Christian Yoga

Part Two

by Tony Crisp

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Meeting the I AM

If you say to yourself, “I am tired. I am hungry. I am depressed. I am happy,” you are describing the changing conditions of your body and your mind. But if you say - “I am” - you are describing the fundamental part of you that experiences the changes. The ‘I AM’ is there all the time isn’t it, behind all changes? But it is as slippery as an eel to catch hold of. That is why the discipleship is needed. Instead of realising your naked ‘I AM’ you tend to see only your thoughts and emotions, your changing body.

This – I AM – survives sleep. It survives the shifting world of your sensory impressions, your thoughts and emotions. It is the ever present awareness behind the experience of your life. It doesn’t change with the tides and calamities of events. This is the rock upon which Jesus suggested building your house, your dwelling place, your identity - while your sensory impressions, your thoughts and emotions are the shifting sands he warned against. It is within the awareness of this I AM that the conviction, not belief, in eternal existence lies. It is to the meeting with the I AM that Christian Yoga leads. When you experience your ‘I AM’ in its nakedness, you KNOW you have existed throughout eternity. It is not a question of belief, or of being told. You experience yourself as an eternal being, standing beyond all the shifting winding paths of your body, your mind and feelings.

So, Christian Yoga does not lead to a set of rules, or to certain beliefs, but to an experience. When you meet that experience you can decide for yourself whether it is valid or not.

Meeting Your Eternal Self

So what is it like to meet this conviction of eternal existence, and what is the value of it? Why have people sacrificed so much for it?

It is easy to see that while you are convinced that your real identity is your body; while you are convinced that your emotions and thoughts are your only reality, you are incredibly vulnerable to uncertainties, fears, dashed hopes, feelings of failure, the emptiness of success and painful betrayals. These can toss you around like a scrap of paper in a gale. They can be the stress that is at the root of illness. Discovering yourself as anchored beyond change is enormously healing.

Although the I AM is beyond thought, beyond emotion and physical sense impressions, and at first appears to be an empty void – the Cloud of Unknowing as an early Christian mystic described it – it is like a spring from which can emerge healing of body and mind, creativity, intuitive perceptions, and all the gifts of the spirit described in the New Testament. (1 Corinthians 12:06-13).

The following dream and waking experience give an impression of what it is like to meet this essence of human life. The dream is taken from the writings of J. B. Priestley from his book Rain Upon Godshill:

‘Just before I went to America, during the exhausting weeks when I was busy with my Time Plays, I had a dream, and I think it left a greater impression on my mind than any experience I had ever known before, awake or in dreams, and said more to me about this life than any book I have ever read. The setting of the dream was quite simple, and owed something to the fact that not long before, my wife had visited the lighthouse here at St Catherine’s to do some bird ringing.

I dreamt I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds all flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek, and then, in a flash bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless effort?

As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us, had been born, if the struggle ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again, and the time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of being. Birds, men and creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled though them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought was tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never before felt such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds.’

Priestly tells us that not only did his meeting with Life itself change his whole perspective, but he knew deep happiness. What he describes is what the Christians called Spirit.

The Meeting that Transforms

The following personal experience happened while fully awake, but it had powerful inner imagery with it. A group of us were meeting each week in ‘an upper room’ to surrender to the action of the spirit. The week prior to this experience I had been deeply impressed that I had blood on my hands; that I had in some way killed someone.

I was standing with others by the side of a dusty unpaved road. People were excitedly waiting for someone, and I was curious to see who it was.

It was a man, and as he walked the road he saw me and came toward me.

The man was ordinary in appearance, but as he got near to me it seemed as if a great force surrounded him that penetrated me completely. The force was love, buffeting me like waves I could barely tolerate. The man stood before me and took my hands and said, “You are my disciple.”

At this, love so immense touched me that I fell backwards, the contact too painful for me to bear, and the man walked on.

I knew who he was. I also knew, because it was welling up from within me as sure knowledge, that he was the man I had killed. It was his blood I had on my hands. It was his death I felt guilty of. But he, in some strange paradoxical way, was myself. He was the cosmic mystery I have been born as. He was the very best of myself I had killed, murdered. He was my youthful sexuality I had suffocated to death, helped by the tenets of a religion that was supposed to be teaching his way, the way of life, the way of recognising one’s cosmic link. (See Meetings With Christ).

Not only is there a changed perspective of life when we meet the I Am – the centre of your being – not only do we feel a radiant happiness, we also meet love.

First Steps on the Way

To grasp the first steps in Christian Yoga you need to remember that Christ frequently taught in parables. Such teaching by the use of analogy and symbols was not limited to the stories told, but was also given via the very events and actions of his life. In the ancient world, much more than in the world of today, teachings were given in the form of rituals or mystery plays, stories and analogies.

If we look at the path of the Christian Yoga, it starts with birth. In The Bible story, this is the birth of Jesus. That event in the mystery play in which Jesus is the main character, is also true for each of us. For Christian Yoga, unlike some aspects of Eastern Yoga, is concerned with the arrival of the individual identity or soul amidst the forces of the cosmos, not with its nirvana or blinking out and melting back into the ocean of being. So unless there is the coming into being of a living feeling person, an identity that can make conscious choices, there is nothing to work with. For this reason, whether as a ceremony or as a psychological fact, Christening has always been an important first step in the Christian mysteries or inner teachings. Particularly in some denominations of Christianity it is felt to be of great importance if a baby is ill, to have it named before, or in case, it dies. If this were not done, it is believed that its ‘soul might be lost.’

While in Japan I visited a Buddhist temple devoted to aborted babies. Prayers and remembrance were given for them. So this recognition of the importance of naming and remembering is not limited to any one culture.

Studies of human babies who were lost at an early age and reared by animals, show that even when physically adult, the lost baby never developed a sense of identity or selfhood. What we call ‘self’ or ‘I’ or the ‘soul’ is not innate. It does not develop by itself. In fact it is given to us by other human beings who have attained it. It is a precious gift, a flame passed on to us by our parents and the society in which we are reared. Being given a name, taught to speak, and looked upon and related to as a person, enable us to achieve identity. (See Animal Children).

You are the divine – expressed or repressed

With this in mind, God, Christ, the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary become definable forces with which we can consciously relate, in and through Christian Yoga. For instance, when Christ says, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I” – He is describing the force of collective human love and caring. In other words, Christ is saying, “I am the force generated by people when they unite in goodwill.” It is this transcendental force (it transcends individual human action) that creates human souls by naming them, treating babies as loveable valid beings, and accepting them as welcome parts of our community. Without that action of love and care, human identity does not properly mature, or take its place in society. In fact without it a person may never develop an awareness of the living process in nature and other people as it extends beyond the narrow boundaries of their own personality and sense impressions. They never develop a spiritual life. So here the word spiritual refers to that which exists as a reality beyond the limitations of ones own personal awareness and body. Priestley’s dream of the birds was a spiritual experience because he was helped to look beyond the individual life and death of the birds. Lacking spiritual life would mean you remain unaware of the universal life in which you constantly live and act. You would not sense any real connection with other people or the life on this planet. You would have no sense of anything beyond your own limited sense impressions and experience.

But returning to the action of family and society on the growing mind and soul of the child, we can see clearly enough when we look around, that children reared in violent or abusive environments have been twisted or injured. It is therefore evident that the opposite is true. In a loving and supportive environment, a child can grow as a soul until the eternal in it shines through.

So when, as a group, we approach the mystery of our own existence, we are the god who creates or destroys human souls. In this light, Christ is the personification of collective human self-giving and supportive love, the shepherd of individual souls. But of course, Christ is both immanent and transcendent.

This is the very foundation of Christian Yoga; that we recognise our responsibility as a group and as individuals, for the creation of the massive amount of ill formed identities we find in modern society; that we attempt to move toward a more caring and humanitarian world; that as parents or adults, we recognise the part we play in transforming tiny human animals into human souls, under the guidance of Christ, which is collective human love, suffering and experience. And out of this collective human love and suffering, we create the means of healing the deficiencies we find in ourselves, and in the care and humanity we give to each other.

Therefore, Christening as a ritual is an enactment of a baby being given a name and taken into collective human care, that it may be nurtured into healthy identity. Christening as a psychological fact rather than a ritual, is our own recognition of that baby as a loveable being, who we agree to treat as a valid individual. It is recognition of each person’s own unique ideas and experiences. It is an introduction to oneself as a being with a personal will. It is the respect we give to the children and people we relate to.

Christian Yoga Part Three