Worthy Is the Lamb

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

It’s the Holiday Season in the United States. Lights, music, trees, the gusher of retail dollars and – Messiah sing-alongs. Yes, as a member of the Taos Community Chorus (tenor until faced with a high A), I am participating. How many times, how many places? And yet these texts from Isaiah and Revelation, set to Handel’s exuberant music, continue to inspire and thrill. May the abuses and domination of all twisted religious expression wither and perish. Please, dear God, save this glorious music.

One of the most powerful choruses is based on a surreal image from Revelation 5:12: “Worthy is the lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.” (NRSV) Or in the King’s English used by Handel, “Worthy is the lamb that was slain.”

The obvious reference here is to the glorification of Christ, crucified by the threatened powers and resurrected in an immutable assertion that life as intended, the true spirit of love and compassion, can never be conquered, whether by evil intent or physical demise.

But it seems to me there is more in the phrase. As we journey from our experience of scarcity and fear under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; as we begin to know and trust it as the Tree of Life, there is always a lamb to be slain. The Buddha asserts with certainty, life is duhkha. We will suffer. The innocence of the lamb will be ravaged. We can delude and harden ourselves. There will be sickness. There will be abusers and victims. There will be war and hunger and loss of loved ones. And in the end, we will die.

No lamb avoids the slaughter. Worthy is the one that faces and embraces it. It’s not that some perverse deity requires blood to be satisfied. It’s that we don’t pass the test of life without dying to the lies.

We can paste over it with Christmas presents and walls of security and comfort. We can mask it with youth and pleasure. We can pretend to fend it off with walls and guns and warehoused kids at the border.

Or we can make a different choice. We can die right now and get on with the real thing. Die to fear. Die to domination. Die to greed and anger, our selfish anxiety and hoarding. In the end, it avails us nothing. Why not end it now? Why not make the choice, today, to shed all of this and replace it with the giving and receiving of blessing, honor, glory and power?

So let’s sing it, clear and strong. Worthy is the lamb, the lamb that is slain:

The family turned back at the border. Worthy is the lamb.
The youth taken by opioids in the towns along the Ohio River. Worthy is the lamb.
Christine Blasey Ford. Worthy is the lamb.
The “deep state” public servant, courageous enough to blow the whistle. Worthy is the lamb.
Jamal Khashoggi. Worthy is the lamb.
The Walmart shoppers in El Paso. Worthy is the lamb.
The Syrian hospital patients in the sights of the Russian warplane. Worthy is the lamb.
The indigenous environmental activists killed by governments and corporate thugs in Latin America. Worthy is the lamb.
The young women lured to hotel rooms and private jets by promises of open doors to the future. Worthy is the lamb.
You and I, friend, when we die to all of this, die to our comfort, our greed, our fear and embrace the cross that leads to real life. Worthy is the lamb.

Worthy, worthy is the lamb that is slain. Blessing, honor, glory and power be unto her.

Worthy.

Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by Skype at Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078. Click FOLLOW to be notified of future posts.

Hard Rain

Posted on June 29, 2019 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

President Trump of the United States kicked off his 2020 campaign last week, pouring fuel on the flames of fear, mistrust and anger to reignite the hurting and fevered base that would assure his re-election. During the same week, more environmental regulations were rolled back in the face of the science that overwhelmingly points to a warming planet, with disastrous consequences for not just humans, but all life.

In another cynical gesture, Guatemala, among the poorest of countries in the hemisphere, with leadership grounded in corruption and abuse of its people, was forcibly named by the United States as the designated refuge of asylum for migrants fleeing gang or narco-violence and drought in Central America, particularly those from the neighboring countries of Honduras and El Salvador. This comes as the number of people fleeing Guatemala, for the very same reasons, is at its own peak level.

Wall Street waits on the sidelines, up a little today, down a little tomorrow, fluttering anxiously on the tails of the latest presidential Tweet. It is stunning to consider that the markets of the most sophisticated economy in human history rise and fall with so little rationality.

And someone somewhere thinks that yet another manufactured war in the Middle East will line enough pockets to make it worth the lives of countless unarmed citizens on another side of the globe and a few thousand dead or traumatized soldiers of our own.

We seem the epicenter of a newly unleashed global permission to hate.

But hatred is a thin veil for the underlying reality. As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated at the top, the masses turn to misguided anger. It is always easiest to hate someone who poses no threat beyond being somehow different. And the devil in power loves the opportunity to fan the flames in a sleight of hand to mask its ballooning greed.

We can delude ourselves with the religion of false morality. We can vent our frustration in political mudslinging. We can beam our positive energy out to the universe. If we don’t change our ways, “well it’s a hard, hard, hard, hard, it’s a hard rain gonna fall.” (Bob Dylan)

We don’t need a nasty god to judge us. We are doing a fine job of creating our horizon of hell.

Wealth is not the issue here, nor is power, though the mad grab for both is symptomatic. Human hearts that misunderstand their connection to creation, their responsibility to compassion and beauty; shrunken hearts deluded in belief that they are the majestic pinnacle in the unimaginable scope of all that is; hollow hearts certain that money can buy happiness, eternal life and the exit from all misfortune — these furiously pave the way to our collective demise. So many comfortable people, trailing just behind in the bell curve, would rather not know, turning a blind eye. The newly poor flare with misplaced anger. The truly downtrodden migrate in desperation for the next scrap of bread.

Dylan’s blue-eyed boy knows nothing of hard rain. Rather, it is the global masses in the path of rabid extortion and extraction, fleeing violence and hunger, the hidden but real costs of the low prices paid by the white north for food, clothing, energy, transportation and daily security. These, the most with the least, are the ones who know the storm. Their desperate lives are nothing but.

The headlong greed of the top and the complacency of the shrinking class we call middle (screaming rich compared to the displaced and suffering masses), have now traversed a height of slim escape, speeding blindly along a precipitous and razor thin ridge. The depletion of the earth’s resources, the warming of the atmosphere, the increasing likelihood of massive system failures, the insane stockpiling of sophisticated nuclear weaponry, these loom large and imminent on a rapidly approaching horizon. Yet money-madness and lazy comfort hold pedal to the metal, throwing up their flat screen charades, a vomitous spew of digitized misinformation, fooling themselves that all is well. America is now great again.

We have taken so much more than enough. Yet seeing only the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we sap and burn the Tree of Life, sucking up even the water that feeds its roots in our insatiable appetite for the things that were never real. America, America, it’s a hard, hard rain that’s going to fall.

Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078.

Creation

Posted on September 9, 2018 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Creation is amazing. Things keep happening on a seemingly infinite scale from small to grand, subtle to nuclear, still to beyond the speed of light. What’s it about? Where do we fit in? Our vision is so limited and, given the immensity of the whole thing, we mostly just ignore it and go on our way.

Going on our way, however, is exactly our problem – or better put, the problem of “our.” The premise of Two Trees in the Garden is that, under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we became conscious, we woke up to “I”, “my” and “our.”

The “going on our way,” the “going” and the “way” of “our,” all happened on a road of fear. We believed ourselves to be alone and separate. We became aware of death. The response of “I,” “my” and “our” was greed and a grasp for power and control. Anger, deceit and violence became our tools.

But “our way” is not the way of creation, of true reality. It is only halfway. It is not whole. It is “self”-deceived. We don’t know it, but true reality is that we are under the Tree of Life, not the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which is only our limited misperception of the real thing. And that real thing, the real tree, is love, goodness, beauty, relationship, peace, the surprise of creation, rest and enough. Why would we not want these things? How do we get there?

It’s been called by many names, this turn from “self”-deceit to connected reality: enlightenment; awakening; conversion; second birth; born again. And in our despair, we look for any one of these (they are all the same) as some sort of magical elixir that, if we can only reach it, grasp it, experience it, will make us happy and solve our worldly fears and woes, maybe even save us from death. And it always seems elusively just beyond “our” reach.

But it’s not elusive at all. Yes, it is beyond “my,” “our” grasp. The problem is that we are grasping at nothing to be grasped. And we are missing everything. Because enlightenment, awakening, conversion, second birth, being born again are the simple choice of turning from deception and coming home to reality. And “reality,” is “not grasping.”

Creation, friends, is the impetus, the impulse, the word of love breathed infinitely and eternally into the void. And we are part of it and with it, not separate, as our fear – the fear that is “I,” “my,” “our” – would have us believe. And our fear is only that, a belief upon which we act, resulting in our unhappiness, the unhappiness of “our.”

Alas, what must “I” do to be saved? It’s so simple. Confess. Confess and submit. Confess that you, the real you, are connected to and one with the great I Am, the love and exuberance beyond all knowing that is part and parcel of all you see, unfolding with joy and confidence into all you cannot perceive.

It’s a piece of cake, a walk in the park, a look into the eyes of the beloved. When deceived “you” lets go of grasping and submits to real everything, you are alive, awake, born for real under the Tree of Life.

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Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by Skype at Two Trees Center for Spiritual Development. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com or by phone or text to (970) 217-6078. Click FOLLOW to be notified of future posts.

Submit Yourself

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

East, West, which way to look for that perfect spirituality? Such a quandary for the comfortable with time and resources to spare. No doubt my deep intentions are tilting the universe in a better direction, while in turn, that very same expanse is conspiring for my greatest good. But somehow the rubble still gets deeper in Syria. The thugs paid by the palm oil companies are still burning the houses of peasants in Colombia. And the string of cars belching carbon, clawing their desperate way to the mountains in Estes Park, Colorado, extend the crack in the Antarctic ice sheet.

There are flies all over all of us. What to do? We can rage against the darkness. It’s so easy to blame the stupidity of others for the burden we share. We can wallow in despair, sighing our way to the next tomorrow and the next. We can stick our heads in the sand. If I am comfortable in this moment, why look beyond my bubble? We can work ourselves to weariness with good deeds, shrug, and say we did our best.

But these alternatives share major flaws. They are selfish and disconnected. All focus on how I feel about myself in relation to the problem or to the rest of creation. My anger at others exonerates me from personal complicity and, therefore, action. And yet, especially as one of the world’s privileged, I take no step and breathe no breath without exhaustive and violent extraction from the Earth and all its creatures, including the bulk of humanity.

Despair, of course, is just completely irresponsible. I can blame my inactivity on the impossible size of the task and the exhaustion I experience just thinking about it. Focusing on my own comfort at least gives me pleasure and distraction. But these two options also abdicate responsible participation.

And let’s be real. My good deeds are never enough. I can never run fast enough or jump high enough to save the planet on my own. And the conclusion that at least I tried is just another form of despair, with the gold star of performance pasted on it to relieve my guilt with a little smug pride.

The root error of all these responses is that they focus on me, as though my feelings are what matter, or as though the outcomes of creation are somehow, in a very special and important way, on my shoulders. And when I am focused on me, I am too distracted to be truly useful.

I opened with a less than subtle dig at the spirituality of intention. Perhaps that is unfair. Focusing our intentions for good can, it seems, shift energy with positive outcomes in ways that we can observe, if not yet comprehend. As Masaru Emoto documents in his Messages from Water and the Universe, even a positive word pasted on a glass of water can yield a response of astounding beauty in ice crystals formed from that water. Perhaps on a given evening we could effect positive change if millions focused their intentions completely on the healing of our president. And yet our New Years prayers for universal peace – offered annually all over the world – have yet to tip the balance decisively. Who can say, of course, that they have not at least held us back from the brink of destruction.

What we miss in all of this is that we are not, indeed, ourselves. Nor are we just our intentions. We are intention embodied. We (not just humans, but every particle and the energy that binds it into being) are the hands and feet of Creation. Our intelligence, while seemingly vast from where we stand, is just a speck of something grand beyond imagination. Whether we look big and far to the stars and galaxies or small to the mysterious behavior of the Higgs Boson, we learn that everything is always more and different than we think. Our book of physics is never more than a scratchpad of notes in the library of what we vainly imagine to be the universe.

We are intention embodied, We act within the capabilities and limitations of our embodiment. Granted, that is a statement of blind faith. But what is more blind than the borders of what we think is real? I choose – I invite you to choose – faith that the wonder of all we don’t know is expressing itself continually into the void. And we are part of that expression.

I propose active submission to that greater intention. We can engage the gorgeous paradox of acting, in complete rest, into that intention. There is direction available to us for action. We connect with it when we, as Gerald May has put it so well, eschew willfulness and embrace willingness.

When we submit (read “allow connection of”) ourselves, all our intentions and all our actions, with confidence to Creation/Spirit/Mind/Source (read words I use for God), we move forward, acting with compassion from a position of expectation, the joy and surprise of creation. We are not exhausted. We do not despair, nor do we fear or avoid walking forward.

We cannot know. We do not need to know. Our satisfaction comes in submitting ourselves and all our gifts to the intelligent Whole, being and acting rather than owning and resisting.

Exhaustion and despair are the net of our selfish frenzy under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Rest and compassionate action join as one for health and wholeness under the Tree of Life. Come with me, dear one, to the place of wonder and deep satisfaction.

O Holy Night

Posted on December 25, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Something extraordinary happened in the birth of Jesus. No one bothers to write tales of wonder about the birth of most of us: confounding tales of deep simplicity and wild extravagance; no room at the inn and choirs of angels; the politicos already attuned to the threat to power.

We come looking for a savior and king. Something in us yearns for the perfect leader, the one who will make it all right, with enough for everyone, the end of death and sorrow and pain.

But the prince of peace would not be king. He said to serve each other the way we have been served. The supposed savior said it is, in fact, your own faith that makes you whole. The one who shines a light on the path to the Tree of Life said that you – you and me – you are the light of the world.

And the one slaughtered on a cross did not call us to receive salvation kneeling at the foot of that tree. The way of Jesus calls us all the way to the terrible end hanging from the top, nailed to the gnarly limbs of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: a death by submission to connection, by willingness to release the isolation of ego; death to fear; death to selfishness and the violence it engenders; the overwhelming death of embracing the pain, fear and sorrow of life without turning away, without running to hide, with no father or regiment of angels to take us down from that hanging before the last ounce is wrung out.

There is a barrier, a chimera, a lonesome valley and dark night of the soul that stands in the road between the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life. We must ultimately walk it by ourselves. No one is born again without the lonely death on that tree. No one finds the other end of that path by staying stuck on their knees at the foot of the cross of Jesus.

O Holy Night. Be born again: born through every step of pain and suffering; born to the last wretched and lonely breath, stolen by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Be born to your true light, the light of your life. Walk as a companion and not a king.

Blessed Christmas.

For Christmas this Year, Let’s Let Jesus Off the Bloody Hook

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

For Christmas this year, let’s give Jesus a gift. Let’s let him off the bloody hook. Somewhere between the Sermon on the Mount and Paul’s letters, “Follow me” turned into “I did it all with blood sacrifice.” Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 – 1109, sealed the deal with his writing on the satisfaction theory of atonement.

And ever since, we’ve been killing him (Jesus) softly but surely by piling on the sins of the world, Sunday after Sunday. Data tells us he’s almost half dead now, under the load. Barna Group relentlessly counts the beans of evangelical angst, documenting the slippage of the “churched” through the door to become the “unchurched”, searching for just the right moves to get’em “churched” again. Their latest book, Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How to Connect with Them, documents that the “unchurched” segment of the US population has grown not just steadily, but at an ever increasing rate from 30% in the 1990’s to 43% in 2014. For Barna and company (A better book title might have been Clueless.), it seems a daunting task to stem that tide, given what they see as the relentless bashing of Christianity by godless unchurched culture. A small first step might be to get rid of those repelling and out of touch churched and unchurched labels.

Let’s let Jesus off the bloody hook. Lots of folks have tried to redeem atonement by turning it into “at-one-ment.” Too little too late, I fear, but the sentiment is useful. I believe with all my heart that Jesus was “at-one” with Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source. And I believe “the way” to which he persistently called the people of his small corner of the world in his time is, indeed, the path forward – the very same foundational path forward whispered by the breath of life in all places and all times.

But we – you and I and Aunt Suzie – won’t find that path by continually “casting our burden upon the Lord.” (If you are sufficiently unchurched, that phrase of evangelical atonement might be unfamiliar, and I promise not to use it again.) We will find it, metaphorically, in our own journey from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to the Tree of Life. We will find it by changing the way we view ourselves and the world around us.

“Salvation,” another hopelessly abused and by now nearly dead word, is really just our choice to grow up and move along that path. A bloody choice? Well, let’s be honest. Turning from the fear and separation of the metaphorical Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is very threatening to power, at least to the misused power of twisted politics and those that wield religion to mediate your redemption and mine. Taking personal responsibility for growing up to compassion, confidence and responsible relationship – becoming the Adult of God (Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source – not an old man in some heaven) that we become under the Tree of Life – taking that personal responsibility and acting on it generally, at some point, puts us crosswise with the powers of fear. Witness Jesus as the Romans nailed him to a tree, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer and six millions Jews up in smoke in bloody Christian Germany.

I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings, I will not accept them, and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
(Amos 5: 21-24. God I love my old Revised Standard Version.)

Want to be saved? Stop going to war. Want to be saved? Take care of the planet. Want to be saved? Don’t even think about killing the food stamp program.

Want to be saved from “sin and death?” Stop nailing Jesus to the tree and crying salvation. Grow up and choose it. Forgiveness is not a gift that was given in the bloody slaughter of the Lamb of God. Forgiveness is a state of being. No one can give it to you. You must truly embrace it for yourself. And then move on.

Move on, move on down the road. And consider a gift to Jesus this Christmas. Take him off the bloody tree, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the tree of fear and hate and twisted power. Clean him up, like the Good Samaritan would. Clean him up and walk with him, even through the valley of the shadow of death. Walk with him, all the way to the Tree of Life.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

Sacred and Profane

Posted on November 2, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Sacred and profane are simply two ways of interacting with the same phenomena. We grew up thinking that these were inherent characteristics of things. Certain words, like “amen” for instance, were sacred. Certain words, I dare not write them here, were profane.

The sacred and profane cluster and clarify, especially, under things we label as taboo. Sex and money are the two most obvious taboo clusters in our society. Typically these clusters exhibit a bipolar frenzy. We parade them, we avoid them. We exploit them, especially sex and money, in our marketing fantasies. We avoid open talk about them at an interpersonal level, throwing a moral wet blanket over our silence.

This bipolar activity simply illustrates our frenetic discomfort, the tug of war of chase and avoidance, grasp and repulsion, fear and desire, loathing and lusting. We cycle around, we yo-yo back and forth between the poles, always missing the powerful untouchable center of the taboo.

We abandon or abuse power in this bipolarity. At one pole we are a victim, at another we are the conqueror. We hoard wealth, we gloat in the spoils of the sexual conquest. It’s a zero sum game with a loser for every winner. There is a lot of money to be made, a lot of power and position to be garnered for anyone who can master the art of keeping the yo-yo of the masses going around these things. The oil barons, the pimps, the hedge fund managers, the priests and imams of false religion sit atop these untouchable centers, taking their fees and building their empires on the wasted energy of the masses flying back and forth between the poles of desire and despair, having and not having, satiation and repulsion.

At the center of all this bipolar cycling stands the metaphorical Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Al the center of all this bipolar cycling stands the metaphorical Tree of Life. It is the same tree. All that matters is the lens we look through. Do we view it through the clouded and profane lens of scarcity and hoarding, of good and bad, of fear and violence? Or do we view it through the clear lens of sanctity, the lens of non-judgment, satisfaction and enough?

All that we desire, everything we want and need hangs freely as fruit on the tree. It tastes good. It feels good. It shelters and sustains us. We can approach in fear of scarcity. If we get there first, we can take more than our share and use the excess to harness the fears and desires of others. We can use that yo-yo to fuel the frenzy that feeds our stash of wealth and power.

Or we can choose, when we reach the tree, simply to take and enjoy together what we need, leaving enough for others, experiencing peace and satisfaction, giving and receiving with grace.

Our choice, friends. The tree is rooted firmly before us. As individuals, as societies, do we choose the lens of the sacred or the lens of the profane? Do we rest in the true power of enough, or do we exhaust ourselves in the bipolar frenzy of fear and grasping? Food, sex, clothing; shelter, health, the environment; borders, commerce and security – sacred or profane? Which tree will it be?

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

Suchness and Form

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, the infinite mystery of the universe, is described in many ways: word, breath, spirit, formless, suchness, energy, nameless with a thousand names. We turn to look and do not see. We listen, but the sound escapes us. But somewhere in our being, everywhere in and beyond our being we know, we revel, we delight.

This Teacher of mine, this Teacher of mine – he passes judgment on the ten thousand things but he doesn’t think himself severe; his bounty extends to ten thousand generations but he doesn’t think himself benevolent. He is older than the highest antiquity but he doesn’t think himself long-lived; he covers heaven, bears up the earth, carves and fashions countless forms, but he doesn’t think himself skilled. It is with him alone I wander. Taosim. Chuang Tzu 6*

The sages have sifted and filtered the light for us and with us, spoken pieces of the word, cast metaphor on the formless, seen spirit in the manifest:

Just as light is diffused from a fire which is confined to one spot, so is this whole universe the diffused energy of the supreme Brahman. And as light shows a difference, greater or less, according to its nearness or distance from the fire, so is there variation in the energy of the impersonal Brahman.

Vishnu is the highest and most immediate of all the energies of Brahman, the embodied Brahman, formed of the whole of Brahman. On him is the entire universe woven and interwoven: from him is the world, and the world is in him; and he is the whole universe. Vishnu, the Lord, consisting of what is perishable as well as what is imperishable, sustains everything, both Spirit and Matter, in the form of his ornaments and weapons. Hinduism. Vishnu Prana 1.22*

C/S/M/S is the essential energy and spirit. We are not separate. We and everything are embodied temporal expression of that spiritual reality. We fool ourselves into fear when we hide alone in seeming separate ego. But we hide only from the falsehood of fear. There is no true hiding from our essential being, the Self that breathed us and is us – the Self that is every rock and tree and is at the same time the no-thing, the mystery we can only sense, only trust, but not fully grasp.

When appearances and names are put away and all discrimination ceases, that which remains is the true and essential nature of things and, as nothing can be predicated as to the nature of essence, it is called the “Suchness” of Reality. This universal, undifferentiated, inscrutable Suchness is the only Reality, but it is variously characterized as Truth, Mind-essence, Transcendental Intelligence, Perfection of Wisdom, etc. This Dharma of the imagelessness of the Essence-nature of Ultimate Reality is the Dharma which has been proclaimed by all the Buddhas, and when all things are understood in full agreement with it, one is in possession of Perfect Knowledge. Buddhism. Lankavatara Sutra 83*

We move, we feel, we see, hear, judge and act. We must never forget who We are as we do these things. The talent is not to be buried, but to be used to its fullest in the creation of beauty, wonder, compassion, the newness and suchness of each breath.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. Christianity. John 1:1-4 NRSV

We are the Word, spoke into being by I AM. Thinking ourselves alone we hide in fear under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Awake, we breathe, we create. Growing, becoming, we heal. We are, suchness and form, in the image, under the Tree of Life.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

The Authoritative Word

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Authoritative is a word often used in reference to scripture. It implies a superior truth. Paul claimed that his vision of Jesus, his gospel, was superior to and superseded the Torah of Moses, which he viewed as a temporary or even flawed fix of the human condition and our relationship to the divine. Muslims claim that the book – the Koran – received by the prophet Mohammed is a more perfect revelation of the word of Allah. Latter Day Saints claim that the books revealed to Joseph Smith are a more current gospel.

The natural result of any claim to exclusive authority is division and strife. All are required to make clear cut, dualistic, judging statements of acceptance or rejection. The response and action of those who decide in favor of a given authoritative word ranges from benign tolerance, to active proselytization, to violent vengeance and retribution.

Christians in the United States busy themselves with bloodying each other and the society around them with special authoritative words for or against select issues of morality. Islamic fundamentalists feel righteous zeal and justification, based on their authoritative word, in delivering death to the infidel. The West responds with “justified” violence. Latter Day Saints take their authoritative word, two-by-two, from door to door. Jehovah’s Witnesses seem to get by with just one carrier.

I believe – I know in my heart of hearts – that the Authoritative Word is, indeed, one. It’s just not this one or that one. The Authoritative Word is beyond the limitations of language. It is bigger than any single revelation. It is greater than any set of rules or code of ethics. It includes all scriptures. It is none of them. It is read on all pages, but seen only in blindness. It is heard by the ear, but known truly in silence.

In essence, the Authoritative Word is. It manifests in creation and evolution. It is glimpsed in beauty, felt in kindness, spoken in healing and known intimately in the depths of the heart. It does not judge and is not judged. It is not born and never dies. Found in book, in song, in story, it is none of and beyond all of those things.

All our scriptures exist within the limits of our bodily manifestation. They are temporary touches and glimpses of the eternal reality, as are the bodily manifestations inhabited by you and me.

When we claim any manifestation as completely and exclusively authoritative, we stay stuck under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We judge and are judged. We participate in aggression and defense. We find ourselves threatened by the enemy or deluded by a false sense of security.

Be still. Be still and know. See all, hear all, experience all. Judge none. Encounter the Authoritative Word. Be the timeless, Authoritative Word that you are, through and beyond manifestation, under the Tree of Life.

Jerry Kennell provides spiritual direction in person and by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

Second Birth: The Upanishads, Jesus and the Journey to Self

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Jerry Kennell, Two Trees in the Garden

Recall that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is a metaphor for the first awakening of human awareness: the ability to perceive a discreet self; the ability and propensity to judge phenomena as good or bad, depending on how we think we are affected; the ability to contemplate life, death and the nature of the universe. It is, in short, the realization of ego. In its immature form, the ego only perceives separation and vulnerability, and the response is fear along with a desperate grasping for protection at any cost.

The metaphorical Tree of Life represents a maturation of awareness. It is achievement of a stage of realization that recognizes the interconnectedness and spiritual nature of life and all that is. We are no longer just isolated selves, dependent solely on our ability to protect our body and our fragile ego. We achieve a realization that we are part of something larger, something that transcends time, space and physical manifestation. We are, in fact, living sparks of the very mind of Creator/Spirit/Mind/Source, breathed full of the breath of life, the creative thrill of the universe.

The garden trees themselves are, in reality, only one. They simply represent the manifestation of all that is, the complete creative activity of C/S/M/S. They are the source and stuff of life, the universe and everything (appreciation and apologies to Douglas Adams). The two trees are not distinguished by their unique and independent natures. Rather, they are distinguished only by how we view them. Their names – Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil or Tree of Life – are just indicators of the level of our own spiritual maturity. Have we grown to a level of trust and comfort with our place in the universe, a place of willingness to give and to receive without fear or grasping? Do we trust that there is “that” of us that transcends birth and death, space and time? Or do we see only as much as we can through the blinders of separation and scarcity, good and bad, physical life and death?

The journey from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to the Tree of Life is, in reality, the journey from small “s” self to capital “S” Self. Nowhere is that journey presented with more clarity than in the Upanishads, wisdom teachings attached to the Hindu Vedas that grew out of the merger of the Indo-European speaking Aryan culture and the resident culture of the Indus Valley. This merger of cultures is believed to have happened about 4,000 years ago, placing the Vedas among, if not distinguishing them definitively as the earliest of what we would call scriptures.

The relevance for those of us in the West, particularly as we move away from a spirituality based on original sin and redemption through blood sacrifice, is tremendous. Here are writings, among the earliest on spiritual reflection and experience, that discover and declare the difference between these two different levels of spiritual maturity. There is no presentation or burden of guilt, just recognition that we are born into small “s” self and that our task in life is to grow, to mature to capital “S” Self, our connection with and existence in timeless being.

We are, in truest essence, born again when we make this move between the two trees, the journey from disconnected ego to connected essential being. We achieve this step, our second birth, through renunciation of attachment to the senses – the mindless drive to chase what we think is pleasure and safety and to run from what we perceive as danger and pain. Renunciation is not separation or disengagement from these life experiences. Rather, it is to live them fully without attachment, without being driven and governed by them, recognizing their passing existence as opposed to our eternal being.

From the Isha Upanishad^*:

⁶ Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no fear.
⁷Those who see all creatures in themselves
And themselves in all creatures know no grief.
How can the multiplicity of life
Delude the one who sees its unity?

⁸The Self is everywhere. Bright is the Self,
Indivisible, untouched by sin, wise,
Immanent and transcendent. He it is
Who beholds the cosmos together.

From the Katha Upanishad^*:

Part I [3] ¹⁵The supreme Self is beyond name and form,
Beyond the senses, inexhaustible,
Without beginning, without end, beyond
Time, space, and causality, eternal,
Immutable. Those who realize the Self
Are forever free from the jaws of death.

Part II [1] ²The immature run after sense pleasures
And fall into the widespread net of death.
But the wise, knowing the Self as deathless,
Seek not the changeless in the world of change.
³That through which one enjoys form, taste, smell, sound,
Touch, and sexual union is the Self.
Can there be anything not known to That
Who is the One in all? Know One, know all.

Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” (John 3: 3, NRSV). This is indeed second birth, to renounce the fear and slavery of small “s” self, and to engage our true Self, at peace, at one with all there is. Experience without fearing. Enjoy without grasping. Share without owning. Choose, practice, to be born to Self under the Tree of Life.

Jerry Kennell now provides spiritual direction by Skype. Contact jerry@2treegarden.com.

Two Trees in the Garden

Thoughts on a New Spirituality

Category Archives: Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

Creation

Submit Yourself

O Holy Night

For Christmas this Year, Let’s Let Jesus Off the Bloody Hook

Sacred and Profane

Suchness and Form

The Authoritative Word

Second Birth: The Upanishads, Jesus and the Journey to Self

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