"I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there' and it will move.  Nothing will be impossible to you"   Matthew 17:20 NIV

 

Extract from

SUNDAY SERVICE

June 5, 2005

by Aeptha

 

MEDITATION OF THE DESERT FATHERS

I would like to speak today of a form of Gnosticism which was first recorded in the 2^nd, 3^rd and 4^th centuries by those who were called the Desert Fathers. These were monks who had left the traditional form of life, had given up all their worldly goods, and sought refuge in the silence. But in truth as I read of their accounts what I recognize is that which comes from a much earlier time, for as we know, truth is everlasting for those who reach for it and hold it in their hearts, and who have the courage to grow with it. And what I recognize is a formula, a way of being, that was practiced in the ancient temples of both God and Goddess. For the Novice, the Neophyte in the temple was always sent first to the wisdom of nature. It was recognized that nature is not separated from God or Goddess; nature expresses itself in praise and perpetual prayer, for those who have the eyes to see and the ears to hear. And so these wise monks deepened in Gnosis, in their relationship with life, in what seemed to be a very harsh landscape, which was the desert itself.

And so when their Neophytes or Novices would come and seek them out in these bare plains and on these craggy mountains, the first thing that these wise monks would do was to instruct them in a form of meditation, of living prayer, that expressed itself in nature. First they would first tell them to pray like a Mountain. I have an image of these very eager Novices who had given up their worldly possessions, not unlike what was asked of those who entered into temple life in arcane times, and stood at the door ready to be enlightened.  And so you have this Priestess or Monk that comes to them and says, “Go out there and pray like a mountain.” I can imagine, knowing some of my own thought processes when I was a Neophyte, what I would have thought. “What do you mean pray like a mountain? I came here for enlightenment! I came here to serve! I came here to heal!”

So what does it mean to pray like a mountain?  I would like to share with you that in the not that distant past I had the privilege and the opportunity to call upon these things that I will share with you this day.  So listen, for they will serve you well, as they have served me well. When you pray like a mountain, you become the mountain. Eternity is behind you, eternity is with you, and eternity is before you.  For you are beyond the appearance of the movement of time as we understand it and you are deeply rooted in the present, and the Presence is rooted in you. And you are deep, and reaching up, and wide, and vast, and yet simultaneously you recognize yourself as being small upon the earth. The mountain watches the seasons come and go, and it knows itself as dry, and it knows itself as abundant with harvest. And there is no judgment or attachment to these things, they simply are. And so the novice would sit in this posture and his being would be rooted with the Presence, beyond the movement of time as we understand it.

Then there would come the time in which he would be called forward to the next level of understanding. When it was recognized that he had internalized the Mountain, the monk would send this novice to contemplate the Poppy. The poppy raises itself up to the light. It raises its stem up just as we raise up our spine as we reach for the light, and wherever the light is, we seek it out. And yet we also learn humility from the poppy, for when the wind comes, the poppy bends, for as great as its love of the light is, it also recognizes that it is humble in that light and is not greater than it. The poppy also has a relationship with time that is very different to the mountain, for the poppy will wither and die, and yet all of its beauty expresses simply for the sake of sheer beauty. It has no expectation that it will ever be seen or appreciated, but out of love it nonetheless radiates its glory and beauty. And when the time comes it will wither and die, for it always knows that its time upon the earth is short.  Those of you who are familiar with the earth traditions know that the great Shamans always teach that upon one shoulder you have life and upon the other you have death, and you must have a relationship with both. For it is only when you have a relationship with both that you can live and love fully, because you choose life, not in denial of your death, but in celebration of death which then brings forth new life.  And as that poppy dies, its body is given over to create fertile soil for new life to emerge.

And the time would come that the novice, the neophyte, after learning the lessons of eternity and of time, would then be directed to go to the Ocean. And the ocean is the breath of life, movement. It does not take long for anyone who has been to the ocean to remember the feeling of that rhythm; the in and the out; I exhale, I inhale, I am exhale, I am inhale. Many of us tend to lose consciousness as we lie on the water or on the shore, and we become like the sea; our consciousness becomes very fluidic. But the priestesses and the monks knew that in order to continue the awakening of the heart one must choose consciousness. So while you know yourself as the water, you should still hold the consciousness of being the drop of water which is part of the whole. This is necessary because this enables you to have continuous consciousness rather than losing consciousness. How many of you in your meditation state or even in your prayer state, go on automatic pilot, or you just disappear? Go to the breath of life, the sea of life, and work with the understanding that while you meditate on the sea, you will retain the consciousness of yourself as a drop in the water. This will serve you well for it will then enable you to know yourself as the breath of God.

As I understand it from my reading[i], at this stage, two or three years have passed for the novice. We are on the fast-track and we do not have two or three years, but there is still a large community of about 20,000 monks who live on an island in Greece who practice this form of prayer and meditation, which is known as Hesychism. And it is still very strong in orthodox communities, whereas it was separated out around the 10th century because it espoused that you could reach the Divine yourself, and as you can imagine that created a little bit of a political stir. So not unlike the Gnostics, they were pushed to the side.

So, we have meditated as a mountain, we have become the poppy who knows itself as time, we have become the living conscious breath through being the drop upon the ocean of life, and now we are called to meditate like the Bird. There are many references in the Bible to the prayers of animals, where the roar of a lion is a prayer, the chirping of birds, the cooing of doves, and even the growling of the bear. And so at this point the novices were told that it was not enough for their hearts just to beat, but that their whole chests must become the movement of God, of Goddess. And in the particular account that I was reading one of the chants that was often utilized was the Kyrie Eleison chant, because in truth it is an invocation. It is an invocation that calls to God, to Goddess, to lie gently upon you, to enter into your heart, and to enter into the heart of all beings and all sentient life. And so the novices would be instructed to carry this chant perpetually within them, so that no matter what they were doing or what they were saying, they would be in a perpetual state of chant.

After this point in their training they would be invoked to go to a different level of their being, and to go into what is called the Meditation of Faith, or as it is called in this tradition, the Meditation of Abraham. This is where you enter deep into the heart so that the Divine is seeded within yourself and it becomes very personal. Up to this point the meditation has been on a transcendent level, but now it becomes a very personal relationship with God, with Goddess, with the Christ.  It is the anchoring of the faith of the mustard seed, so that it might take root and grow.

We have talked about faith before, and I think it is worthy to speak of it again because there tends to be so much confusion around the implications of faith. I know that many of you have had experiences in your lives where you felt that faith betrayed you, and so there is perhaps a reluctance to embrace this concept, much less choose to place that seed of faith in your heart and nourish it and feed it so that it would grow.  Buddha said that faith is the beginning of all good things, for faith embodies all potentiality. Faith is the recognition that in this life, there is all potential. And there is that which is called bright faith, when we have an experience of upliftment and we feel bigger than self. And so we understand faith as all potential, but it becomes something much more personal, and it is something we experience. There is a moment of epiphany where we feel a sense of transcendence, and we can actually feel faith. That is bright faith, and at that moment, hope is rooted in our hearts.  But for many of us that is where it stops, and even that seed seems to die away. The days pass and that good feeling fades, or worse yet, from our human perspective it seems that whatever we had placed our faith in betrayed us; it wasn't what we thought, or the person or situation looked different.  You see bright faith is a very critical time because this is when words become a living experience. But that is also where the work should begin because then we must deepen and mature with it because for most of us bright faith becomes associated with what I would call bright hope, all shiny potential.  

There may be some things that you really believe should happen, and you may have a magnanimous reason for it, like wanting something for somebody else. Well, are these not control issues, and co-dependent issues? You say you have faith, but only if God or Goddess acts right! Only if your teachers act right when they tell you what you should do. And I hope that my students can attest to the fact that I do not act right, that is if I am doing my job, because guess what? That would be about ego inflation; because this whole process of meditation that we have been going through is to transfer our focus out of our ego centered self into what is called the transcendent Self. It is not about having our way, and it is not about us dictating to others and to the universe, much less to God and Goddess, how to do their job! That is not faith.

We have heard about the demons that attack and undermine which we know of as the Seven Deadly Sins, but the one sin in every tradition that they say will undermine the quickest, whether you are a novice, a neophyte, an adept, an initiate, or whatever we choose to call those who have chosen to step forward, is Doubt. And doubt is rooted in fear, because you see that is what we set up when we put conditions on our faith. In other words that bright hope that I was talking about is not real hope, because Hope means that you know that there is Light even when everything seems dark.  Hope is not an outline of what something is supposed to look like. Hope is knowing, absolutely, that no matter what it looks like, there is still life, and because of that, there is hope.  And by the way, I do need to clarify that life is not necessarily in form. Hope recognizes that even if I cannot see it, even if it does not look the way that I want it to look, even if I am stumbling in the darkness, at least I am stumbling! And there’s enough light in here that I’m on my feet, or even on my belly crawling, but by gosh I’m moving! That is hope. False hope is, “I’m in the darkness but if You do this and this, then I know that my faith is real, and I know You’re real.” That is based on fear because some part of us believes that we are all alone, and so we manipulate and we control, but we are really operating from an essential fear which doubts that there truly is inter-connectedness to a higher power, to Goddess, the Light, or whatever you choose to call it. And particularly when we step beyond our comfort zone and challenge our beliefs, because when faith as that mustard seed grows, we face new fears. Faith brings one to a different level of courage.

Faith sits in the heart, and by the way, in most traditions, faith is verb. It is seen as action, and all Divine action comes from within. Courage also comes from the heart and that is why we speak of the courage of a lion, of the lion-hearted. Courage of the spiritual warrior is from the heart, from faith. And so when you begin to meditate at this level you begin to move to where you embody faith, and its natural extension is sacrifice. Now let us not misunderstand sacrifice. It is not about martyrdom, but it is freedom from that which binds us, from our attachments, from our self-conceived notions, from our perceptions of what safety is. That is sacrifice. It is liberation, but from the standpoint of the personality it can be very painful, because the things that we are attached to and identify with, those are the things that we think we are, and we think that is the way it should be; we think that is the way it should look and it should feel. So it is painful for us to sacrifice our cherished ideals, our cherished desires, our cherished perceptions of what things should be.

The final stage of this meditation is known as the Meditation of the Christ. By this time the novice has progressed through different levels of initiations, and might be at a level that is comparable in our tradition with the level of high priest/ess which entails a level of sacrifice and the embodiment of faith. And it was recognized that this meditation could not be taught, for it was the descent of the Holy Spirit, and who but the Great Mothers themselves who know the Christ, could teach one of the Christ.  It is the descent of the Holy Spirit into a heart that is open in faith, gnosis, love, wisdom, truth, courage, hope, and the willingness to sacrifice, because everything, everything becomes about God and Goddess, and not about me. And then, and only then, can one begin to seek to embody the Christ consciousness.

Pathworking

And I invite us to deepen in the Presence as the Mountain, with eternity behind us, within us and before us. Embody the mountain, with the changing of the seasons, with acceptance, non-judgment, a state of Beingness. Become the mountain. And even as we are the embodiment of eternity, so we are also of time, and so we become as the Poppy. And we seek out the Light. We reach up and turn to wherever the light is.  And we reveal our beauty in this light without seeking anything in return. For we love for the sake of loving, always knowing that too shall whither and die, and there is no fear. And there is only love, and beauty and aspiration for the light, without seeking anything in return. And we feel the breath as it moves in and out, as we inhale and exhale, as we are inhaled and as we are exhaled, for we are held in the bigger body of She Who Breathes. For She Who Breathes extends beyond this earth into the skies, into the planets, and Her Body encompasses all, Her love creates all. And on the waters of Her life, we breathe and are breathed. And we are the everlasting breath, and we also know that we are consciousness. We are both the water and the drop. And even as we expand above and below and all around, we know ourselves as Spirit.

And within our hearts is the song of the ancient language of the birds, for we are both the embodiment of the message and the messenger, for that is the secret of the language of the birds. We are the divine message, and we are the divine messenger.  And so our hearts beat and sing a continuous prayer of praise. It flows through our blood as our hearts beat our blood. It flows through the blood of the earth, through the ley-lines, and it radiates out and is carried on the winds.

And now within our hearts, you who are the praise of all creation, the living prayer, we go to the throne of faith that sits within the heart. For this is the throne of living Kingship, the Divine Kingship. This is the throne of Isis, of Osiris. This is the throne of the Kingdom within. This is the throne of the Christos. This is the throne where in truth your true Self resides.  Go to this throne. Sit upon this sacred throne and know your Self as divine. And in knowing yourself as divine you will know all life as divine. For the kingdom is within. You are both the King and the Kingdom.  Let the Kingship reign. Let that which has been separated be reconciled. Deepen in this sacred Kingship, for the Mothers, Who know their children, know our prayers and our aspirations, and know that even though we are as little children, we have crawled upon this throne, and we have lifted our arms up and called to the Holy Spirit. We call to the Great Mothers, “Teach us Great Mothers, teach us, fill us with the Holy Spirit that we may come to know and be the Christos, the anointed one.”  For in you is all hope, all love, all peace, all wisdom; in you is all gnosis. She has come to the throne, for She is the throne.

Let the quickening occur. Feel the glory.  Become the glory. We do not leave our faith here, for our faith is within, and it is growing like the Tree of Life, above and below. And I invite you to stay as long as you feel called in this sanctum of sanctums with the Great Mothers.