Mansions

I call God by his personal name. I call Goddess by her personal name. Signifying God with words like "Consciousness," "Energy," "One," or "Source" no longer suffices. Such terms may suffice for those merely interested in philosophy, doctrine, or the entanglement of conceptual argument. But for those who drown in foolishness, the wild insouciance of devotion, the madness of divine love, mere concepts of the intellect lack fire. What fire? The fire of communion. Union may be impersonal, but communion is always personal.

For such astonished fools, only words like Shiva or Kali, Krishna or Radha, Christos or Mary carry the living flame. There is an abysmal difference between the concept of "God" and the experience of God, an unfathomable gulf between the belief and the flavor. One is just an abstraction, narrowing the mind into a mere idea, while the other is a conflagration that consumes not only the mind but each neuron in the body, satiating the vast hunger of the heart. Belief is of the intellect, but experience is an alchemic transformation of the entire organism. Tis is why the Psalmist sings, "Taste and see that the Lord is good!"

God is a psycho-physical experience, transmuting the cells and atoms of the flesh every bit as much as the mind. This is the message of Yoga: the physiology of enlightenment. And this is the message of Christianity: "Glorify God in your body!" (1 Corinthians 6:20) The nativity of Christ-consciousness in the infant body of Jesus is a sign that our own flesh, and all that we call "matter," cannot be separated from the Spirit, the breath of creation, the dance of grace through form.

We do not taste God by reading a book, or taking a class at university. These are only preliminary discussions about the thought of God. The experience of God happens in an amazed or broken heart, nourished by tears of yearning. When the yearning is deep enough, grace appears in the form of a teacher, a real teacher whose candle is lit, and who passes that flame to your own candle. This is initiation. The wick is your body. When that flame embraces you, every cell becomes a lamp, every atom a spark, all of you consumed in the breath of the Divine.

If someone asks me, "Do you believe in God?" I answer, "No, of course not. How could a mere belief contain the divine mystery? I do not want to believe, I want to taste and see!" To believe is to carve a graven image out of thought. This idea of "God" is more dangerous than any idol carved of silver or gold. Men will kill for such an idol of thought, and they will kill millions. But no one has ever killed for God. God is love, and love does not kill.

Now is the time for us to transcend every thought of God and begin to listen to the mystics instead of the philosophers, the preachers, and the politicians. The mystics speak not knowledge, but un-knowing, not ideology, but ecstasy. The mystics speak from the silence of astonishment.

Now here, my friend, is some supreme foolishness: the drop contains the sea! For billions of years, the elemental ocean of the Self has been evolving each of us into a person, a droplet, an infinitesimal singularity which expresses the infinitude of Being in a hologram, through incarnation in body after body, so that the Self could experience communion as a person, with another person. The end of all this evolution, the goal of the universe's longing for its Self, is the joy of union with God. Do you think, after such a cosmic journey, the goal would be to disappear into an ocean of "oneness," without a trace of personhood?

In truth, your drop has its own unique flavor, and when the drop returns to the ocean, the whole ocean tastes like this drop. When Jesus returned to God the father, he did not lose his identity as Jesus; rather, the ocean of Christ-consciousness took on the flavor of Jesus. And that is why you may have a personal relationship with him today, even in the depths of the most "non-dual" meditation.

The bee makes a pilgrimage to many flowers, then comes home to the hive. In the hive there is one honey, tasting of the whole garden. And that taste contains the savor of each blossom. So, in God's piquancy, you may taste Krishna, Amitabha, or the Goddess. You may savor the fragrance of Jesus, the personhood of Mary Magdalene, or beloved poets like Rumi, Mira, Dorothy W., all the ancestors. Scripture calls this ocean of flavors, "a cloud of witnesses," and "the communion of saints," signifying the truth of diversity in the Unity, and the glory of each sparkling Soul in the sacred darkness of the Godhead.

So Jesus whispered this mystery through his remarkable words in John 14: "In my Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have told you. There I go to prepare a place for you..."


Painting: 'Adoration' by Gerrit Van Honthorst, b. 1592