I’ve been waiting for the apocalypse for some time now. One of my favorite games as a child was to pretend that it was the end of the world and the goal of play was to not be seen. Cars were government vehicles, driven by Nazis, fascists and big-brother types who cruised the streets in search of the few rare individuals who had managed to stay free. People on foot were zombie ghouls, of course, looking to nibble on some tasty brains or innards. I was pretty good at not being seen, moving amongst the shadows, being able to outrun cars on my bike by the sheer virtue that I knew my neighborhood well, along with all of its shortcuts and hidden places. Thirty years later and I still feel like the end is near, though the thrill of a child’s game has given way to anxiety and fear.

It does though seem like the end of the world has turned into professional sport these days. We all know it’s the end, the main questions are when and how? The latest sign of impending doom is the Dow Jones which, for a while at least, seemed to be plummeting at the speed of angels falling from heaven. Along with this descent into economic darkness, the country is bleeding jobs at the highest rate in sixty years, making it clear that this is no mere flesh wound we are dealing with. The number of homeless is staggering. On any given day in Los Angeles County, there are over 88,000 men, women and children with no place to live. That is four times the population of the small town where I was born and raised and played my apocalyptic games. This number is only going to increase. Americans are loosing their homes at an unprecedented rate and tent cities are appearing across the land, making many exiles in their own country.

While the majority of the cable news programs and newspaper editorials continue to speculate and prophesize over the cause and cure of the economic collapse, a few turned their attention to another story to emerge the first week of April; one which spoke of the nation’s soul. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, America is also undergoing a subtle religious transformation – it is becoming less Christian. The number of Americans who identify themselves as Christian dropped from 86 to 76 percent in 2008. It is not the case that this decrease was the result of conversion to other religions or religious movements, the largest increase in the study was persons who claimed no religious affiliation at all, a group which grew by 37 percent in ten year’s time. America, it would seem, is loosing its religion.

I can’t help but to consider connections between religion and the state of the nation. I am not going to argue that people are becoming less religious because of the economy, or that in their desperation, more people will turn to God. Nor do I plan to lament the decrease in Christians since, truth be told, I am glad to see many of them go. Instead, I want to argue that we are in a unique point in history to re-examine the foundations of both our economy and religion. Indeed, it would seem that we need to consider both simultaneously.

America has been, and continues to be a nation of Christians. We are also a nation of capitalists. It has been 100 years since sociologist Max Weber demonstrated how capitalism emerged out of the protestant ethic. Though he believed that the religious underpinnings had long since vanished, it is not difficult to see how even today capitalism is informed by an often unconscious moral attitude. For example, linguist George Lakoff has pointed out that embedded within conservative political language is the attitude that those who are self-sufficient are moral persons; those who need help from the state are not. It was this kind of moral turpitude which allowed Ronald Reagan to unabashedly claim that homelessness was a lifestyle choice, and as such the state need not extend a helping hand.

This is America at the start of the 21st century. Churches have taken up residence in shopping malls and the homeless push shopping carts along city streets. These are the images projecting from the American dream, and all dream images are apocalyptic, as the word literally means “to uncover,” “to bring out of darkness.” They are revealing unconscious truths; there is no longer any distinguishing Christ from commodity, in our greed we have decimated the environment and our consumption is costing us a place to call home. It does seem that the end is truly nigh. If there is to be any salvation at all, it is going to require radical shifts in consciousness. We are being called to create a new world. We cannot rely on failed ideologies, it is time to take risks and explore possibilities long thought impossible in an attempt to give birth to an economy based on equality, justness and sustainability and that allows for the honoring of the creative human spirit and its connection to the divine. Perhaps we should look to voices from the past that have been silenced and shut away, condemned to the edges of history, to see if what was rejected could be the foundation stone for a new society.

A candidate who fits this description is Meister Eckhart a fourteenth century Dominican priest and mystic. He was condemned by the Catholic Church, in part because he preached to the poor using their German language rather than the official Latin of liturgy. The message he delivered was not one of damnation and separation from god, but one of blessing, union and justice. According to Matthew Fox, a former Dominican like Eckhart who is now an Episcopal priest, there are four primary themes found in the sermons of Eckhart which create a four-fold spiritual path. These are 1) creation (the via positiva), 2) Letting go and letting be (the via negativa), 3) breakthrough and giving birth to God (the via creativa), and 4) re-creation in compassion and justice (the via transformativa). Embracing Eckhart’s mystical vision just may be the key that can free us from our economic and religious malaise and provide the support for a new American economy and spirituality.

According to Fox, Eckhart is a panentheist, that is, that God is in all things and that all things reside in God. God can be found in creation and therefore, the world is inherently good. Being is holy. The human soul is a spark of the divine and as such, we are born into goodness. This is the antithesis of the view that we are all born into sin. It is an optimistic imagining of the human condition that stands in direct opposition to the pessimistic stance injected into modern political and philosophical discourse by Thomas Hobbes.

In his political treatise, Leviathan, Hobbes famously described the human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” The world is a hostile place with everyone always, at all times, acting out of selfish motivation. As such, it becomes a moral imperative to act to protect your interests and ensure that no one takes advantage of you – because everyone is out to do so. This is the underlying world view beneath Reagan’s comments on the homeless as well as those who argue against universal health care or welfare because the assumption is, others will take advantage.

Obviously, Eckhart would not agree with Hobbes’ assessment of the human condition. For Eckhart, the soul was noble so the human was noble. Furthermore, the world, being a product of God’s creation and at the same time containing God, is therefore divine. Because nature is full of God, Eckhart would encourage us to love nature as the believer loves God. I wonder what would follow from a shift in consciousness where people began experiencing nature as containing God, rather than treating it as nothing more than lifeless substance to be exploited for personal gain? Could it not set the stage for an earth-honoring economy and politic? Much is being said about transforming the American economy into a Green Economy, that is, one which is based on sustainability and sound environmental practices. It seems to me that Eckhart’s path of creation will lead us towards this goal.

Scholars and commentators have written much about Eckhart’s second path, the via negativa. It has often been compared to Buddhist, and in particular Zen Buddhist thinking, especially since Eckhart employs terms like “nothingness” and encourages his listeners to “let go” and “empty themselves.” All creatures are “nothing” because they do not and cannot exist without God, which is the ground of all being. In order to fully experience the divine, we must go beyond God and empty ourselves of all our previous understanding in order to allow Being to flood our souls. As Eckhart preached “I pray God to rid me of God.” America too needs to rid ourselves of God, to let go of our self identity as a Christian nation, abandon fatuous fundamentalisms and false piety in order to truly experience ourselves as citizens of a promised land. Likewise, we need to dismantle outdated social structures which serve only the wealthy and elite in order to construct a system truly based on equality and justice.

Weber lamented that capitalism had lost its religious foundation, creating a world of alienation where modern workers were not religious ascetics but angels transformed into automata after being conscripted into corporate service.

"The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt."

Americans define themselves by their work. Most of us typically spend more waking time with co-workers than family. When we are not identifying ourselves with what we do, it is because we are busy identifying with what we own. We are consumers trained by a lifetime of advertising and public relations to never be satiated. We are like the hungry ghosts of the Preta Loka, one of the Hindu and Buddhist hells, where souls condemned to eternal hunger reside. We must release our identifications of vocation and consumer; we must abandon the drive to accumulate of excessive wealth in order to discover the treasure of our souls. Yet, fear and greed often divert our attention from devotion. As Eckhart noted, some people are “more afraid of losing a piece of money, or even a danarius, than God. We condemn Judas because he sold Christ for thirty silver pieces, and yet many persons sell God, truth, justice for a single quarter or eve a penny.”

Even if we can find the courage to embark on the mystic’s path, the world does not allow much time for spiritual endeavors. Personally, I have spent the past 15 years studying the world’s religions and religious teachers, yet have devoted little time to my own spirituality. My days are filled with work and deadlines and distractions leaving hardly ten minutes for silent meditation. Yet I carry with me, every day, the need for stillness. I suspect I am not alone if feeling like this. As well, I also feel the desire to create, to write, to paint, make music, yet that too remains unrequited.

Karl Marx argued that when workers are forced to create items for another’s profit and not in order to fulfill their own creative needs, they will become alienated, strangers to themselves. Again, when we do not know ourselves, we cannot know God. Any model for a new economy will have to be one which allows for the free expression of our innate urge to create.

Eckhart saw creativity as a spiritual practice. Once we have emptied ourselves, and let go of the notions that we are separate from creation then we can be filled with God. When we find stillness, we can experience a breakthrough, an awakening to the mystery. We finally experience the truth that God is in us and we in God. Our will becomes God’s will. God flows from our every action, we give birth to God and like God, we become creators. However, we are not to remain in constant rapture. Too many who have had an experience of the ineffable remove themselves from the world, they are “blissed out” and in their desire to linger in transcendence, they remove themselves from the divine and become trapped in a narcissistic quest for ecstasy. For Eckhart, it was essential that we be in the world.

The final path of Eckhart’s mysticism, the via transformativa, requires that we “recreate creation.” We are called to give birth to the world, just as we are now. For Eckhart, this world is one where equality reigns. All creatures participate equally in being and as such, all are connected. Eckhart taught that there is a reason why the Lord’s prayer petitions “Give us our daily bread” and not “give me my daily bread.”

"We say 'our' in order that we might remember that all people are our brothers and co-heirs and thus we might love them and persevere to the end with them as brothers, keeping also in mind that other verse: 'All of you are brothers.'"


Later, in the same sermon, Eckhart, citing the Church Father Chrysostom, declares

"We might understand that bread is given to us so that not only we might eat but that we recognize others in need, lest anyone say “my bread” is given to me instead of understanding that it is ours, given to me, to others through me and to me through others. For not only bread but all things which are necessary for sustaining this present life are given to us with others and because of others and given to others in us. Whoever does not give to another what belongs to the other, such a one does not eat his own bread but east the bread of another along with his own Thus when we justly eat the bread we have received, we certainly eat our bread; but when we eat evilly and with sin the bread we have received, then we are not eating our own bread but the bread of another. For everything which we have unjustly is not really ours."

The social structure that Eckhart would have us build is one where it is ensured that everyone has their basic needs met; food, shelter and health before anyone could begin compiling and collecting excess. It is a scandal that America, one of the wealthiest nations in the history of the world, has denied so many what is essential for survival. It is not that those in need are lacking virtue. The sin lies with us, not them. We are failing to act with compassion. Eckhart would rightly see us for what we are, a nation of people who pray for “my bread” not “ours.” In a sermon which clearly demonstrates Eckhart’s contemporary relevance, he states “it is a great crime to give the wages of the poor to the rich and from the livelihood of the poor to increase the luxuries of the powerful, taking water from the needy earth and pouring it into the rivers.”

Writing from Birmingham Jail, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. commented that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and so it is for Eckhart. Acting out of compassion, we will feel a compulsion to social justice. The apocalypse is a necessary deconstruction; we are required to remove that which is useless, outdated and unjust before dreaming a new America. This is the nation Eckhart would have us build; one based on equality, justice and compassion. None would go hungry or homeless. All will receive the care they require. Alienation will be exorcised as every person will be allowed to fully embody the creative energy flowing through their being. Realizing that all things are connected and sacred, we will build community and honor the earth and all its creatures and create an economy that is sustainable. If this is revealed, then the kingdom of heaven will surely be on Earth

When I woke up the morning of my 40th birthday, my first thought of the day was “Oh shit, I’m gonna die.” It was not that this was the first time I had glimpsed my mortality. In fact, I remember being struck by the image of a tombstone engraved with my name one summer afternoon when I was about eight years-old. In high school and my early 20s I think I was a bit obsessed with death and began smoking as something of an idiot’s dare. I’ve always known that my days were numbered, but turning 40 was different. I think it was the very first time that I actually felt the truth of my mortality stirring from deep within my bones and grasped the fact that I am very likely closer to my death than my birth.

It is now a nearly a year and a half later and I recently realized that I am in the midst of what I am calling my mid-life chrysalis. Although I originally chose the word because it played well against ‘crisis’, the choice turns out to be rather fitting, despite the fact that it is way to cute for my tastes. The butterfly’s transformational sac, chrysalis comes from the Greek chysos which means gold. In the alchemical tradition gold was the end goal, the philosopher’s stone, which the psychologist Carl Jung pointed out was less an actual thing and more like the elusive final destination of a psychological and spiritual journey. Interestingly, the Greek word psyche which is usually translated as soul also meant butterfly.

What I am attempting to say is that I am in the mood for a metamorphosis. I have spent the past 15 years studying various philosophers, philosophies and religions. Yet during this time my own spirituality has been largely neglected. I think it is high time to retrieve my soul from the shadows of neglect. This undertaking is not about finding religion or meaning or beliefs so much as it is about experience and developing a practice. Part of that practice will be writing, so my intention is to make regular posts as I make my way along the pilgrim’s path.

So, what will be my first steps? In the next few weeks I’ll begin attending kundalini yoga classes while also studying Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. I’ll receive training in the way of the shaman from Michael Harner, a former anthropologist educated at Yale and Berkeley who went native and now heads the Foundation for Shamanic Training. Last weekend I spent two days in a marathon study of the works of the 13th century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart with Matthew Fox, a former Dominican priest who was condemned by Joseph Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict and was better known as Grand Inquisitor. I’m still processing that experience and need to begin filtering it into words. I am also running gleefully through the playground of comparative mysticism while attempting to establish a serious meditation regimen.

Let the journey begin.

At the beginning of the week a story ran in papers all over the world that a group of sadhus, Hindu holy men, were refusing to bathe in the Ganges during the Ardh Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious festivals in the world that takes place once every twelve years. Their reason? The sacred waters are too polluted.

This is a perfectly rational response. The river has been raped, its purity stolen by raw sewage dumped into its water, along with chemicals from industry, human and animal remains and, of course, sins. A similar situation exists in Nepal with the Bagmati river, a soul sister to the Ganges that runs through the capital city of Kathmandu. The Nepalis believe that after death, if their ashes are thrown into the river they’ll go straight to heaven and find release from an otherwise endless cycle of rebirths. However, like the Ganges, the Bagmati is now full of litter and raw sewage. On any given day you can watch dump trucks full of garbage backing up along its shores to release their contents into the river, saving them from an endless cycle of recycling.

There is an annual festival in Nepal where the king is supposed to drink water from the Bagmati. Although the king makes all appearances that he is drinking the water, he is, in actuality not. A friend of mine who worked with the Friends of the Bagmati, a non-governmental organization devoted to cleaning up the river, explained that if the king did drink from the water it would likely kill him. It is not at all surprising that the king would engage in this slight of hand. What is surprising is that the sadhus in India would have much the same response.

Sadhus are a strange sight for most of us in the West. Some walk about naked, a few smear ashes all over themselves in an attempt to imitate Siva who is covered with the ashes of the dead, and yes, some do get their ashes at the cremation grounds rather than their own hearths. Some stand for years on one leg or keep atrophied arms raised in an attempt to find enlightenment. A few lift heavy rocks, piles of bricks or even pull trucks with their genitalia, all done as expressions of their devotion and piety. All of this, I imagine, would seem rather irrational to the western mind. However, the sadhus refusal to bathe in the Ganges shows that even in irrationality there is reason.

And that, by way of a path that meanders like a river, is the point I want to make. There is much talk these days about reason and religious faith. The irrationality of religion is under attack by the likes of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, and in many ways they are right because irrationality is a dangerous beast. But I think religion is a much more complex creature than what they portray. Religion is not just belief, it is a river with many tributaries and shores, winding through culture, politics, ethics, art, psychology, and more. It is not synonymous with irrationality. I’ve known a great many rational people, including scientists, who make a rational decision to believe. And yet, irrationality does seem to be an epidemic these days, and perhaps that, rather than religion, is what we need to be attacking - the garbage in the rivers of our belief.

On Tuesday, January 1, 2007 Pat Robertson announced to the viewing audience of “The 700 Club” that God had one again whispered sweet forebodings of disaster to him during a recent prayer retreat. According to Robertson, God revealed that sometime after September there is going to be a “mass killing” which Robertson has translated as a terrorist attack which may or may not be nuclear.

Now, I am not going to argue whether or not God is actually talking to Pat. There’s no way for me to prove that God isn’t and I think it’s next to impossible for Robertson to prove that God is. Even if there does happen to be an attack, there’s no way of proving it anything more than a lucky guess. I’m not a betting man but I think prognosticating another attack on American soil is like suggesting that sometime in August Britney Spears will show her goodies again on YouTube.

Nevertheless, I do have my doubts and here’s why – it doesn’t sound like God. All anyone has to do is flip through Isaiah or Ezekiel or any of the other prophets of the Old Testament to see that God is out of his game. First of all, since when did God become vague? He may have talked in riddles sometime, but vagueness was never a sign that God had the floor. God didn’t tell Moses to “gather some slaves and head north” and the message he had for Pharaoh wasn’t “something big’s gonna go down.” Indeed, the Lord was full of vengeance and spite and boils and blood and specifics. I would assume that if there is going to be an attack then God, being God, would know exactly when and where. Why wasn’t this information passed on to Pat? I mean, if God really gave a damn, then he might like to let us know so that preparations can be made.

I also doubt because Pat, crazy as he is (and that, I believe can easily be documented) isn’t crazy enough. I’m not going to believe a word he says until I see him sitting naked on a heap of cowshit playing with bones and kissing coals. That’s the sign of a true prophet. True prophets don’t run multi billion dollar corporations. They don’t have web presences. They don’t run for president. They don’t send out press releases. They do none of this because their minds are completely fucking shattered from the experience of hearing the voice of GOD. To listen to Robertson, one would think there is no difference between hearing the voice of God and receiving a phone call on a private line.

The Bible warns of false prophets and the language is not vague or ambiguous. The Bible tells us that false prophets are motivated by greed (Micah 3:11) that people tend to prefer them over the real deal (Isaiah 30:10), that sometimes the prognostications of these prophets come true (Deuteronomy 13:1) but in the end they will all be consumed by sword and famine (Jeremiah 14:15). I'm sure if I dug a little deeper and I'd find all sorts of deuternomical nastiness for those claiming to speak for God and actually don't. Maybe something with locusts and hot pokers. Regardless, the message is clear, in the end, false prophets will not be tolerated and they will pay.

Oh, if only I were a gambling man...