Growing Corn — Orthodoxy & the Modern Mystic Part II

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“I want no spirituality that doesn’t grow corn,” a fellow indignantly huffed to me a month or so ago. He was was parroting a Native American saying concerning the utility of spiritual belief and practice. But the statement begs the question: Is it really possible for us to not grow corn? That is to say, can we suddenly become non-creative beings?

The answer is no. So long as we wear a body, we cannot not create. The closest we can come is to create the illusion that we’re not creating, which is itself, of course, a creation.

So the real question is not whether or not spiritual practice grows corn, but what kind of crop is being grown and how. In other words, how do we create, individually and collectively; and why is it that even the greatest of our historical and living masters are still seemingly subject to the same forces of “fate” that the rest of us are?

After all: Xenophanes was banished from Colophone; Socrates was tried and executed; Joshua bar Joseph (Jesus) became the victim of dirty politics that led to his execution; Shankara disappeared under mysterious circumstances at Kedarnath in the Himalayas; Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj was declared an infidel by the ulama, the guardians of the Islamic faith, and spent his life running from the law until he was finally caught, imprisoned, and executed; Jnaneshvar was powerless to stop the invading Muslim army; Margarette Porette was burned at the stake; Meister Eckhart was cast out of the Roman Catholic Church by Papal Bull.

Masters one and all, some of whom performed great “miracles.” They all “grew corn,” to put it in the above parlance; fields of corn! Wrestling with demons, healing the sick, some of them even raised the dead. Others did nothing more ordinary than show a profound wisdom that transcended their generation, but they all left an indelible mark in history, and in our consciousness. At the same time, they were seemingly no more imune to the ebbs and flows of the collective consciousness of their day than any of us. The difference was their understanding of, and surrender to, the Divine Whole. Few lives illustrate this better than that of one of mysticism’s most influential teachers. Juan de la Cruz, known to us today as Saint John of the Cross.

John joined Teresa of Avila’s Discalced Carmelite order, and along with her, was one of those daring souls who taught a traditional mystical path to Unity based on internal recollection at a time in history when the Inquisition was in full swing. Today we call the practice they taught “meditation.”

At under five feet in height, John was a small man, yet it is said that all who came in contact with him were startled by the intensity of his devotion, and the supernatural aura that seemed to surround him.

Like the “yuppies” of the nineteen eighties, by his late twenties and early thirties John’s career as a monk (he was now going by the name of Brother John of the Cross) took off. He became confessor to the nuns in Teresa’s original convent, and soon became confessor for Mother Teresa herself. The Discalced Order was flourishing and well connected in the Catholic hierarchy thanks to Mother Teresa’s political acumen.

Then came the inevitable crash. After much political infighting, the Discalced Carmelites were ordered disbanded by the Carmelite Vicar-general, and through his emissary, Tostado, he ordered the “rebel monks and nuns” exommunicated. Though an inquisition was never started against Mother Teresa, she was replaced as Prioress of her own order.

As a further blow, a band of armed men were sent to arrest John and some of his companions. John was flogged mercilessly and transfered to Toledo, that famous bastion of the Inquisition. In a classic show trial, the Inquisitor tried to convince John to plead guilty to a minor charge of disobedience to a superior. If John would compromise and plead guilty to the minor charge, he could save his career as a monk. For reasons we may never know, he refused.

In December of 1557 Brother John was found guilty of rebellion and contumacy and condemned to an unspecified term of imprisonment. He was thrown into a six foot by ten foot closet. A room that had previously served as a privy (outhouse) to an adjoining guest chamber. It became his home for nine months, lit only by a small toilet sized hole at the top. His bed was a board covered with a rug and he was fed scraps of dry bread and an occasional sardine.

No change of clothes was given him during the entire tenure. Consequently, his body became covered with sores and lice. During the winter the privy was freezing cold; during summer the heat was stifling. On Fridays, which were Catholic Feast Days, he was taken to the refectory where the Friars made him kneel in the center of the room and take bits of dry bread and water like a dog. The Prior would admonish and taunt him with reproaches, after which all the monks in turn would strike him across the shoulders with a cane.

I wonder how many of us would have shaken our fist at heaven after such treatment, issued retorts, or fought back? Are we not taught today that:

If we’re truly spiritual we’ll have a life filled with joy and happiness all the time and nothing bad will ever happen to us? I mean, after allÂ …
If we’re truly spiritual we’ll be in absolute control of our lives and the creative process. Nothing uncreated by us (read: unplanned) will ever happen again. We create our own reality, right? Not only thatÂ …
If we’re truly spiritual then we’ll have lots of preternatural powers with which to impress our friends and neighbors and, most importantly, those pesky infidel non-believers who need a good comeuppance.

The popular spiritual dogma of today. Typical of most dogma, there are precious kernels of truth imbedded in the nourishing fertilizer. Typical of most masters, John said, and did, nothing.

Yes, we create our own reality. Our own reality. We do not create the reality of our neighbor or the collective. Our egos latch onto the first part–we create our own reality–and leave off the much less glamorous second half: So does everyone else. The product of all these individual creations is a complex network of consciousness called the collective over which we have little direct influence.

In struggling mightily to advance our individual agendas, we often forget that we may put ourselves in the position of going head to head with equally sovereign souls advancing the exact opposite agenda, or even worse, a whole collective! As both Ammachi and Deepak Chopra point out, bucking the collective tide through disobedience or demonstration is a meaningless exercise. Right action, compassionately taken in concert with others of like mind, is the only way we will ever meaningfully change our world. And then, Chopra says, only when the collective consciousness has reached critical mass.

So the question becomes: What is “right action?”

The answer lies in our own soul, which is in constant contact with All That Is; those levels of Divine Consciousness of which even our sleepy planetary collective is mostly unaware. Out of the field of pure potentiality, the very chaos of life, comes an order more fantastic and beautiful than anything we could possibly imagine.

The trick is to learn how to surrender to it.

It is a Truth that so long as we wish to retain our illusion of control over our lives, our souls will let us. We can build empires, go broke, get sick, kill, steal, manipulate; all those things we, as a race, just love to do. Our soul–God, if you will, doesn’t care!

Just don’t plan on such a life leading to happiness and bliss. One doesn’t have to look very far to find mountains of reports on those who’ve had everything: money, sex, power; and yet who found their lives as barren as an empty field. A lifetime of struggling to bear fruit, only to discover they’d only planted weeds.

Only when we surrender our Human Order to Divine Order and let it go to work in our lives will we find true bliss. But don’t expect such a life to always look wonderful by the standards of the popular orthodoxy:

For it was during John’s exile, in his tiny privy closet, beaten bloody, with sores and lice all over his body, that Saint John of the Cross penned his exquisite treatise on the Dark Night of the soul and its union with its Lord. It was written on scraps of paper given to him by a sympathetic jailer.

John’s surrender to Divine Order landed him in prison. God needed to cleanse him, to remove of every source of distraction, so that he could hear that inner voice with perfect clarity. The result? A document that is still today, five hundred years later, the premier authority on mystical spiritual evolution.

And once the task was finished, Divine Order moved him on.

After nine months John would escape and recover from his mistreatment. He would then go on to become Rector of the Carmelite college, which he founded at the university of BÃ¦za. He would be made Prior of Granada, and later of Segovia. The heights to which he would rise would far exceed those he attained prior to his nine months in prison.

The principles of creation work for everybody, all the time. It doesn’t take a mystic to make them work, or even someone religious. They work for the most pragmatic agnostic and rational scientist with equal faculty.

It takes a mystic of the first order to understand that we will never have control over the external environment created by the sleepy collective. It isn’t real. It’s illusion, an illusion created and maintained by the lot of us.

It takes a mystic to understand that the real challenge, the real control point, is is not external, but internal. It is the process of growing through endurance until you pass the point of resignation and arrive at complete surrender. Freed from ego based agendas and timelines, we open ourselves to a Divine view of the physical world. We see, as Saint John of the Cross did, a tiny fragment of the Divine plan operating in the ever shifting mirage of the physical world, and have revealed our role within it at that illusory moment in time.

This is the path to mastery, to eternal joy, peace, and bliss. May you find yours.