Sebastian

He taught them that contrary to what they had heard throughout their lives, the real meaning of the cross and the empty tomb had nothing to do with sin and redemption but rather that it was the most dramatic illustration possible of the Truth that love is greater than death. In fact, he continued, originally sin and redemption had no place at all in the church’s teaching; that instead, in the beginning the primary focus had been on illusion and enlightenment.

He taught them that while they might have many teachers in their lives--that in fact the spiritually awakening person could profitably take teaching from everyone they met--there was but one final authority for them and that this final authority was sometimes call The Ultimate Teacher.

And then, reminding them of what he had said the first time he had spoken to them, he told them that they were their own Ultimate Teacher, that that One was within them and they needed but to learn how to listen.

Learning to listen came to be the overarching theme of more and more of his Sunday morning homilies and as increasing numbers of the people of the parish began to discover this there came a day when at last they began to come to him and ask how it was that they were to do that; how it was that they might ‘learn to listen’.

When that day come he called them together, those who were ready for the next step, and he taught them to meditate.

He taught them to light incense and candles and to sit cross legged on a cushion in the darkness and to become mindful of their breath as it came and went of its own volition through their nostrils.

He taught them to befriend the silence of which they had learned throughout their lives to be afraid and thereby how to return each time they sat to that simpler, more basic, primeval state from whence they had come and to which each of them would one day return.

He taught them how to rediscover their home.

He taught them how to deal with distracting thought and sounds in their mediation (he called these ‘makyo,’ illusion) by simply returning their attention to their breath each time they became aware that they had become distracted. He taught them that the makyo would always be there for them in some form and to some degree but that their practice would teach them how to be present to the deeper silence which was beyond the illusion and from which The Ultimate Teacher who spoke with no voice to no ear could be heard.

"Be soft in your practice," he said, quoting an ancient Taoist meditation master. "Think of the method as a fine, silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you."

One day, when the time was right, he called them to himself and told them that it was not the two hours each day that they spent with their legs crossed and their eyes closed which was meditation. He told them that it was the other twenty-two hours that were the meditation. The two hours of practice, he said, were done in order that their eyes might open to the truth of the other twenty-two.

And some, like Barbara Douglass, began to know.

She came to him one day in his office, tears streaming down her face, and spoke of the beauty she had discovered in so simple a thing as sitting in the silence.

He listened without comment as she struggled to give words to her dawning realization that the "voice" of The Ultimate Teacher within her spoke to her heart and not her mind and that as her sitting practice deepened it seemed that what she heard the voice saying had spilled over into the rest of each day and she found herself going through her daily tasks more and more gently, more and more lovingly, and without judgment.

He asked her finally if she could tell him what the voice was saying to her that had made such a difference and she responded automatically that it was as though she knew what Jesus had meant when he said, "Before Abraham was, I Am."

As she said the words her eyes met his and filled with new tears and it was as it had been at the altar on Christmas Eve--they seemed to flow outward to one another, blend and unite, and become one. For a long moment they were thus and it seemed to her the most incredible intimacy she had ever experienced.

He got up, crossed the room to her, knelt and kissed her forehead, and then blessed her.

"Just sit, Barbara. That’s enough for now. Just sit."

One Sunday morning during the Eucharist, having just said the epiclesis, the sound of the sanctus bells still reverberating through the church, he abruptly stopped the Liturgy and asked, "How do you make the bells stop ringing?" The following week, at the same place in the prayer of consecration, he stopped again and said, "When no one is there to hear them--when one has become the Mass--the bell is struck but does not ring."

On Good Friday he told them that the only thing which died on the cross was ego and self-will. On Easter, that the lesson of the empty tomb was simply that love is greater than death.

He taught them with images and with paradox, intentionally confounding their minds with his use of language. "Words cannot contain what we are about here," he said by way of explanation. "We must go beyond words. I intend to boggle your minds. Allow your minds to be boggled. Be not afraid, God's mind is not boggled."

One morning he told the parish that most of humankind, the church not excepted, as a matter of fact, the church in particular, did not really live at all but rather existed in a dream-like state of illusion and the appearance of things. "There is a reality," he said, "but you do not know this. You are that reality and when you awaken to that reality, you will see that you are nothing. Being nothing you are everything."

But always he returned to the same three themes.

Always there was the unity, the non-separateness, the essential one-ness of all creation.

Always there was the Christ within, the Christ Consciousness, he called it; the image of the Christed nature being ultimately more significant than the figure of the man Jesus himself, and that nature, that consciousness, being the common heritage of all humankind.

And always there was the centrality of love. All else, he insisted, was but illusion.

He taught them by his every act while simultaneously proclaiming, no, don’t get caught in me, I’m part of the makyo, part of the illusion. It is Truth that is important, not the one who speaks it. Let my being here be simply a catalyst for the birth of The Lover within you and then let The Love have its way with you.

Only that.