality ways to embrace the invitation of the 11th step to improve our conscious contact with God, and will offer a wonderful opportunity for all of us to deepen our contemplative practices and to form communities to support these practices.

Fr. Thomas Keating

Fr. Richard Rohr

June 27 - 29, 2008Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town

Info and registration at www.cacradicalgrace.org

Info and registration at www.cacradicalgrace.org

Sacred Desire urges us to connect with God and to manifest the image of God within us through loving others, ourselves, and God. Despite centuries of debate about the relation of body and spirit, science is now confirming what people of faith have long known and has opened the door to seeing human Desire as incarnate in our bodies.

Nancy K. Morrison, MD, Sally K. Severino, MD

& Richard Rohr, OFM

Thursday, June 26, 2008 • 9am - 3pm

The day before the conference join us for...