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Advent Retreat Session - Dec 23rd - Wisdom Waypoints
Dear Advent Retreat Participant,
This is our fourth week of the Integral Light Shining in the Dark Advent Retreat and final week of journeying together around the material in this way. Cynthia joined us for this past Friday’s interactive gathering bringing fresh insights and perspectives for us as we continue to engage the powerful themes present in this Advent season. If you were unable to join us live, the recording of that session is now posted in the course materials for Advent Retreat Session — December 16th.
This week in the material we are working with, Cynthia focuses in on how the Paschal dimension is woven throughout Advent. She speaks of a dynamic loop of Patior and Fiat, suffering and letting be, that flow from one to another. If you are keeping pace together you will want to listen to and meditate on the following audio teachings from Days 4 & 5:
4:1 Intentional Suffering as Cosmogonic Agency
4:2 Annunciation and Fiat
4:3 The Lord Have Mercy Exercise
5:1 Apocalypse, or “The Unveiling”
Continue to engage these teachings with the intelligence of your three centers, aware of what arises in your intellectual center’s thoughts, your moving center’s sensations and gestures, and your emotional center’s feeling tones, sympathetic vibrations. Listen with the ear of your heart and consider these highlights from Cynthia’s teachings along with a few reflection questions:
In 4:1 Intentional Suffering as Cosmogonic Agency Cynthia shows us the many dimensions of Patior, ‘I am acted upon’ or ‘to come under,’ which can at first appear contradictory—passion, passive, and patience—but rather reveal to us a gamut. On one end of the gamut is the mechanical side when we are stuck in the grip of a reactive intense emotion (a passion) without realizing ‘I am acted upon’ the intensity of which is a measure of automaticity. It is an involuntary mechanical passivity. On this end we often experience stupid suffering as a result of the frustration of our false self programs and waste our life energy in dramas. On the other end of the gamut is a conscious allowing, a lofty self donation that is a creative act because it makes space for life to happen, it is a core piece of love when love is real. We wait in patience through an active letting be. On this end we begin to work with conscious suffering, when we choose to decide whether we want to use our actualized being-energy to birth a new self, which Cynthia mentions is the real birth. Ponder:
- What might it look like for you to begin to engage the practical work in yourself, that Cynthia suggests, to fully experience and interiorize the whole gamut of Patior?
- What practices cultivate in you the staying power that can stand against the overwhelming tsunamis of emotions which squander our energy in reactivity?
- When have you had an experience of the kind of staying power that kicked in allowing you not to be overwhelmed by these strong mechanical reactions when your buttons were being pushed? Can you begin to locate that staying power in your body? In sensation? How might you continue to strengthen that within?
In 4:2 Annunciation and Fiat Cynthia helps us to see how Patior (to suffer, to come under) and Fiat (let it be) are “joined at the hip.” When it comes to stupid suffering, all the religious traditions across the board point to getting a handle on it, but then vary on the idea of whether suffering remains beyond that. Cynthia points out that the Western traditions say that “we do experience suffering as an irreducible condition of life in this world and probably in all manifest form” because “its origin is deep in the hidden abyss of God” and “its purpose is cosmogonic.” “It is how something comes into being.” She says that suffering and anguish are buried in the conditions of which anything can manifest and that the suffering gives birth to the allowing. . . that suffering is not the result of Adam and Eve making a great mistake, the mystery goes deeper than human misdoing. She shows us that the whole history of creation hinges on three Fiats: at the beginning when God created the world, “the cosmogonic Fiat”; when Mary said yes to becoming the handmaiden of Jesus Christ, birthing “the diaphonous Spirit fully concretized, fully visible in human flesh, in finite form”; and when Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane in all of his agony chose to follow through with suffering the pain body of the world, bearing it on the world’s behalf. Cynthia says that in those three Fiats we see voluntary conscious suffering bearing fruit in new creation. The first brought us the world, the second brought us the beginning headwaters of a different kind of reality, and the third brings us the reunion and the harmonizations of the planet’s celestial life, the binding together in a deep way of paying the cost of that pain that was voluntarily accepted by God that anything could come into being in the first place. In Advent we get to explore this relationship between anguish and conscious allowing with fecundity, creativity, and generativity in which the images of pregnancy and birth are so prevalent. And Mary, more than anyone else in the Christian tradition, bears witness, symbolizes, and incarnates this. Wonder:
- If suffering is not entirely the result of human failure and is part of the inevitable conditions of manifestation, how does this impact the way you perceive the world?
- What arises within when you consider that we can consciously choose to bear a piece of the irreducible nature of suffering which is a condition of life in this world?
- Have you ever found yourself in difficult circumstances beyond your control (Cynthia gives the examples of cancer, taking care of two parents with Alzheimer’s, etc) and chosen to work with those circumstance consciously bearing and enduring them? What fruit may have emerged from that conscious suffering?
In 5:1 Apocalypse, or “The Unveiling” Cynthia names that there is anxiety out there all around us and she sees this in relation to the current collective Dark Night of the Spirit we are going through. This collective dark night of the spirit is the complete upending of the structures of perception which is inherently disorienting and destabilizing at one level and at another level is the fertile ground of something new springing forth to come into form. She knows that all of us are here because we want to help in some way and “one of the most important functions. . . is to learn how to hold our ground in the midst of the anxiety, that is to not get swept down stream by currents of disorientation and pain that are out there.” We can find that which within us can be free enough not to get caught in it, and hold onto the reality that it is a necessary part of creative unfolding. We can begin to offer the missing strength around us, directly infusing it in the planet right now. We can be a bearer of courage, not letting fear deter us from where we need to go. We are priests of our own lives whenever we participate in intentional suffering. Through sacrifice, we make it holy. And we are met. Mercy rushes in. . .
Consider:
- How can you continue to learn how to hold your ground in the midst of the anxiety and disorientation that is part of this collective Dark Night of the Spirit? What can stand the ground while the deficient mental structure loses its dominance?
- Cynthia says we know it hurts and we want it to stop, we seek comfort…how do we grow into the Fiat itself?
- As this culture is disintegrating, what does it look like to be hospice workers and doulas?
Lastly, as an overarching theme for this month of Advent, you have been invited to work with the inner task that Cynthia put forth in regard to shifting our relationship with the nature of time. In our usual mental structure of consciousness, we view time as linear and sequential. This month we are exploring the multi-dimensions of time by opening to a whole different way of tasting time, even if only in glimpses. We are opening to the possibility of moving through time with intention and awareness, rather than being a passive slave to time.
Last week’s task was: to bring one of your underutilized centers of intelligence and perceptivity more online. Just as the three centers are invited to be co-present and in relationship, so too are the different manifestations of time. Gebser says, time “manifests itself as the unity of past, present, and future; as the creative principle, the power of imagination, as work, and as “motoricity.” And along with the vital, psycho, biological, cosmic, rational, creative, sociological, and technical aspects of time, we must include—last but not least—physical-geometrical time which is designated as the “fourth dimension” (p.285, The Ever-Present Origin). See if the intensification of attention through three centered awareness can allow you to continue to shift your relationship with the nature of time, directly tasting the different manifestations of time. In what ways does this shift anything more in your relationship with the nature of time?
This week’s task is to engage Cynthia’s invitation, and fundamental inner task, to sense your feet on the ground for some time every day. Sense the connectedness flowing through you, origin springing forth in each moment, help abundantly moving toward you in all times from those who have been of service before us and to come, outside of time. As you sense your feet, expand your attention to the sensation and feeling of that which within you (with the help from beyond you) has the capacity of staying power, strength, and courage in the midst of the surrounding anxiety, disorientation, and destabilization.
This Friday will be our final interactive gathering for this course although you will continue to have unlimited access to the course content. Thank you once again for your participation in this exploration together. Whether you kept pace or were present at the gatherings or not, your presence was felt and sensed.
In the Light of Advent,
Heather
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