Xiphos

For a little while each morning and evening, I vow to let go of all doing, all thinking, and reconnect with pure Being. Let go of effort, concentration, and repetition. Let go of tradition and expectation. Let go of every thing and plunge into thingless Silence, where I am no longer a creature, for I have come Om to the uncreated. Where I am not an object, and there is no noun after the verb, to Be. Where the pilgrim has returned to the beginning of his journey, and it is the end. I no longer look for that place, I look from that place.

I see the whole cosmos happening around me. But this is not who I am, I am the seer. I see the whole cosmos happening within me. This is not who I am, I am the seer. In my mind I see the chaos of 10,000 thoughts, the residue of 10,000 lifetimes. This is not who I am, I am the seer. In my body I see trillions upon trillions of sparkling atoms dancing through stillness. This is not who I am, I am the seer. Let mind, body, moon and stars do the dance. This is not who I am, I am the seer. I am the witness at the center of the whirled. And what is called "the cosmos" is but an afterimage, flashing in a silent bolt of lightning up my spine, for an instant that stretches from one end of eternity to another.

Now let us get very specific, very local, for we only enter the non-local, the boundless, through the infinitesimal vanishing point of focus. At the tip of my sternum, just beneath my heart and just above my diaphragm, is that diamond point of the sword. The Bible calls this the sword of the Word. In Hinduism, it is the sword of Shiva. In Tibet, the Vajra sword. Western anatomy calls the lower tip of the sternum the Xiphoid Process, from the Greek "xiphos," meaning sword.  The sternum is a sword pointing downward toward the gentle wound-like indentation at the center of the chest.

Then let this exhalation be a gentle sword that pierces my heart, following the point of the sternum down into this vulnerable hollow place, this wounded valley, where I let go of I, and plant the seed of Christ. At the end of the outbreath is an instant of annihilation. Ancient yogic scriptures declare that all the worlds, both heavenly and earthly, burst out of this tiny dimensionless point. Dying into this point Bindhu, even for an instant, our awareness becomes eternal and unbounded. Out of that seed, the next inhalation springs up, a dragon of fire, a new creation.

Jesus said, "Ameen Ameen, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Therefore, whoever clings to his life will lose it, but whoever looses his life will find it for eternity" (John 12). He was not preaching theology or metaphysics, but describing sadhana, a spiritual practice.

 

The sword of the Spirit makes her gentle but fatal stroke when awareness descends from the mind into the heart, piercing even through the hridaya chakra into the vale of tears at the center of my body, where thought dissolves. Through the perishing of "me," silence blossoms. It is death for the mind, but life for the soul. The silence is vast, but the portal to it is a dimensionless dot between breathing out and in. Through the infinitesimal we pass into the infinite.

To taste true Life, the soul must root down into unmoving, uncreated, unknowable Silence. Where is the entrance to this wound that leads to infinite healing? Here, where the tip of the blade pierces the center of my chest. Here I am not merely a human, but a human Being.

Is this a "teaching"? Very well then, let it be the simplest teaching, for I am the most foolish of teachers. This is the foolishness I teach. A Goddess visits your body bearing a mighty sword, yet the sword is your own breath. And it is the Spirit of God, for the very word for Spirit in the scriptures is also the word for Breath.

Let her melt your sternum into a pillar of moonlight, with the fragrance of sweet myrrh. She who whirls the galaxies at the dawn of creation, the first mover in the stillness of God, now comes as your comforter, nearer to your heart than your very soul. Some call her Shakti, Shekinah, Ruuh, Sophia, Magdalene the Bride of Christ. But, her touch is more tender and lethal than any name.

IMAGE by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 instrument, showing the Herbig-Haro object HH111, which lies about 1300 light-years from Earth. Herbig-Haro objects consist of young stars blasting superheated jets through surrounding clouds of dust and gas, like a sword piercing the heart. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Nisini. Second image: by Danté Rossetti.