Essay #12:  Practicing the Presence II:
The Faculty of Discernment

We have now uncovered the basic framework for practice that Jesus teaches fostering God-intoxication, enlightenment, and discipleship, that is, the Way of Return. In this Christology, we have surpassed the deadening cosmology which had it that the universe ran like a vast machine, deterministic and devoid of God’s presence.  Instead, we saw that it was God himself who made and still supports every atom and every thread that he ever created.  We have overturned the false ontology which may at most have allowed that humans were created by God but not that they retained his own substance in their very nature.  Instead, we saw that it was God’s own light and life which illumined the life of every person coming into the world without exception and that we have the power of his being in our being.  And we have explored a myriad of human existential problems which arise when man’s own will, power, and ego are mistaken for his true nature as a child of God.  We considered how a “primordial wound” is passed from person to person through generations causing a breech in one’s discernment of the divine and the substitution of all manner of false conceptions of human power and contrivances of the ego.

What remains is to follow Jesus as he “rewires” for us the connection between our central spiritual practice and our faculty of divine discernment.  God indeed empowers the soul to deliver to us once again the sweet taste of his presence.  But there is much subtlety and depth to explore in the soul’s movements and in the ways that God reveals himself in answer to the soul’s disposition.  We will see that the cross itself is a symbol for the rewiring of the soul to God from each of the several fields or “quadrants” where it may have become detached and where its discernment has gone dim.  While the soul’s divine nature is never in question, its discernment of its connection to the divine certainly may be.  This results from a variety of psychological or spiritual illnesses the topology of which we began to explore in Chapter 3 as the effects of an early wound.  The framework of the Kabbalistic Trigram emerging at the heart of disciple making now affords us the opportunity to reexamine these illnesses and their healing in still greater detail.  In fact, Jesus addresses them quite specifically in laying out our Way of Return.  We will study his advanced topology in the Quadrants of the Cross.  But first let us follow his more general application of the Kabbalistic Trigram to the faculty of discernment, its corruption, and its recovery.

In John 10, we find Jesus standing in the midst of the Pharisees at the time of the feast of the Dedication in Jerusalem.  He walks back and forth along the Portico of Solomon, the king whose very name was synonymous with wisdom for the Jews.  From these signs alone, we should expect that Jesus has some great wisdom to reveal.  In fact, he has come to reveal nothing less than the way to enter into the sheepfold of God, that is, to discern the Divine.  He is standing outside the temple, near the temple gates, and tells the Pharisees how to get inside, but they do not hear him.  They listen but do not hear.  He tells them that they have no confidence (i.e, belief) because they are not his sheep.  His sheep not only listen to his voice but also hear him and recognize who is speaking.  They know his name, but the Pharisees do not.  They ask him to tell them plainly if he is the Christ.  “I have already told you,” he says, “but you do not have confidence.”  They ask for repetition because they are stuck in the mode of repetition, the mode of the mind which cannot move outside its own linear utterings, its vast but one-dimensional architecture.  Jesus symbolizes this architecture in strolling back and forth in a line along the same portico.  The Pharisees pick up stones to stone him, but he easily eludes their grasp.  He moves effortlessly through multiple levels of reality.  But they are stuck in just one and cannot grasp or follow him.

Jesus tells them that “he who enters the gate is the shepherd of the flock; the gatekeeper lets him in, the sheep hear his voice” (John 10: 2-3).  But “anyone who does not enter the sheepfold through the gate but climbs in some other way is a thief and a bandit” (John 10: 1).  He is alluding to a methodology here.  Anyone who tries to enter the temple or ascend to God by some other means is perforce trying to steal something and to get away with something.  It cannot work.  The sheep only follow the voice of the true shepherd.  They run away from the stranger-thief and at most are scattered, not led through the gate.

Sheep, of course, are creatures without guile yet capable of discernment.  They know the shepherd’s voice, and they can follow.  They can move and be led in and out of the gate.  They can come to pasture and “have life and [even] have it to the full” (John 10:10).  The sheep represent ourselves at the level of our souls.  Within the gate is the Most High, whom we cannot know fully because he lives deep in the temple beyond our reach.  But the shepherd–in Buddhism the bodhisattva–has the gatekeeper’s permission to go in and out, and him we can know and even follow.  The gatekeeper is the Holy Spirit abiding in the shepherd and guiding him along.  John already told us that “no one has ever seen God but he who is in closest relationship with the Father has revealed him” (John 1:18 paraphrase).

Jesus stands in their midst willing to teach them, but the Pharisees do not comprehend what he is saying.  They want religion to abide on one level—at the level of the Law—essentially so that they can measure themselves–and others–against some fixed external standard.  They object when Jesus calls himself “Son of God,” and says that he and the Father are one.  To the Pharisees, God is not accessible as presence–let alone as a being one could identify with–but remains more or less a mental concept.  The Pharisees’ concept of God is a projection of the ego, but so must be any concept of God which excludes us from his presence.  Jesus, on the other hand, was God’s very presence manifested before them, whom they did not recognize.  They picked up stones to stone Jesus with, to prove in essence that he was just a man, a man who could be dealt with and disposed of on their own level of adherence to law and to the ways of the world.  However, Jesus was not of this world.

The foregoing encounter demonstrates just how tricky the discernment of the divine presence can be, for the Pharisees are actually not all that different from most of us.  Most of us prefer to take our religion on a level that is comfortable for us.  By now, for example, we may have become accustomed to “doing church” in particular ways, through particular rituals of worship or acts of service.  We may have become used to the vernacular of our particular community, its modes of dress, even its political leanings.  Moreover, we may have consciously or unconsciously adopted an attitude of suspicion towards other persons, churches, and religions, which look and behave differently from what we are accustomed to.  Similar observations could probably be made about the ways we operate in our schools and workplaces, and among our neighbors.  We might gravitate towards a “good shepherd” who espoused our views in any one of these arenas.  But it becomes much trickier for us when we seem to discern either within ourselves or another a presence which presses us in unfamiliar directions and toward strange new beliefs.

Jesus addresses this with the Pharisees.  In John 10:7-15, he speaks extensively about who he is and how to identify him:

Very truly I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them.  I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be kept safe.  They will come in and go out, and find pasture.  The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. 

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep.  The hired man, since he is not the shepherd and the sheep do not belong to him, abandons the sheep as soon as he sees a wolf coming, and runs away, and then the wolf attacks and scatters the sheep.  He runs away because he is only a hired man and has no concern for the sheep.

Jesus variously refers to himself as “the gate” and “the good shepherd.” As we noted above, it makes sense to view the gate or gatekeeper as the Holy Spirit, and it accords well with the elucidations of our previous chapters that Jesus should identify with him.  He specifically said, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (John 4:34).  Insofar as Jesus was not about doing his own will but the Father’s, he could rightfully identify with the Spirit himself.  From a more earthly and human point of view, Jesus is also the good shepherd.  He is the one who follows the lead of the Holy Spirit, and by that guidance he leads his flock.

Jesus, the shepherd, has permission from the gatekeeper to go back and forth through the gate.  Moreover, Jesus makes it amply clear:  the shepherd is the one who is willing to lay down his life for his sheep.  The most common theological understanding of this is that Jesus died to redeem his flock from their own sins as a kind of ransom.  But to this we must offer the correction–surprisingly under-appreciated by the reduction of Jesus to a ransom–that before Jesus died, he lived!  He laid out his life like a map for all his disciples to see and to follow.  Jesus in essence said with his life and his words:  “The Way of Return is revealed in me, in the way I pay attention to the Father, in the way I manifest his presence, and in the way I treat you.”  (If he only came to be a ransom for us, then the details of his life would be insignificant, which they are not!)  Jesus stood before the Pharisees as the manifest logos, the principle both of creation and return.  He was the map incarnate, but not just the map, the origin and destination, too, brimming with signs, over-topped with effulgence, and lapping with forgiveness like the most exquisite pool of serenity found in the middle of jagged jaws of hostility and ego-absorption.

Herein lies the very key to refining our own faculty of discernment.  Rather than taking comfort, familiarity, or repetition as the points on our compass, Jesus recommends something else.  His teaching expresses and advances much of what we already foreshadowed in Chapters 2 and 3.  In short, he teaches that we must practice coming to terms with our own ego, for the ego is effectively any manifestation of merely human will that is not tethered to the divine will. In learning to identify it, heal its wounds, and set it aside so that we may come instead from the Father, we enable ourselves both to identify the true shepherd and to follow him in living the kind of life that he led.

Ironically, Jesus teaches about the ego in the midst of the ego as displayed so rabidly by the band of Pharisees surrounding him.  The ego, he seems to be telling us, behaves much like a hired man.  It sticks around as long as its own ends are being served, but once the wolf of life shows up, the ego makes for the hills and abandons the sheep—that is, the soul—to its own fate.  The ego cannot tolerate the assaults of life:  the vicissitudes, the trials, the disappointments, the tragedies.  It either responds with rage, like the Pharisees, or it disappears into the hills like the hired hand, fleeing in empty surrender.  The hired hand and the wolf actually play out the game of life on the same board and are counterparts to each other rather like opposing moves.  For the wolf can just as easily be seen as an angry response to life’s unquenchable hunger as the disrupting factor of hunger itself.  The hired man, for his part, would rather choose to flee rather than confront the hardships of life with force.

As for the sheep, the wolf would take them by force.  Just so would our ego in a wolf’s guise try to take control of the soul in its maniacal response to life’s challenges by pulling out the throttle of mere human effort (i.e., coercion or force).  No amount of human effort alone can force open the gate and bring the soul to pasture.  What results is rather the gnawing and gnashing of the soul in the jaws of a murderous thief.  The ego, like the wolf, tends to travel in packs, not unlike the Pharisees, howling and spurring one another on to acts of greater and greater savagery, culminating in the crucifixion of Jesus.  Here we find Jesus in the midst of this rabid pack, at the gates of the temple, discoursing on the mode of entry to a group that would never be able to follow him through and could not grasp him when he chose to elude them.  The irony could not be more poignant.  So much for the path of extreme effort that the wolf chooses.

As for the hired hand, he would abandon the sheep and run for the hills. Our ego can be just like him when confronted with challenges for which no human response seems possible aside from the surrender of our very souls.  Needless to say, this does nothing to open the gate nor to bring the soul to pasture.

“Follow the good shepherd,” Jesus tells the Pharisees again and again.  “He will get you through.”  “Do not be misled by your own egos,” he seems to say, “but remember who you are and where you have come from:”

 Is it not written in your Torah, ‘I have told you that you are Elohim?’ [Psalm 82:6] Those people he called Elohim because the Miltha [Aramaic equivalent of the Greek logos] was with them (paraphrase of John 10: 34-35 from the Aramaic-English New Testament).¹

Jesus stood before them filled with this logos.  He seems to be telling them, “You cannot get to pasture–that is, to eternal life–with your minds, with your egos.  They are too limited.  The brokenness of life confounds them and sends them either into blind fury or runaway terror.  But look, my sheep either do not hear these maniacal strangers or just try to avoid them.  To the sheep they are mere thieves coming to steal their rightful passage through the gates and on to pasture.  The sheep continue to hear their master’s voice even when dreadful footfalls line the path on either side.  Be like the sheep.  Remember that you are sheep.  Remember that you are of God’s fold–one of the Elohim–and that your souls are being tended by a good shepherd.”  And we read in John 10:27-30:

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life; they will never be lost and no one will ever steal them from my hand.

Thus the compass or process that guides discernment does not point toward comfort, familiarity, or repetition, nor to rabid effort nor blank surrender.  It does point to a voice that we can hear within.  The voice Jesus is alluding to is not the voice of the mind or even the voice of feelings.  It is a kind of deeper hearing beyond and sometimes even contrary to those other voices.  But it is a listening that nevertheless inspires profound trust and forbearance even when obstacles appear.

The sheep may not know where they are going, but they do trust their innate ability to be able to discern the shepherd from the thief.  They follow dutifully, and they know when they get to a bit of pasture.  Our own egos want to make our lives so much more complicated and far-reaching in our decision-making.  That is the life of the mind seeking understanding.  What Jesus calls us to here is a life at once vastly simpler and vastly more dimensional.  It is fashioned out of deep “obedience,” a verb that has its roots in a French word meaning “to hear.”  When we hear the voice of God, we want to be obedient to it.  We want not only to surrender to it but also to act so as to express it fully.

On the other hand, the price of being led by the ego is not only severe psychological instability, it is the utter failure to ascend and return to that which is our origin.  There is a place for the ego, just as there was a job for the wedding master to do at the wedding in Cana.  The ego can function to orchestrate the various parts of our personality and character, our mental and emotional faculties, and even our sense functions.  The hired hand can be useful—if not indispensable—as long as he, like the sheep, has the master to follow.  On his own he is at best like a ship at sea under full sail without map or compass, without even a captain.  Some of the time, our lives may look like the course of that ship.  We may go thither and yon under a full head of steam without having the slightest idea where true north lies.  Our ship can swell and be built larger and larger in the dry-dock of our mind’s own manufacture, but its senseless course remains the same as long as the Master’s voice is not to be heard.  We can live for years under the grand delusion that we are on the right course, but years of the journey will not confirm it nor answer the subtle suspicion that “something is not as it should be.”

Discernment deepens rather as we draw closer to the shepherd and closer to the Source of Life within the gates kept by the Spirit.  If Jesus does not promise a simple or quick solution to our frequent indisposition, he does indeed promise eternal life in the end and that at last “no one will ever steal us from his hand.”  He does not promise that we, any more than the sheep, shall always know where we are going, that is, know in an egoic sense.  But he has supreme and unfailing confidence in our own soul’s ability to regain the greater sense that we are “of God’s fold.”  He knows that our soul alone is gifted to be able to move back and forth through the gate between heaven and earth, when it is led by the Guide, just as the servants at the wedding in Cana went back and forth around a wall separating the sacred from the mundane.  What the soul brings back is not the mere stuff of the mind.  It is a finer wine than that cheap wine.  It quickens our ability to bring forth and to maintain the Kingdom of God even as it may dull our worldly senses, blunt our judgment, and confound our understanding.

From that farther shore, our soul returns.  Perhaps due to its passage or the will of the Guide less gentle things sometimes come back with it that drop like stones into the seemingly calm waters of our daily lives.  We might call them “miracles.”  Or we might call them “tests” or “trials” meant to etch away that of this world which still restricts us and impedes our following.  These could be anything from strange new viewpoints we feel compelled to adopt to personal tragedies that test our ability to endure.  As we approach the limit-borders of egoic understanding and egoic power, our familiar and seemingly stable frames of reference can be clouded by God-intoxication, our foundation rocked by divine manifestation, and our very souls stretched by holy aspiration.  Our approach to the Kingdom may certainly require a process of gradual self-examination and refinement.  But entrance itself is bound to involve radical and discontinuous changes, “system jumps” as it were into new mind states and new ways of being.  The promise of divine wine is that it will quench our thirst eternally.  Yet by bringing us closer once again to our Origin and our Source, it also threatens to take us out of this world or at least out of our usual way of being in it.

It is not without danger, then, that we follow Jesus into the hills.  But we are not safe anyway.  If we take even a short glance at the map of his life, we can see at once that we are not safe anyway.  Do we want to take our chances that the ego’s elaborate delusions can protect us?  Or would we prefer to transcend that kind of “understanding” in exchange for a different kind of knowing that comes from walking with the Master?  Are we willing to trust that amidst the greatest challenges life can present, God will keep his covenant with us and come after us even into the farthest ditch of our fallenness and despair?  If the latter, then we are ready to “take up our cross” and follow Jesus into the more intricate methodology we call the Quadrants of the Cross. The parable of the yeast and the dough will take us there in the next essay.

 

Notes:

1. This paraphrase is taken from Albert LaChance, The Way of Christ, North Atlantic Books, 2009, p. 145.