Christian Yoga – Part Three

How do we enter on the Way?

There are steps or stages in the discipline of Christian Yoga. The very first of these steps apart from christening, is what might be called The Turning Point. It arises from an unmistakable awareness that something is missing from your life; or it comes because of a feeling arising from an inner sense of emptiness or isolation. You may feel cut off from something you know you should be a part of. Sometimes it arises because you are faced by a great tragedy, a loss or illness confronting you with death.

In terms of the Christian story, this first step can be symbolised by the experience of Mary’s mother Anna. A description of Mary’s parents is not given in the New Testament as it stands, but is found in the Apocryphal New Testament (Apocryphal New Testament. Protevangelion. Hone edition). There we find the following description:

There was in Israel a man and wife known as Joachim and Anna. Although elderly, wealthy, and giving of their wealth to the Temple, they became ashamed, for they had no child. Therefore, with his unhappiness upon him, ‘Joachim retired into the wilderness, and fixed his tent there, and fasted forty days and forty nights, saying to himself, “I will not go down either to eat or drink, till the Lord my God shall look down upon me, but prayer shall be my meat and drink.” In the meantime his wife Anna was distressed and perplexed twofold, and said, “I will mourn, both for my widowhood and my barrenness”.’

When Joachim had been in the wilderness some time, ‘on a certain day when he was alone, the angel of the Lord stood by him with a prodigious light’ and said, “When God shuts the womb of any person, he does it for this reason, that he may in a more wonderful manner open it again, and that which is born appears to be not the product of lust, but the gift of God. Therefore Anna your wife shall bring you a daughter, and you shall call her name Mary.” Afterwards the angel appeared to Anna his wife saying, “Fear not, neither think that which you see is a spirit: For I am that angel who hath offered up your prayers and alms before God, and am now sent to you, that I may inform, that a daughter will be born unto you, who shall be called Mary, and shall be blessed above all women.”

This story is not being presented as history, but as a parable describing the barrenness you may feel in your life, and the longing and searching that may lead to that first touch, that first encounter with something beyond yourself. This first meeting, this first brush with something living that is beyond the narrow confines of your own personality, may be very small, or very deeply felt. But as with the story of Joachim and Anna, usually there comes with it an assurance, a sense of meeting something good, something More. Victor Gollancz describes his own first encounter as follows:

For an hour past I have been the prey of a vague anxiety; I recognise my old enemy – - – It is a sense of void and anguish; a sense of something lacking: what? Love, peace, God perhaps? The essence of my hell was outlawry. By the sin which, as I felt, I had committed, I had broken the links that united me with universal living: I was separate, alone, without lot or part in the everything. I had deprived myself, treacherously, of it: I had deprived it, quite as treacherously, of me.

One forenoon, when my terror and despair seemed to be at their height, and after a total insomnia that had lasted for twenty-two days, and every muscle and nerve ached, I set out for a walk with my wife. We went very slowly along a country lane… About half an hour later we turned, sharply left, into a dark and narrow path that descended: and soon came out into a great open space – a sort of water meadow, with herds grazing, and a high inland cliff just in front of us. There was dappled sunlight everywhere, and a slight breeze. I felt suddenly very still: and then I heard the inland cliff, and the grass and water and sky, say very distinctly to me, ‘A humble and a contrite heart He will not despise.’ When I say I heard them say it, I mean, quite literally, that I heard them say it; a voice came from them: but they were also themselves the voice, and the voice was also within me. I said to my wife ‘The trouble is over’, and that night I slept a little. (Quoted From Darkness To Light, ed. by Victor Gollancz. Published by Gollancz).

This contact, this meeting, comes to us because there has been an inner shift, an inner change of heart. It is a change from believing there is nothing but your own will, your own opinions, your own power, to that of perhaps uncertainty, or towards an opening, a longing. If this change has not happened in your life and you wish to practise Christian Yoga, then you need to cultivate the change. Consider whether your inner condition is one that shuts out the possibility of the human spirit and love. To take the first step, take time each day meditating upon this change of heart. See if you can feel or create this within you.

Some thoughts to ponder that might help this inner shift are as follows.

• Ask yourself what power you have in the world, and how much control you have over your life. For instance you may be able to decide many of the things you do, but can you make your heart beat and digest your food? What actual independence do you have, considering that you need others to make your clothes, grow your food, build the house you live in, and so on?
• Do you actually know who you are and from what you emerged? Giving a name to your parents and grandparents is not an answer.
• Whatever attitude you have to the process of life in creatures and the universe, does it explain all the phenomena that surrounds you? Are you that wise?
• Practise recognising that your thoughts and emotions never ever reflect reality. At these times remember that if you think of a person you know, your thoughts or feelings are never ever that person. Also, what you feel and think about yourself can never ever be anything more than a tiny fragment of information. That tiny fragment, if taken seriously, gives a totally distorted view. To understand and to judge who you really are you would need to be completely aware of all the factors in history, and in the lives of your forebears, and in fact in the development of the cosmos, that led to your existence and to your present situation. Likewise, when you think about events, people, political situations, always realise that you are considering with a tiny fraction of the information you really need to be wise.
• Therefore stand with some humility before the fact of your own existence and before the world. That humility may act as a leader to open your heart and mind to something more than you have experienced so far.

The second step of Christian Yoga is the way of Mary.

The birth of Mary symbolises this change of heart, and the life of Mary shows what can come of it. Mary as an image of your own human situation represents the possibility of a virginal mind and feelings. Put simply this means that we drop preconceptions, we melt away fixed opinions, rigid attitudes, perhaps through prayer, meditation or perseverance.

The story of Mary beautifully illustrates this. She is a young girl who has just started menstruation. She is therefore fertile, open and loving. How much more we can receive from that mysterious spirit of life that is around us and within us if we have an open and loving heart, a love that has unfolded like a beautiful flower toward the unknown mystery that we have given the name of Life or God? Evelyn Underhill, writing under the name John Cordelier in her book The Spiral Way, has this to say about Mary:

So many had gone up the mountain to that one desired encounter; only to be thwarted by the cloud that broods upon the summit, and hides from human eyes the Shining Light within. The great prophets, poets, and philosophers of the antique world – all these had gone up, all had marked classic moments in the ascent of the race. Then came a little girl, pure, meek, and receptive: and ran easily to her destiny and the destiny of the universe because she was ‘full of grace.’ She held out her heart to the Invisible and in this act flung a bridge across the chasm that separates Illusion from Reality. Mary becomes by this circumstance the type and pattern of each human soul. Consciously or unconsciously, all are candidates for her high office. All, truly can become the mothers of God. (Published by Watkins – See http://www.evelynunderhill.org ).

The life of prayer is often spoken of as part of the Christian path. But prayer can so easily be the mechanical mouthing of certain words, repeated over and over. We may make the movements of our mouth, we may repeat the words, but do we really experience them – do we make them an outflow of a real inner feeling? The great saints of East and West have gone beyond words and ego-directed movements, to the real changing of self. Some of the changes they made within themselves are almost universal. This is true of the Prayer of the Virgin Soul.

The prayer of the virgin soul

The symbolism of the Virgin Mary, and the many other virgin mothers in the world’s sacred literature, show how universal a realisation this is. But if you wish to practise it, you have to make it an inner reality. In doing so you have to realise that by “inner change” is meant an inner condition, an inner state of being. It is also helpful to understand why you attempt this. It is because, until you clear at least part of your consciousness of preconceived ideas, biases, convictions, rigid emotions, unconscious habits, and so on, you cannot conceive new realisations from your own inner possibilities, you cannot give birth to the awareness of that Mystery that you are, to God. Basically this is very practical. In trying to remember someone’s name you may fail utterly because you are certain it begins with ‘S’ – when in fact it begins with ‘B’. You will never remember the name until you drop your preconception.

So the virgin posture of the soul is an attempt to bring about an inner state, an inner feeling of fertility and love towards your invisible and unknown potential – purity from preconceived ideas – the offering of your whole being as material for your potential to use in creating a new self – the act of supplication in which you let go of your thoughts, emotions and body, so they can be played upon as a piano or organ by Life. There should arise a feeling of warmth toward and desire for the unseen Life, openness to any possibility Life may have in store for you, good or bad, allied with trust. If you have a temperament capable of this, then make it an act of love, a real devotion, approaching ones darling.

When you manage to let go of what you think God or Life is, what you believe yourself to be, or what you are convinced is so about yourself and the world, then you are ready to receive something new. Then, that divine conception can take place in you that enables the spiritual (that which exists beyond the barriers and boundaries of your own ego) to gain a foothold in you. Then you become pregnant with new life and eventually give birth to the More of yourself in the way you live and act. This conception and the following birth will become known to you in some way. It will be felt, or maybe shown to you in a dream. The following is the dream of a man who for some time had been practising the way of Mary.

I dreamt I was lying in a cellar. I was myself, yet at the same time, I was my wife and another woman I loved. I was in labour, and after a time the baby was born. It was a boy, a wonderful child. The membrane covered part of its face and I pulled it away. The baby then began to breathe, and looked about, fully conscious and very alert. Then, to my wonder, it spoke the name of Jesus, and said, ‘It is gone’.

When asked what was gone, the beautiful baby replied, “The other ego, where has it gone?” I seemed to know exactly what it meant. The baby had been part of the cosmic awareness, of universal consciousness, and was now but a babe; and I said, “The cosmic still exists within you, to become known as you grow”. I then carried the baby from the cellar upstairs, and knew it to be a holy and wonderful child.

Deep within us, when we have opened to God as a virgin, in the cellar or cave of our unconscious, among the beasts of our instincts, and physical energies, the New Life tentatively begins its growth to consciousness, to birth. The star and the stable are the highest and the lowest in us uniting in this wonderful task. Joseph, our intellect and outer creativeness, difficult though he finds it to believe in this miracle, listens to his intuitions and dreams, and protects and cares for the childlike mother.

This new life of the spirit emerging in you, as the story of the Gospels suggest, is just a baby. It is vulnerable. It needs caring for and nurturing. It needs protection against the Herod’s of the world. It also needs recognition that the Christian drama takes place in your own life, as the following quote suggests.

Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born, but not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn: the cross of Golgotha thou lookest to in vain, unless within thyself it be set up again. (Scheffler, a German mystic, quoted from The Perfect Way by Anna Kingsford & Maitland, Watkins, 1923) (See http://www.sacred-texts.com/wmn/cws).

Some helpful pointers to this inner posture of the soul are as follows:

• Try to shift the condition of your inner feelings to one of a young and loving girl who is opening herself to the mysterious spirit of Life. In this way you are opening not to the known, but to what is an eternal mystery.
• Remember that you are an expression of that Mystery, so it is not far off or unattainable; it just needs an open doorway into your conscious life. Open that doorway with some sense of wonder