Kenosis

Last week, I did an interview for Dr. Lucy McBride’s podcast and she asked me what I do to take care of myself. I had to think for a minute because I don’t have much that abides by a set-and-forget-it routine, but I listed off weekly therapy, sitting in the sauna and being quiet, acupuncture every month where I fall asleep after the needles go in, and quasi-frequent walks in the hills of my neighborhood for exercise. Paraphrasing, I said something to the effect of: “I feel like such an overfull sponge most of the time—information, books, other peoples’ feelings—so I do things to get empty.”

I’d never actually had that revelation, but that’s what I’m after: Emptying. Letting go so that I can continue to take life in. That’s certainly how I feel about therapy: I know some think of therapy as self-involved—you’re really going to talk about yourself for an hour?—but for me it feels like hygiene so that I have capacity for the people I love.

I had to laugh when I finally starting reading Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Wisdom Jesus this week, which is probably her most accessible book (it’s much lighter and easier to process than some of her later work). The book focuses on “putting on the mind of Christ”—not living like him, but entering into a shared consciousness with something much bigger. Or another way of saying this is to get beyond yourself. It’s hard. She focuses a fair amount of attention on The Gospel of Thomas, one of the scrolls discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945—unearthed where they had been buried for safekeeping by concerned monks, they eventually made it to the collection of Carl Jung before being widely published. (Deemed heretical, these gospels didn’t make the canon when the New Testament was canonized in the fourth century.) The Gospel of Thomas is a series of aphorisms that Jesus supposedly said—they’re a bit like Zen koans—one of the most famous and stunning being Logion 70:

If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you will kill you.

The idea here, to my mind at least, is that the point and goal of life is to bring forth our inner gifts and share them with the world. To not do so is a slow and steady poisoning.

To figure out what those gifts are is deeply personal and requires a lot of quiet inner work and intervention. The answers are typically not “out there,” as much as we’ve been trained to seek approbation from external authorities. We’ve been conditioned to look outside ourselves for ideas about who we are. This is the wrong instinct. Bourgeault writes: “As in the Gospel of Thomas, it’s merely the ‘seek and you shall find’ part without the confusion, wonder, and reorientation—and also, without the ‘sovereignty.’ For all such spiritual sleepwalking bypasses that crucial first step, that moment when the heart has to find its way not through external conditioning but through a raw immediacy of presence. Only there—in ‘the cave of the heart,’ as the mystics are fond of calling it—does a person come in contact with his or her own direct knowingness. And only out of this direct knowingness is sovereignty born, one’s own inner authority.”

I’ve found that to get to this “direct knowingness” I must get quiet, plain and simple.

Bourgeault also examines the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12), including the statement: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” I’m not a Bible scholar and wouldn’t know how to properly interpret that statement, but I love Bourgeault’s translation via the wisdom perspective, which in her words is about the “transformation of consciousness” or accessing that Christ mind. She writes: “‘poor in spirit’ designates an inner attitude of receptivity and openness, and one is blessed by it because only in this state is it possible to receive anything. There’s a wonderful Zen story that exactly translates this teaching. A young seeker, keen to become the student of a certain master, is invited to an interview at the master’s house. The student rambles on about all his spiritual experience, his past teachers, his insights and skills, and his pet philosophies. The master listens silently and begins to pour a cup of tea. He pours and pours, and when the cup is overflowing he keeps right on pouring. Eventually the student notices what’s going on and interrupts his monologue to say, ‘Stop pouring! The cup is full.’ The teacher says, ‘Yes and so are you. How can I possibly teach you?’”

This hits, but it also underlines what my rambling self-care routine is trying to accomplish: Kenosis, or the idea of self-emptying, so that you can then be refilled. By spirit, by the needs of others, by the world at large. But to do this effectively, we must learn how to let go.