Sunday, November 23, 2003

Meditation and Mary Magdalen

Our instructor, Father John Cowan, has been teaching Buddhist Meditation for Christians for a while and searching for a Christian teaching that warns against giving undue importance to the physical world supports the Buddhist practice of observing "the wheel of life" and our reaction to it from a distance and he found it in the Gospel of Mary Magdalen

Matter gave birth to a passion that has no equal, which proceeded from something contrary to nature.

There is an interesting lecture by Dr. Stephan Hoeller on the Gospel of Mary.  (Beware: It is almost 1.5 hours and he takes about 20 minutes to begin, but he offers some good points that Father Cowan was hitting yesterday, that being born into this world is kind of a sacrifice of wholeness.  And we spend our lives clinging to life, worshipping the flesh. 

Even when we embrace practices that are supposed to give us a break from the focus on the flesh, we hope for the side effects of longer life, clarity of thought.  We do yoga for improved muscle tone!  We meditate for greater clarity of mind, so we can get ahead.  Christians attend faith healings in hopes of seeing someone's goiter disappear.   The point is detachment from the wheel of life, but we turn these things around so they focus us more on the wheel of life.

I have been aware of this as I meditate.  The monkey wants results!  Every two seconds, the monkey is saying.  When can I use this power to subjugate my enemies? 

One of the goals of meditation is freedom from automatic responses to the material world, and this is done by first becoming aware of your automatic responses and then realizing that the pain of the world is secondary to the spirit. 

And the gospel of Mary seems to support this: 

There is no sin, but it is you who make sin when you do the things that are like the nature of adultery, which is called 'sin.' 

  Somehow they got from this statement to the following statement:

the Savior argues, in effect, that sin is not a moral category, but a cosmological one; it is due to the improper mixing of the material and the spiritual.

 and I am not clear exactly how, except that "adultry" here doesn't mean  sleeping with someone's life, but the mixing of things that don't belong together, as in adulterated milk.  I guess that makes sense.  It is wrong to adulterate the spirit with considerations of the material world.

This problem is with us all, obviously, but it gets comical when when you are so consumed by the wheel of life that you think to pull off a really notable miracle, Jesus actually has to physically rise from the dead!  ( ..and feed on the flesh of the living?) "


9:08:00 PM    comment []
 
sledding

Snowed 6 or 8 inches today.  The kids were out of their minds over it.  I took them sledding at Todd Park, which has a tiny hill.  They drove themselves to exhaustion after watching me demonstrate.  up down up down.  The wind blew pretty bitter and it turns out they both wet their pants rather than interrupt sledding.  So, once the sledding stopped, the screaming began in stereo.  Boots full of freezing cold urine.  Shouldn't have used cotton socks.

I didn't think we had any sleds and was looking for pieces of cardboard when I came across two brand new sleds in the garage.  These apparently came from Kate's dad a while ago.  Thanks Grampa John!


4:37:17 PM    comment []