|
|
The Sacred Heart in the Labyrinth
September 2005
It is no accident that the single new book I acquired in Los Angeles, the book I am supposed to read next, that I am reading now, displays on its cover the image of a Sacred Heart burning in the center of a Labyrinth.
 Rob Breszny, Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia
These two symbols, these two keys of Western mysticism, that have come up over and over again in my personal constellation, welcome be back to my spiritual home, after all my sojourns in the East, and in other realms. So, I’m stuck with it. I have to deal with it. Thus, the anatomy of a Symbol.
A good friend encourages me to write about the Sacred Heart, and my recent experience of embodying it, although I am not sure it’s a good idea to do so. I resist it; partly because I feel like I am giving away a secret that can be so easily misunderstood, and misused, that to mention it at all risks great misunderstanding. This falls into that dangerous, risky realm where people can think you’re becoming spiritually ambitious, and bragging, when all you really intend to do is reporting. Events happen to us, with us, for us: they’re not always about us, or have anything to do with us, at least not directly.
I also resist it because of the tawdry sentimentalism that surrounds the subject: it’s always a risk, and an evocation of fear—as Loren Eiseley said, we artists frighten the ordinary folk—to broach a subject that has deeper realities than just the sentimental, to move from surface shallowness to deep Symbolism. You risk being misunderstood, or even worse, dismissed as already-understood by those who refuse to look into the deep heart of the matter. The sentimental images and cheaply reproduced icons, like bad paintings of saints and tacky teaching-pictures of the actions of the embodied, incarnate Christ: these all confuse the issue, and can block us from going into the, if you will, heart of the matter. I resist adding to the shallow pond of cheap meanings, those doctrines and prayers that don’t really mean anything because they are recited as rote formulae, or worse, as superstitious near-magickal ritual, as SPELLS, instead of being spontaneous praise spoken directly from one’s experience and heart. Better a spontaneous praise—and poets are meant to praise, as Rilke said—than a tired old formula. Even the Catholic dedication and invocation prayers to the Sacred Heart have been so oft-repeated that they contain little merit anymore, and are just rote recitations for most. Religious practice is meant to be a liberation from the world, yet all too often it becomes tightly bound up with the world, by cementing itself into rote practice, dogma, doctrine, custom, and tradition. To become genuinely liberated, you must break free of the rules of institutions, and also break free of your own preconceptions, prejudices, and ideas.
The Sacred Heart is the open, compassionate, completely vulnerable, wounded heart. It is the heart of the completely open, loving and compassionate Cosmic Christ. I am not a Christian, and even though I was raised Lutheran, I have not attended a church service in decades. (Except for those Christmas midnight services my parents always want to attend as a family, when I’m home to visit for the holidays.) I do get a rich legacy of teaching, however, and guidance, from the Medieval Christian mystics, and one or two moderns. There is a legacy of spirituality and mysticism preserved in the Catholic Church, despite all its many other faults, that is worth tending to. When we have these experiences, it helps to have a frame of reference, to know what others have had the same experience before one, and to hear how they have dealt with their own versions of the experience; even if their frame of reference is religiously bound, or framed in a doctrine or custom one personally cannot accept.
That’s how I feel about all this. I reject Catholic doctrine as often filled with hate and division—especially with reference to sexuality, sexual orientation, and reproductive rights; all fronts on which the Vatican is rapidly alienating their American flock—while at the same time honoring and finding great personal guidance in the stories and writings of many of the deepest Christian mystics, from Meister Eckhart to Thomas Merton, Hildegard of Bingen and St. Teresa of Avila to Julian of Norwich and St. John of the Cross; and many, many others. I view many of these individuals as my personal teachers, along with servants of the Divine from many other paths and traditions, and in some cases, such as with Eckhart, as my direct, personal, spiritual directors. They have all had great meaning for me, and helped me survive my multiple experience of the dark night of the soul.
But the Sacred Heart is a universal, not just a Christian, symbol. It resonates with the experiences of many, across space and time. It’s the Rose we place in the hands that would bring on Armageddon, to disarm them; and a Rose for Ecclesiastes, saying, yes, we are small and insignificant, and yet we will go on, we must go on.
Close to home, there is the wisdom tradition within mystical Judaism, which is rooted in the Other being the same as oneself: I and Thou, as Martin Buber put it, are One. There’s a saying in the Jewish tradition that speaks directly to compassion in action: To save one life is to save the universe. All of Creation is One, and no action is too small. When you quietly and compassionately host angels unawares, in the form of the strangers at your door, those who come into your life, the travelers who ask only a meal and a place to sleep, those who need saving, you bring Light into the world.
Across the globe, there is the Buddhist way of framing this same experience, of the opened heart of compassion and healing. The Mahayana and Vajrayana paths of Buddhism, especially Tantric Buddhism in Tibet and Japan, symbolize it with Avalokiteshvara, the ambiguously-gendered Boddhisattva of Infinite Compassion. Also known as Kuan Yin, or Kannon, and often depicted as a feminine figure with a heart wounded by the suffering of the world, and healing and love running out of both hands.
The parallels to the Virgin Mary, in symbolism and even in some identical details of stance and gesture (mudra) and symbolic aspect, are direct and obvious: and both are images of the Goddess, in Her many-faced form of compassion, love, and Motherly aspect of nurturing and healing.
The Virgin Mary, with the Heart of Infinite Compassion, pierced by the world’s suffering, and the Bleeding Heart of the Wounded Christ, again with the same stance and gesture, if slightly less bloody symbolism, of Avalokiteshvara, indicate that this compassionate heart is a universal human experience, arising in all cultures and all eras. That this is so is reflectd in the infinite variations on each symbol, and that parallel symbols and stories turn up in other cultures around the globe.
There is also Parvati, Durga, Radha, the feminine aspect of the Divine, as depicted in many guises in Hindu beliefs: the many faces of Mercy, of whatever form and face She might take on. And Mercy is her name, in principle. There are so many other Names for this Face of God, that I stagger under the weight of attempting to compile a list. Mercy is always feminine, in the folklore, always the anima, the Female. Even in her darker and more wrathful aspects, as the dark Durga, or the Green Tara, or the Black Madonna, or even as Kali, her compassion and mercy remain in the foreground.
There is also the Tibetan Buddhist practice of bodhichitta, which is the Compassionate Heart in action. It is the “awakened heart,” which is soft and tender, rather than hardened and sheltered. As vulnerable and tender as an open wound, the awakened heart is equated both with our ability to love, and with compassion. It is also the broken heart, which, under the anxiety and panic that can be the compensation for the raw wound, is also the tenderness of genuine sadness. There’s also a folk story, which has the Goddess saying, “Your heart didn’t mend right the last time, so we had to break it again so we could set it right this time.” When I first became of the need to open the heart chakra, years ago, I felt as if my heart were encased with ice: the wendigo heart, the glacial heart, the heart wrapped in ancient ice; a heart that had been so sorely wounded that it dared not open itself to further pain, and so wrapped itself in ice to preserve itself. I was afraid of being hurt again, and again. Gradually, over time, with practice in softening the heart, I was able to melt the ice, and thaw my heart; then, it got broken open, and the rawness of it felt like the pain of a literal wound in my breast. My heart turned from blue to red, from ice to blood, from hardened to bleeding. Now, with this recent experience of the Sacred Heart, I see that the further opening of the heart chakra is set the blood ablaze, to turn the frozen heart to fire, to burn without being consumed. ALL beings have the capacity to feel bodhichitta tenderness, and there are methods of developing this compassionate heart, meditations outlined by the experience of centuries of practice. Moving through the world with bodichitta, with the tender heart, is also its own practice, its own state of being, that needs no rewards or justification.
Suffice it to say, therefore: The Compassionate Heart, the Wounded Heart, the Opened Heart of the World, the Cure for the World’s Pain (the true meaning of the symbol of the Grail), Mercy, Love—these are all Names of this experience. Each a valid aspect of it.
For myself, I have for weeks now, maybe even months, been more and more aware of the opened heart chakra in my own chest, and how it has continued to open. Sometimes the world’s pain stops me in my tracks, and I must take time to breathe. I practice tonglen, then: the Tibetan Buddhist practice of breathing in suffering, then breathing out relief, for oneself, for those one loves, and then for the whole world. I am also reminded, again and again, of that vision of the world I first experienced in 1984, as part of the World Heart Meditation in the Pranic Healing training session I undertook in March of that year. That was also the end—that very day, that very meditation—of over four years of constant, daily, personal dark night suffering that I had been experiencing since my first, crushing vision of the Void. That day, the second vision of the Void came to me, as a relief to suffering, as a reframing of what the Void is, and as a balm to the open heart of compassion. Although it doesn’t matter how long it was, I can tell you that there were exactly 4 years, 3 months, and 14 days between those two visions of the Void; and a long personal darkness lay between them.
When I am stopped in my tracks, when I breathe tonglen, sometimes I must weep: for no reason, it sometimes seems: the real reason being, of course, that one is grounding and processing and healing and clearing and releasing, through the circuits of one’s own being, a unit of negativity from the World’s Pain. And all of us who daily, continuously process whatever units of negativity we are able to, help the world from being drowned, or exploding, under a deluge of negativity. And there is more crisis, more negativity—and more hope, and more healing—in the world right now, then ever before. We are at a time of rapid change, rapid change, much turbulence and chaos; every piece of the world’s pain we can ground and clear, helps hold the world together. Paku Alam: in Javanese, the Nail of the World, that keeps this reality in place; keeps it together; that nails this reality into being, and holds it in place, for all those who need it to be held together. All of us hidden, unknown Lightworkers—most of whom you will never know about, although you meet them daily as you go through life; most of whom are quietly doing the work of holding compassion for the world’s pain, with their open-hearted beings, in ways that are invisible, and silent, and unheralded and uncelebrated; and we are all content for it to be that way. I feel like I am violating that very silence, simply by talking about this; it is a large part of why I hesitate to bring it forward. They work best when invisible. I know who many of these Lightworkers are, but I will not tell you; not that it’s a dark secret, but that in the end it’s completely irrelevant. It doesn’t matter. Every person, everyone you know and those you don’t, contain within themselves that Divine spark of Immanence and Transcendence that is our birthright. All of our faces are just masks for the Face of God that lies within us all. We can all breathe tonglen, and be just as effective at holding the world together through these difficult times; so, names don’t really matter. You, too, are a Face of God, and can breathe this compassion. I am nothing special; we are nothing special.
The spear in my brother’s heart is the spear in my heart: we are One. How could it be otherwise? There is a lot of negativity out there in the world right now, that needs to be counteracted, and salved, and balanced, and grounded, and released. I am thinking of the destruction of New Orleans by a hurricane, for one, and the political and social fallout from that event that will last for years. I am also thinking of the next time it happens, when a coastal city is flooded out by storm or tsunami or rising sea levels prompted by global warming; and it will happen again, one way or another. And the pointless wars in the Mideast, the gasoline price crisis in the USA, the hatred and mistrust of a government that seems to have failed its wards and citizens when they most needed it, and everything else going on in the world right now: all contributing to the negativity that must be grounded and healed, all components of the World’s Pain.
I already wrote about holding space, holding healing space, and breathing tonglen, and also sending Reiki, to that woman with heatstroke, that afternoon in the Park station at Joshua Tree. A day in the desert, come to it. I did it all invisibly, just holding space, and no one present knew it. And that is right and proper. I don’t feel the need to rehash those events, as I have already written about them.
But the experience I had that afternoon in the desert heat, and before and since, of consciously embodying the Sacred Heart, in my own person, soul, and heart chakra, continues to resonate. I feel my heart charka open and bleeding even now, as I write, more than a week later. Bleeding with the sweet blood that does not hurt, but heals. This is the mystic’s way, in this day and age, when mysticism has gone mainstream: that it be just an ordinary, daily experience. I have plenty of friends who are and will remain skeptical that these sorts of mystical experience can, or ever do, happen to people. Well, I don’t mind. I feel no need to convince, convert, or justify any of this. It happened: it will happen again: not just to me, but to many.
Well, what do you do with this? Nothing. Everything. Whatever comes up. It’s a state of being, not a set of tools. The difficulty comes in other places: when you find yourself and your friends being judgmental about a political or social situation, and you have to stop talking, because your compassion has expanded to the point of causing you pain, and because you don’t want to be judgmental of either the situation or of your friends; and you must withdraw. That kept happening to me all this past week, in several contexts, personal and professional, whenever the current state of the world became the topic of discussion. When you know you’re right to respond with compassion rather than judgment, and there’s nothing you can say or do about it, in the face of other hatreds and judgments. It becomes obvious how pain and suffering are what you get because it’s what you put out. We make the world turn around, with the suffering we add to it.
Sometimes the ultimately compassionate action you can do is to refrain, for just this moment, this day, from adding to the world’s suffering. If that’s all you were able to accomplish today, you did a great deal. Today I felt challenged to do even that much; and then the discipline becomes, just for today, I will not contribute to the world’s suffering. Nothing more than that: some days that’s all the strength you can muster, but it is enough. Just for today, I will not add to the world’s pain. Do you think that’s a small thing? It is rather a very large thing. It is the mustard seed rather than the mountain. It is the small act that heals the Universe.
The Sacred Heart knows this: that witnessing, that having an open vulnerable heart of healing, open to the suffering of others, taking in the pain and giving back love, that this is itself enough. Marching in the streets won’t change the world. Edward Keating said: “You do not destroy an idea by killing people; you replace it with a better one.” You can view it as a design problem: to improve the world, you have to make the old paradigm obsolete, by replacing it with an obviously different and better one. And love is that different design; the Sacred Heart is a clean, clear blueprint for making the world a finer place. If we were all able to embody it, as we were intended to do, then so much suffering would immediately be alleviated.
The Sacred Heart is timeless: it is always operating in the Now, the Now that enfolds everyone and all time, always. All action occurs at the same moment; we only separate time into narrative because it is a convenient way to frame it, and to talk about it. Linear time is, after all, illusory, a lie. The Sacred Heart, like all mystical experiences, takes you “outside” the experience of time, and into that timeless Eternal Now, the moment that is forever, simply because it enfolds all time into the same moment. You want to talk about time travel? Speak, rather, of the collapse of the dimension of time into an unmeasured and immeasurable duration, a duration of Nothing, that is both Abyss and Eternal Now, timeless anguish and timeless beauty. Rilke: Beauty is the beginning of terror.
No angel need clasp you to its breast, immolating you in its higher, more intense breath and heat. All you have to do is stop time, step aside: and the world’s feeling will flood into you, complete, all One, unbearable and breaking like a wave on the collapsing wave function of your consciousness, evanescent, still and silent and utterly embodied. And this is how you live with your heart chakra constantly open, vulnerable, reaching out to heal and be healed. You bleed love from your wounded heart, and from your hands. What are the stigmata but the symbols of the Sacred Heart, the wounds of love? The paradox of pain taken on for the sake of love: the real meaning of savior. Again, I run into that wall of sentimental, unquestioned doctrine, so I want to be clear: the Christ (which is an office, not a surname) wanted us to become like him, and embody what he gave us to learn, not worship him and not deify him into a symbol we could keep at a convenient distance, rather than have to actively engage with, and embody ourselves. Taking on the world’s pain via the Sacred Heart is indeed a personal crucifixion: a door opens in your soul, and you let in such pain and suffering, that you are crushed by it, killed by it, nailed to a fallen tree. And you endure. You endure, and continue to endure. The resurrection—that coming back to life again on the 14th day of the 3rd month of the 4th year—that will come, eventually—that resurrection is the almost-end of the Sacred Heart process. One day, you look around, and it doesn’t hurt as much anymore. Is there less suffering for you to transmute that day? Perhaps not. What matters is that your heart has grown, and deepened, and you are able to take on more of the world’s pain, and transmute it, without you yourself becoming quite so crushed. This does not mean your heart is now closed: it means your heart is stronger for having been wounded.
Every shaman knows this energetic dynamic: sucking the evil, the badness, the sickness, out of the patient, taking it onto oneself, then transmuting it, getting it out of yourself, cleansed and smoothed out, and given to the spirits, to the Mother Earth, so that both shaman and patient are no free of it: that is the pattern of healing. And that, too, is the operation of the Sacred Heart.
You can only do this by letting go. By not holding onto what comes into you. By learning a strong, non-passive, active non-attachment to suffering. Pain goes away when you let it. It runs through your fingers like blood luck and holy water, and leaves nothing behind. It’s only when you hold onto it, grasp it to your breast, nourish it, feed it, keep it alive, turn a wound into a woundology: it is only then that you create more pain for the world to take on, and more pain that must be eased. The Sacred Heart lets go: it lets the pain go, loving it all the way back to the Void from which it arose, as it dissolves. Tonglen.
The Light of the Heart: the Heartlight. The glow of the Sacred Heart. It’s a sublime vision of transcendent, immanent, utterly calm compassion. We can take all the symbols—even those tawdry, tacky, cheap ugly images that line the walls of thoughtless sanctuaries—and transform them into action. The Sacred Heart is the root of action. Even the cheapest of symbols can be redeemed, in the light and breadth and heat of the Sacred Heart.
I don’t want the cheap and sentimental symbols that just get in the way of the real experience, by framing it in a neat, easily swallowed package. The real experience is so shattering, it’s no wonder we retreat from it, and hide it behind the tacky drapes. But also, I don’t want to read any more books about spiritual development, about the New Age, about personal growth, about healing myself and bettering myself. None of that matters anymore. It’s time to stop talking about it, and putting it into practice, into action. I’ve read enough manuals on how to improve the world; now it’s time to but what you’ve learned into practice. This is the discipline of action, that follows on the Sacred Heart: it is a mistake to assume that receptivity equates with passivity. Not at all! Being receptive and open to the world’s suffering is to already have begun to actively transmute it into love. I have said it before: my activism no longer consists of marching in the streets; now, it consists of the art I make, the Things I Make, that ripple outwards and effect the world; and, no less than that, simply breathing tonglen can change the world. Tonglen IS activism. The Sacred Heart, simply by being embodied in you, is a force for positive action. You need do little more.
I will end where I began, last night, with books by Loren Eiseley at hand. I will end with the Star Thrower story (attributed to Eiseley even though he wrote about it in a rather different way, and this is not in his writing style) because in many ways it represents how you take action, when you have the opened Sacred Heart, and need to act in the world. It demonstrates that no action is too small, and underlines that compassion in action is always an available choice for us.
•
There was a man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work, or to take a break from his work.
One early morning, as he walked along the shore, he saw a human figure moving like a dancer, in the distance. He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, so he walked faster to catch up.
As the writer got closer, though, he saw that the figure was that of a young man, and that he was not dancing at all. The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.
He came closer still and called out, "Good morning! May I ask what it is you’re doing?"
The young man paused, looked up, and replied, "Throwing starfish into the ocean."
"Why? What good does that do?" asked the writer, somewhat taken aback.
To this, the young man replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out. If I don't throw them in, they'll die." There were hundreds of starfish at the edge of the water, some still moving, others still. The young man picked up a starfish that was moving slowly, and threw it far out over the waves.
The old writer said, "But, young man, don’t you realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile? There are too many to throw back in. How can it possibly make a difference!"
At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean. As it met the water and sank, he said, "It made a difference to that one."
•
And one cannot divorce sexuality from the sacred. It’s best not to. Despite what the mainstream religions say, embodiment is no curse, no desecration. Pure spirit alone is not fulfilled; it requires spirit and flesh together, or we would never incarnate. After all, if you could do it all just in spirit, why bother?
So, I must now make another symbol, a related symbol. Think of this as Keith Haring meets the sacred heart. Which, knowing how Haring spent a great deal of time working for free with children and communities, is not really that big a stretch.
And this of course is where Tantra comes into the equation. Spirituality and sexuality are not divorced, not separate, but deeply and permanently intertwined. I find it only natural that gay mystical Tantra is part of this thread; if anything, a part of the thread that in true Tantra fashion seeks to become more conscious, to live more consciously—to awaken.
A Spiral Dance essay, © 2005 Arthur Durkee/Black Dragon Productions.
|
