NOTE: Two quick links for you: I preached the other day and thought some of you might enjoy it. It’s a remix of an Easter sermon I gave years ago. And second, Elizabeth Jameson and I are teaching a new class starting April 23 on a book by Sufi master, Kabir Helminski. You can learn more about it and register here.

(Paid subscribers can find the audio version of this post at the end.)

Hi Everyone,

For this installment in the Spiritual Sommelier Series, I want to introduce you to Riyaz Motan. Riyaz is a spiritual guide and therapist I first heard on a BATGAP (Buddha at the Gas Pump) interview. Riyaz speaks with such beautiful authenticity, vulnerability and gentle wisdom.

Sadly, out of nowhere in 2023, Riyaz was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. Knowing he may not have much longer to live has added a profound dimension to his message. Unfortunately for us, Riyaz hasn’t written any books for me to point you to, but there are a number of interviews available on his website, including THIS beautiful talk he gave in January (it’s about 38 minutes).

At the time, he thought it might be the last public talk he would be able to give. I’m glad to say he is feeling well enough to speak again on Zoom this Saturday, April 12, where he’ll be interviewed by spiritual teachers: Adyashanti, Jonathan Gustin and John Prendergast. If interested, you can learn more and register for it HERE. The talk is free, with an option to donate to support his medical expenses.

At the start of Riyaz’s January talk, I noticed that twice he used the word ‘poignant’ to describe his experience of living with a terminal illness. ‘Poignant’ is an interesting Old French word that originally meant ‘sharp’ or ‘pointed’ and referred mostly to food, like sauces and spices, that would sting the palette.

These days, when we say something is poignant, we mean it stings not the palette, but the heart. We mean something has startled us from our tendency to sleepwalk through life by the power of its truth and meaning. And in a culture that encourages us to drift from distraction to complacent distraction, our hearts are hungry for meaning, even when it stings.

And probably no subject is more stingingly meaningful, more full of aching truth, more poignant, than our own impermanence. The only guarantee life offers us, as Riyaz says, is that someday we will die.

Understandably, this is a topic most of us prefer to avoid. It brings up powerful and painful emotions of sadness, fear, regret, and even anger. This life is such a precious thing. And the thought of it going away, of us going away, can feel almost unbearable.

Nor does it help that we don’t know what happens after we die. Do we go somewhere else? Do we someday come back? Do our individual spirits dissolve back into some larger Spirit? Or do we just…end? We don’t know. We may have ideas and intuitions about it. I know what my heart tells me. But in the end, we just don’t get to know.

What a strange situation we find ourselves in. What a mystery all of this is. And what courage it takes to be born into the world, told nothing about from where we’ve come, why we’re here, or what happens to us when we leave. Whose idea was this, anyway??

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In this second installment in the Spiritual Sommelier Series, I want to introduce you to an idea I love. It’s an image, actually, and a deceptively simple one that has, I think, the potential to shift how we see just about everything.

I came across it in Rabbi Lawrence Kuschner’s conversation with Krista Tippet at On Being. Rabbi Kuschner is an author, an expert in Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah), and the scholar-in-residence at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. The interview is close to an hour, and well worth the time if you have it. If you don’t, the image I want to share is in the first 12 minutes. Click HERE to listen. I’ll wait patiently till you’re back…

What’d you think? Pretty cool, eh? Moving the little circle (the dot we are) inside the big circle (the vastness God is) is so simple. And yet it changes everything.

I think the traditional view that we are outside of and other than God reflects a deeply ingrained fear that we’re ultimately alone and on our own…that we’re ‘down here’ (whatever that means) and God is ‘out there’ (wherever that is), and God could disappear on us at any moment, which is a little terrifying.

This fear helps to explain why so much of our theology ends up framing our relationship with God through a lens of reward and punishment. You can almost picture us, looking up at God with our puppy dog eyes, hoping our good behavior and right beliefs will translate into treats (good fortune, eternal life, parking spots). And at the same time, we’re afraid that when we make a mess on the rug (and boy can we make a mess) we’ll get a slap on the bottom…or worse.

But what if that’s not how all this works at all? What if our relationship with God is much more mysterious, much more beautiful, and much more…intimate.

I think that’s what I love about the image, the intimacy of it. The way it conveys, without a word, that being human is so entangled with the Divine that it would be impossible to tease the two apart. I love the way it suggests that the apparent separation is a kind of illusion of the mind; an understandable by-product of our limited time-and-space-bound existence. I love the way it hints that everything we see might be shot through with the light of God (even the not so shiny stuff).

The mind wants to separate…this from that, up from down, in from out, Divine from not-Divine. But in those mystical moments that Rabbi Kuschner talks about, we catch glimpses of a deeper truth…that all of this is also one single thing.

The Big Bang Theory suggests that everything began from a single point, smaller than an atom, that exploded into everything we see. And thus, we can fairly say that to be human is to be made of stardust. In many religious traditions, including strands of Christianity, there’s a similar idea - that God, existing before time and form, chose to manifest (explode?) into creation. If true, then we are not just made of stardust, but goddust too.

When Rabbi Kuschner said, “Now put the little circle inside the big circle,” something in me went: Yes, that’s right. Even if my mind doesn’t quite know what that means, something tells me it’s closer to true than our being outside of God, separate, alone.

These days, even the idea that we are in a relationship with God doesn’t feel quite right to me. It’s not close enough; not intimate enough. I now believe that at the deepest level, to be human is not to be with God, it is to be of God.

As the Apostle Paul said 2,000 years ago:

“For in (God) we live and move and have our being.”

And Meister Eckhardt said 800 years ago:

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

And as the Baal Shem Tov, 300 years ago, said it about as simply as you can:

“There is nothing but God.”

I know to the rational part of our brain these quotes don’t make much sense. When I’m in a linear, logical mood, they fall flat. They just sound like so many words. It’s only when we drop out of our thinking mind, into a heart-wide-open space, a nothing-but-the-present-moment space, a deeply-trusting-mystical space, that we can begin taste the truth of them.

Which is why I love this image. At a rational level, it seems childishly simple. And yet, the more we sit with it, feeling our way inside the circle, the more it can touch something in us beyond anything our minds could hope to grasp.

The World I Live In

by Mary Oliver

I have refused to live
locked in the orderly house of
     reasons and proofs.
The world I live in and believe in
is wider than that. And anyway,
     what’s wrong with Maybe?

You wouldn’t believe what once or
twice I have seen. I’ll just
     tell you this:
only if there are angels in your head will you
     ever, possibly, see one.

For years, as he pulled out of the driveway in the morning, our neighbor, Bill, would honk his horn two times. It was an inside thing he had with his wife, Jane.  His way of saying, ‘I love you, dear. I’ll see you later.’ Hearing it made me smile every time. 

I guess I figured Jane would probably outlive Bill, as so many wives do.  But then about ten years ago, she died.  Bill, now in his 80’s, still lives in the house by himself.  And every morning that he goes somewhere, for the past ten years, as he pulls out of the driveway, he honks his horn two times.

I’ve never asked him if he believes that what he’s doing is a way of keeping Jane’s memory alive or something more.  But he’s on my mind as we say goodbye to the five “missed perceptions” Elizabeth and I introduced in October. 

To remind you, we listed five things almost anyone would agree are true.  That to be human is to be:

Physical
Separate
Vulnerable
Mortal
And living in a world that can be cruel

Then we suggested there is another level of reality that is harder to ‘see’ but no less true.  A level in which we are also:

Spiritual (we have souls)
Interconnected (think aspen trees or the fingers on your hand)
Unharmable (at the soul level we are immune to injury)
Immortal (we live on in some way)
And living in a world where everything is held by Love (including even the cruelty)

Maybe to you, that second list sounds like nonsense.  Or maybe it seems so obviously  unprovable, and therefore irrelevant to daily life, it’s pointless to talk about it.  Or maybe you move between your heart feeling like it might be true, and your head telling you it just can’t be.  Wherever you are, I get it.  This stuff is strange. 

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Hi Everyone,

NOTE:  As we begin our Opening the Aperture series, this Tuesday (the 15^th) from 5:30-6:30 MT, Elizabeth and I will host a Zoom call focused on five ways we miss- perceive reality and the problems it causes.  You’ll find the Zoom link for it at the end of this post and on my Substack page in the section for paid subscribers (called the Cairn Circle).  I think it’s going to be an interesting hour and I hope you’ll join us.

The Second Gaze

Seeing a bigger picture

We look out at a world that seems obvious enough.  Right now, as I sit on my back porch, I see our little white terrier-mix racing through the yard.  I hear a squirrel voicing his unhappiness at this fact.  I feel the cool metal of the computer on my lap.  I smell hints of dinner cooking inside.

But this is a tiny fraction of what is really happening around me.  The flowers in our garden would be offended by how few of their true colors I perceive.  There are spiders close by that I can’t see (gladly), picking up vibrations I can’t feel.  There are birds overhead guided by a magnetic field I am completely oblivious to.  And those are just some of the things I’m aware that I’m unaware of.

To perceive.  From an old French word combining a prefix meaning ‘thoroughly’ with a root meaning ‘to take.’  But no creature on earth takes all of this in thoroughly.   Every being has unique perceptual talents.  And every being has their blind spots.  The difference between humans and other creatures is that we have the capacity to comprehend just how limited our perception is.  Though we seldom do.

It’s just too hard for us to imagine there could be more going on than we perceive.  It goes against every ego-centric bone in our body.   And this is true at the physical level, and at the spiritual. 

Today, I want to share one of the most helpful ideas I’ve come across in my own spiritual growth.  It’s called the ‘Second Gaze.’   Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation used it in a reflection years ago.  He described the second gaze this way:

“Even after fifty years of practicing contemplation, my immediate response to most situations includes attachment, defensiveness, judgment, control, and analysis. I am better at calculating than contemplating…The false self seems to have the “first gaze” at almost everything…It has taken me much of my life to begin to get to the second gaze… (but) it is well worth waiting for, because only the second gaze sees fully and truthfully. It sees itself, the other, and even God with God’s own eyes, the eyes of compassion…”

When I first read this, a light went on.  Until then, I thought my usual way of perceiving the world - that of discriminating, critiquing, comparing and judging (the first gaze) - gave me a truer, fuller picture of things.  And I thought that being a “good person” or a “good Christian” was about ignoring parts of this fuller picture and agreeing to view others in a more limited, rather naïve way…in the name of compassion.

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