The Wisdom of Selflessness

Tonight at the Vajrayana Institute, Geshe Samten continued teaching Lama Tsong Khapa's Lam Rim Chen Mo, 'The Special Insight on the Path of Enlightenment'. This week we read about the path of training in analytical meditation, which is pursued after stability has been reached in calm abiding meditation. The intuitive hits that I got around several of my stuckness-es inspired a Chariots of Fire style knees-up run this evening (ah, here's my mojo...).

Anyway.

One key learning for me has been that dharma words have quite specific meaning in Buddhist discourse.

'Emptiness' is a good example, and was a key to most of my revelations tonight.

Geshe Samten started out advising us to debate and discuss these ideas, to interrupt and to argue, while he was teaching us the points of distinction between the commentaries on the text from the great teachers. By virtue of this discursive practice, he argued that we 'bring the memory alive', and are in a better position to analyse our own interpretation of the texts once we have listened to and understood other people's perspectives.

Chapter 7, 'Why Insight Is Needed', starts from our achievements in concentrated meditative serenity, which include non-discursiveness, clarity and the delightful and blissful physical and mental benefits of these two. While these are wonderful achievements, bodhisattvas throughout time who wish to be liberated from samsara realise that concentration itself cannot eliminate the conception of the self. Concentration does not reveal profound meaning, or wisdom.

Wisdom is the dawn of knowledge that obliterates the seeds of confusion. Wisdom is proposed to come from being 'one who listens to others', this one who will then be 'free from aging and death'.

Buddha proposed this idea, of listening to others, to refute the notion that we can develop a notion of selflessness from within ourselves.

Selflessness takes on a critical meaning here too. In my recent posts, I've been rattling on about the deconstruction of the ego, about how I never felt I had a very strong ego because I've felt as though I've been most grounded when I hold other people's needs as quite dear. My take on ego could be loosely termed as a form of 'selflessness', although not a very pious form of selflessness, at that. My reified selflessness looks like an empty cardboard cutout after tonight, where I now understand selflessness in terms of the Lam Rim text. This is an emptiness of the self, both as a person, and emptiness of a self as an experience of all phenomena. Ultimately here, there is boundless groundlessness. This can be clarified by analysing the characteristics of an object across many levels of reality:

- the reality of it's gross form - shape, colour, size;

- the reality of it's subtle impermanence - realised through inferential cognising, or logic;

- the final reality of the emptiness of the object, where no analysis can be continued beyond this point, the collapse of logic;

- and finally, seeing all these things, the dawn of knowledge of special insight into emptiness, which eliminates the seeds of ignorance.

Here's another important point: the seeds of ignorance are in the grasping. Grasping, with the mind, is the delimiter on samsara and nirvana. That self of me, who wants to know all about everyone elses needs, she's still grasping, still identified. The cycle of samsara is continued. This notion can be logically followed all the way to generosity, to great compassion and loving kindness and joyous effort, all of which are noble and worthy and fulfilling, but none of which can break the cycle of samsara, as none of them directly engage with the root of ignorance and confusion. In terms of the Lam Rim, it could only be the opposite of ignorance, the opposite of confusion, a light for these darknesses, that stancds a chance of dispelling their vile traps. Only the total opposite of a conditioned mind can eliminate ignorance.

The wisdom of selflessness eliminates the root of cyclic existence.

I like it. And I love running.

Terce - the third hour in Roman reckoning

Avoid getting into debt, except the debt of mutual love. If you love your fellow men you have carried out your obligations. Love is the one thing that cannot hurt your neighbour; that is why it is the answer to every one of the commandments. Romans 13:8,10

Detranscendentalisation - Hegel via Habermas

'Hegel's preferred mode of explanation refers to various forms of mutual recognition. From early on, he chooses 'being in love with and being loved by somebody' as a key to analysing the modern version of the classical Aristotlean notion of ethical life. In a love relationship, the object of recognition is the character and natural individuality of an entire, sexually attractive person. The passionate relation itself is described as 'being for the other' (Sein fur Anderes) which gives the lover in turn 'the satisfaction of having one's own essence in the other'. In a symmetrical relation the point of mutual recognition is that the two persons involved seem to sacrifice their independence; but in fact each gains a new kind of independence by coming to recognise, in the mirror of the eyes of the other person, who he or she is. Both become for themselves the kind of characters they mutually attribute to each other. Both gain awareness of their individuality by seeing their own images reflected in the dense and deep exchange of an intimate interpersonal relation.'

Habermas, J. (1999). From Kant to Hegel and Back again – The Move Towards Detranscendentralization. European Journal of Philosophy, 7 (2), 129 - 157

Interiority

Have you ever looked at a photo of somebody that you loved, who has disincarnated from the earth, and found yourself smiling at that photo, just as you would if you met them on your front doorstep?

I've had reason, lately, to spend some time thinking about this - when someone leaves our mortal earth, when I'm most sharply aware, and hurting, over the sense of all of this life-ness that I'm graced to be a part of, but the other being no longer has access to, when a part of my life has been absorbed with time spent with this person, what of the persons interiority gets left behind, here, on earth, amongst us?

Interiority becomes apparent in the sharing, the moments of co-existence, that we have between us, these moments that let me know bits about who that person is, on the inside. Revealed this way, interiority has many layers. There's the outer level, of actions-in-common, of ten-pin bowling games, of hours spent in geography class learning about tundra, of passing the black pepper grinder at the dinner table. There's the limbic level, of likes and dislikes in common, parmesan cheese, Julian Clary, was Red, White or Blue reaallly the best movie? There's the time spent enjoying each others company, comfortably silent on a long drive, passionately ranting about Intervention policy, all of these.

There's that level further down, of deeply knowing, of resonating with, each others fears, anxieties, dreams, visions. There's the shredding heartbreak of having been through a shared trauma, or sharing the raw, cold edged playground bench that we've sat on together on the other side of it. For some people there's fifty years of marriage that captures the shared time/space corner where you can see the movements of one partner echoed in the other as they help each other make dinner in the kitchen. Words can't account for that level of knowing. 'Love' doesn't quite capture the earthed-connectedness that I sense when I hit this core of knowing with another human being. It's not an interaction, it's a tune, a pattern ingrained and intertwined, hummed in the moment.

It's stunning to me to sit in an observant space and actually watch my own responses to other people. No two, no two, of my intonations, my eye-brow raises, my hand gestures, my big-arsed or sneaky-Machiavellian smiles are the same for each person that I am blessed to encounter in a day. Every interaction between two human beings is it's own language. Every single one.

So when I smile back at that photo, of that person now departed, I think that smile might reflect back to the world a small component of the interiority of that other human being. Without myth, without channelled spirits, without resorting to Freudian psychology, pheremonal biology or game theory, we all, each of us, carry around this vast accumulation of a lifetime spent experiencing the interiority of others.

En-souled.

To be honest, there's not much about our world that I can honestly say makes me want to be a better person. This awareness, that I'm sort of a living representative of those people I love so deeply, who have passed from this world, does a lot for helping me to do what I've heard termed recently as 'suck it in'.

Maybe that's X-gen code for inspiration.

On the Memorial of Mary Magdalene

In the 'Secrets of Mary Magdalene', (edited by D. Burstein and A.J. De Keijzer, 2006) former Catholic priest James Carroll heralds Pope St Gregory I (the Great) (d.604) as instrumental in recasting the role of Mary Magdalene as a harlot, as a sinful woman, as the scourge of unworthy thoughts of those celibate monks and priests of the church. Through a series of homilies, St Gregory describes 'the perfume of her flesh', 'the hair to set off her face', 'the proud mouth that kisses the Lord's feet', a scandalous woman, an 'ideal of virtue that drew (her) heat from being a celibate's vision'.

But it's possible, I think, that James Carroll's vehemence may represent a personal struggle. As I read St Gregory's Homily this morning in the Divine Office, Mary's desire, the fire of love that melts the soul, echoes to me as a prayer, in and of itself. Keep on searching.


See what you think:

Ref: http://www.universalis.com/readings.htm

When Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and did not find the Lord’s body, she thought it had been taken away and so informed the disciples. After they came and saw the tomb, they too believed what Mary had told them. The text then says: The disciples went back home, and it adds: but Mary wept and remained standing outside the tomb.

We should reflect on Mary’s attitude and the great love she felt for Christ; for though the disciples had left the tomb, she remained. She was still seeking the one she had not found, and while she sought she wept; burning with the fire of love, she longed for him who she thought had been taken away. And so it happened that the woman who stayed behind to seek Christ was the only one to see him. For perseverance is essential to any good deed, as the voice of truth tells us: Whoever perseveres to the end will be saved.

At first she sought but did not find, but when she persevered it happened that she found what she was looking for. When our desires are not satisfied, they grow stronger, and becoming stronger they take hold of their object. Holy desires likewise grow with anticipation, and if they do not grow they are not really desires. Anyone who succeeds in attaining the truth has burned with such a great love. As David says: My soul has thirsted for the living God; when shall I come and appear before the face of God? And so also in the Song of Songs the Church says: I was wounded by love; and again: My soul is melted with love.

Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek? She is asked why she is sorrowing so that her desire might be strengthened; for when she mentions whom she is seeking, her love is kindled all the more ardently.

Jesus says to her: Mary. Jesus is not recognised when he calls her “woman”; so he calls her by name, as though he were saying: Recognise me as I recognise you; for I do not know you as I know others; I know you as yourself. And so Mary, once addressed by name, recognises who is speaking. She immediately calls him rabboni, that is to say, teacher, because the one whom she sought outwardly was the one who inwardly taught her to keep on searching.

Purity, Danger and Paradox

The final installment from Chapter 3, 'Mystics and Ascetics' from Matthew Bagger's 'The Uses of Paradox' begins with Mary Douglas.

Mary Douglas explores what she calls ‘a sociology of the uses of logic’, delving into an apprehension of what is ‘right and necessary in social relations’. Searching for stability and psychological consonance, we see people vest nature and reason with the authority to regulate social discourse.

Douglas parallels societies responses to hybrids and anomalies that arise in the classification of animal to the attitudes to outsiders held by those societies.Those that view the incorporation of outsiders as enriching will venerate the outsiders and view them as auspicious, while a social group that finds it’s external boundaries threatened by outsiders will abominate anomalies and view them as dangerous.

The biases that form around these beliefs by outsiders enlist emotional energy – abominable beasts shock and viscerally offend, sacred mediators, on the other hand, evoke awe and reverence. If we categorise ‘paradox’ as one of these taxonomic anomalies, we reflect the different responses that can be seen in attitudes towards paradox that are held by the mystics and ascetics. As an encountered ‘alien’, paradox can be brought within the recognised boundaries of the cognisable, or be left beyond the pale.

Bagger’s theory is far more psychological than Douglas’ functionalist thesis, and Bagger proposes that the availability bias of cognitive psychology is evident in human attitudes towards paradox. As could be expected to occur in line with the human capacity to, well, think, experimental evidence shows that merely drawing attention to the potential cause of an event will increase the likelihood that people will identify that potential cause as an actual cause of an event.

In regards to attitudes to anomalies, then, the more subjectively important the external boundary is to a person, the more it is available to their consciousness, and so a generalised attitude to paradox (paradox as an ‘outsider’) could be expected to include that paradox as a threat, which leads to an orientation towards cognitive asceticism, where the dirty, unclear thoughts of paradox get cleaned up, or shipped out.

Note in this context paradox becomes extraordinarily useful for legitimating a social vision, because paradox now functions to exemplify the dangers (or at the other end of the spectrum, rewards) of crossing social boundaries.

Bagger proposes that in order to preserve his argument, he must establish that 1) correlations do exists between attitudes towards outsiders and attitudes towards paradox and 2) demonstrate the direction of causality as running from the attitude to outsiders to the attitude to paradox.

Pseudo-Dionysius’corpus is purported to provide just such evidence – Pseudo-Dionysius argues that God’s powers of purification, illumination and perfection are symbolically reflected in the hierarchy of angels and the hierarchy organising the church. The church, as an image of the Divine, is divided into distinctive orders and powers to reveal that the activities of the divinity are preeminent for the utter holiness and purity, permanence and distinctiveness of their orders. He actually argues that the threat of pollution protects the conformity of the orders, and so for Pseudo-Dionysius, the cosmic order serves to legitimate a social order revealing that his mystical theology does not differ in reflecting his social preoccupations.

The whole purpose of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and liturgy of the church is to initiate people. Salvation can only occur through divinisation, which consists as much as possible of being ‘like and in union with God’. So the very reason for having the social group becomes to bring others into the group, carefully controlled, of course, if the group is to retain it’s character. Pseudo-Dionysius dogmatically reminds us that the ‘impure’ people would defile the sacred teachings – deacons, in fact, are charged with the task of purging the uninitiated, and maintaining the external boundary of the group. The deacons are given responsibility of the doors, and postulants must submit to total purification before they can be allowed to come into the presence of the sacred.

Pseudo-Dionysius views paradoxes congenially – a sacred cognitive mediator that provides occasion for union with the divine. His mystical cognitive practice transforms the self by invoking awe and reverence at the moment of realisation of the immanence of God in all of creation, decentering selfish desires and promoting an identification with God’s wider perspective.

While for Pseudo-Dionysius positive attitudes to incorporation of outsiders produces a bias that views paradox as revelatory, Kirkegaard’s focus on boundaries and limits requires in his understanding that unless one confronts the possibility of offence at the Christian paradox, one is not essentially Christian. Paradox for Kirkegaard arouses emotion that we could identify as expected in approaching the abominable. The paradox is not merely vexing, it is horrible, appalling and offensive. Kirkegaard yokes this to his ascetic suffering – indeed, for Kirkegaard, paradox becomes the pus that hagiographers insist Catherine of Siena chose to drink – both try to overcome offense to transform themselves in relation to God.

The Dark Light

More from Matthew Bagger's 'The Uses of Paradox' - Chapter 3 on 'Mystics and Ascetics'.

Nicholas of Kues(Cusa) was a 15th century German Roman Catholic cardinal, whose writings include mystical treatises and philosophical and mathematical contributions. He was the first to use concave lenses to fix short-sightedness. Personally, on this fact alone I should probably be blessing him as a saint.

Exploring the idea that the absolute maximum cannot be a maximum relative to something else in his ‘De docta ignorantia’, Cusa hits on the idea that there is nothing lesser than the absolute maximum – but this, indeed becomes the absolute minimum! God as the absolute maximum is the transcendent simplicity, prior to contradictories, the enfolding (complicatio) of all and the unfolding (explicatio) of all. God transcends reason (ratio), which imposes names and operates by means of names and their opposites. ‘Learned ignorance’ consists in exploiting and then transcending all words, ‘every act of reason’ to ‘ascend to simple intellectuality to see God incomprehensibly'. The effort of human intelligence should be to raise itself to that simplicity where contradictories coincide.

Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa differ from Hegel in that they both think that the deeper knowledge attained through paradox remains ineffable, whereas Hegel, in pursing the speculative, tries to articulate it. The awe, mystery and piety are what the mystic takes to be revelatory – the resistance to language lends to the paradoxes the sense that they have extraordinary cognitive content to disclose.

The Christian concept of mystery includes both doctrines regarding truth as well as on the very intelligibility of which one must take on faith. Mystery connotes that some truths resist rational articulation – there is a second order cognition that assures against absurdity to reduce first-order dissonance.

In Buddhism, the Madhyamaka texts portray anupalabdhidharmaksanti (intuitive tolerance of the incomprehensibility of all things) as enabling the development of prajna (intense knowing) and aryajnana (holy intuition), that is, enabling a transcendent cognitive state that discloses the ultimate truth about reality. This is necessary to the bodhisattva path, where the individual encountering the Madhyamaka doctrine of the emptiness of all things must paradoxically realise that the doctrine itself therefore must also be empty. Cultivation of tolerance of incomprehensibility allows for the ease of dissonance that the doctrine of emptiness would otherwise arouse.

John of the Cross pursues cognitive asceticism using Pseudo-Dionysius’ darkness and illumination imagery. Following the path of purgation, illumination and union, a night to the senses is the first dark night that is proposed, where, in the ‘Ascent of Mount Carmel’, St John describes the purgation of desires for worldly goods and attachments. The second night of the journey by the soul to union with God is passed by way of faith – that is, as ‘dark as night to the understanding’. Will and memory too are subject to total annihilation, a ‘death to the natural self’ is undertaken. The third night is the destination, God – described as the dark of dawn before the onset of illumination by God’s incomparable light, in ‘The Dark Night’.

Nurturing cognitive dissonance appears to be a key to St John’s Dark Nights – rigorous self denial, coupled with the faith that if God is darkness, we too must be prepared to enter into this darkness, purging the understanding in pursuit of the incomprehensible. For John, the vertigo of self-contradiction induced by faith abets detachment.

Entering deeply into the experience of faith, in and of itself, is what St John proclaims as the path to true mystical experience of God –

‘For not only does it give no information and knowledge, but, as we have said, it deprives us of all other information and knowledge, and blinds us to them, so that they cannot judge it well. For other knowledge can be acquired by the light of the understanding, but the knowledge that is of faith is acquired without the illumination of the understanding, which is rejected for faith’.

Thus, the soul is left resigned, detached and annihilated, self reliance is eliminated, and now it is prepared for union with God. We are humbled.

Note that we are humbled in a different way to that proposed by Kirkegaard, of perpetual martyrdom – St John proposes that after purgation, there is the illumination, the dawning of God.

Mystics and Ascetics

Chapter 3 of Matthew Bagger's 'The Uses of Paradox' is entitled 'Mystics and Ascetics', and is a water-well of deep adventure into the coincidentia oppositorum, touted by more than one mystic as being perhaps the eye to the Divine.

Starting with Hegel, who takes the meaning of a notion he calls 'the speculative' as closely paralleling the meaning of the word 'mystical' - a mysteriousness is captured, that defies the understanding. The mystical is a unity, bringing together the separation and opposition of determinations that are abstract positings of identity. In the mystical we see a constant sublating of the understanding, as it overturns and overturns into it's opposite. The rational, however contains those opposites as ideal moments within itself, and thus, Hegel says, because the speculative and the rational both contain within themselves their own opposites, both are mystical.

Bagger then introduces Pseudo-Dionysius as a mystic who starts out preoccupied with this idea that God is a creator. Emphasising God's transcendence, Pseudo-Dionysius pursues the insight that God cannot be a creature. This leads him to the notion that God's radical transcendence is indefinable, and this 'transcendent darkness remains hidden from all light and concealed from all knowledge'. But this transcendence is still limited - leading the mystic to paradoxically assert that God's transcendence also reveals his immanence - being both beyond, and within, all things capable of description.

This is what Nicholas of Cusa called the 'coincidentia oppositorum' - coincidence of opposites. God's transcendence is darkness, his immanence is light, and so Pseudo-Dionysius employs phrases like 'the ray of the divine shadow'.

(For those of you that know me well, yes, absolutely, I'm paddling happily in a pool of warm tropical ocean water, yep, right about now.)

So, two modes of theology are required - immanence requires names drawn from the created order, transcendence requires the denial of any name of God. While for Kirkegaard paradox was an instrument of asceticism (see ' Credo Quia Absurdum' post), for Pseudo-Dionysius, as for Hegel, paradox alleviates cognitive dissonance - we move past negative contradiction to be cognitively beyond assertion and denial. Per Pseudo-Dionysius, a more adequate mustikos (mystical) knowledge of God can be achieved through agnosia (unknowing), yielding to a state of henosis (ecstatic union). In paradox 'one is supremely united by a completely unknowing inactivity of all knowledge, and knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing'.

Jesus' incarnation recapitulates this paradox, where the trancendent puts aside it's own hiddenness and reveals itself in His human being. Scripture, in it's role as the inspired record of revelation, records transmits the Jesus' ecclesiastical hierarchy. Sacraments, offices and ranks, combined with instruction in their symbolic esoteric meanings alter the individual's violitional complex - that is, the person's beliefs, emotions, attitudes, perspectives and desires. Purgation of the catechumens, illumination of the scripture, the liturgy, the ecclesiology, and perfection through union in unknowing all act anagogically, cognitively training the individual in a developmental framework. As put by Pseudo-Dionysius, the goal of this hierarchy for each individual is:

'the continuous love of God and of things divine, a love which is sacredly worked out in an inspired and unique way, and before this, the complete and unswerving avoidance of everything contrary to it. It consists of a knowledge of beings as they really are. It consists of both the seeing and the understanding of sacred truth.... It consists of a feast upon that sacred vision which nourishes the intellect and which divinizes everything rising up to it'.


More to come.

Ref: Bagger, M. (2007). "The Uses of Paradox", New York: Columbia University Press, pg 30 - 35.

Officium Parvum Beatae Mariae Virginis

Quae est ista, quae progreditur quasi aurora consurgens, pulchra ut luna, electa ut sol, terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata?


Who is she that come forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, fearful as an army set in array?


I'm presently somewhat skint, which has meant that I've needed to become creative regarding ways to imbibe new materials that I'd otherwise just go out and buy to keep my spiritual practice colourful and...um, alive.


So, I've been thrilled to find that not only has some wonderful person blogspotted the Little Office of Our Lady, in English and Latin, but also that the open library has a .pdf version of the 1903 Office. Nihil Obstat.

Inhale the musty dusty smells and admire the 'Art By God' mould stains. It's beautiful, it's rich and it's free. God bless the Internet, indeed.

The Art of Enchantment

Pure filter,

Perfect memory,

No delusions.

Magnificat anima mea Dominum

'My soul doth magnify the Lord'

Luke 1:46

A little while ago I had a lightning-bolt-out-of-the-sky moment of inspiration, that upon the path earmarked by 'Gnothi Seauton' (know thyself), that there might be a need, for some other people maybe, but definitely for myself, for some prayers grounded by a conception of Spiritual Motherhood for Priests.

The idea comes from a booklet kindly lent to myself by a Catholic priest - a copy is online here.

There are some beautiful stories in the booklet telling of both everyday people and of saints, and of the kinds of wisdom, and givingness, and simply love, that are humbly extended towards the men who have represented Christ in the priesthood, over the centuries. The booklet also paves the way for lay people to step into expanded leadership roles within the Church, distributing the Eucharist where priests cannot go or be, and acting as the firmament for the expression of the Divine as is suited to a particular place at a particular time.

When I started litmus paper testing the idea of these prayers amongst the wisdom of those I love and cherish, the response was, well, mostly lukewarm, with lashings of fiery anger (you're NOT a mother) to downright cold (why would I pray for them?)

I'm still sitting with the responses, but an edge on my drive to start unpacking the idea was found in tonight's Mass, The Feast for the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. If you've never encountered the Divine Feminine in a Catholic context can I gently urge if not usher you to attend this service next year. It's astounding.

And while Fr Duncan shared his private moment stories about pretending to be pregnant (a pillow in the front of the cassock, I kid you not) and would have us believe that he brandished umbrellas with fiesty nuns in the old days, there was a line in his homily that has stuck in my head - 'He, who was too great to be contained within the Universe, He, who is our peace and our salvation, He, She held him in her womb. She, indeed, is greater than all the Universe, Mary, Queen of Heaven'.

Sancta Maria est Janua coeli. Through Mary we must go in order to understand our Divinity, from Mary comes the human incarnation of our Divinity, she is the portal, she is the keyholder, she is Janus, looking forward and backward. (in the Novus Ordo, the Solemnity of Mary is held on January 1, see here.)

So, when She says in the scripture 'My soul doth magnify the Lord', there is something in me that holds very very still, for a moment, and listens. This speaks directly to me.

I've been railing against a model of spirituality that says that I have to break from my egoic ways of being, and stop trying to make the world move my way, and asserting my petty needs, and to get a bit of second-person perspective on the way to being more firmly grounded in the will of God, or the non-dual ever-present nothingness, whatever.

I rail because I sense that some of us (at least, me) never heard our own egoic voice first. There are some of us, for whom being overcome by the Holy Spirit, Mary's fiat, is about the most natural symbol of connectedness to Oneness that could ever have been downloaded into our grey matter. It's less about detaching from my egoic needs, and more about detaching from your egoic needs, just long enough to assert my own groundedness in my own presence, to hear that still small voice that is perhaps the acknowledgment of shared-trinity space (you, me and the Be-loved between us).

It's about stopping being driven, just for a sec, by such facts as Dan needs me to go and pick him up from the station, and I still haven't called Jules back and it's been a whole week now, oh, Andrea needs some time so we can go over the work that she's done, it sure is great work, and Laurence needs his shoelace tied...again....oh, hang on it's dinner time, and I still haven't had lunch yet, but has everyone else? Oh good, we're okay then.

Do you see where I'm going with this? (think: pathological communion). There's so much that is written about how to detach from all of my egoic attachments and truly become the Ruler That I Really Am, but very little about how I can compassionately stop, for a second looking at everyone else's needs, assert my own, but still stay firmly connected, because this very notion of connectedness is what grounds who I am. I don't want it reduced to co-dependence, I don't need to be told that I have attachment issues, and I'm not going to look at you with eyes of deep love if you tell me that leaving my needs to be determined by everyone elses needs is a cop out. My needs are intimately intertwined with everyone that I am blessed to call my closest. On a good day, this stretches to the whole of humanity. All sentient beings. Yep, all.

'My soul doth magnify the Lord' says to me that Mary is absolutely animated by the Divinity that she encounters in that attachment, that connection to another, and it is the highest experience of exaltation that she could dare subject her atoms to. She's absolutely enriched by His greatness, and is not diminished, but is absolutely affirmed, in that moment.

Oh yeah. I can relate to that.

I'm not afraid to make you into my momentary God.

What are you afraid of?