To Grow Together

Today I listened to a sermon about relationships. The preacher made many good points, and presented what I thought was a fairly mature perspective. One of his main points was that when we fall into blaming others, this localizes the problem and therefore the solution within them, actually robbing us of power, and leading to an understandable sense of hopelessness. This is true. He suggested instead that we emphasize seeing ourselves as the source of the problem, to show mercy to our partner, and ask ourselves what we are doing wrong. Together we recited "The biggest problem I can see in this relationship is me."

This is, no doubt, a strong perspective. We can, however, do better.

This perspective, although quite admirable, leads to a dead end. It relies on force, or "relying on one's own power," to orchestrate the streams of one's mind. One must hide their eyes from what they see, and manually press their attention to their own flaws. Wherever such a flaw can be found is of course a precious pearl found in the sea, but only if that belief came about through honest realization, in pursuit of Truth, not distraction.

Indeed this phrase refers to willingness to see your own fault, but not only your own fault.

When problems arise in a relationship, it is very important not to hide from one's own responsibility, but if we at that same time hide from any other knowledge, we risk an imbalance which leads to its own problems, such as a misguided sense of always being in the wrong (neurotic guilt-complex), repression of problems in your partner (leaving them open to avoidable embarrassments and failures, or yourself vulnerable to predatory narcissists who love someone who'll always foot the bill), and so on. Most importantly, it severs us from the dynamism of the Spirit at hand, which guides to novel understanding of your partner and of yourself, "into the wilderness" of your misunderstanding, to seek a deeper Truth.

This balance can be complex enough that we revert to one such simpler approach, and get lost in our imagined simplicity.

The suggestion, on its own, to simply stop blaming others is tantamount to white-knuckling the harmony between you and your partner, shining the light of a ruleset without understanding the underlying dynamic, that the darkness always breeds undesirable growth. "Do not hide unwanted things in the fog."

You have to have the fight.

You have to have the fight, because it's the honest thing to do, and by being honest you relinquish tyranny over yourself, presumed authority and ill-conceived reliance on conscious control, and cease forcing yourself to be something you're not. Then, you are forced to deal with exactly who you really are. Psychologists and the religious constantly seek to attain the fruits of a healthy and well adjusted mind or spirit or relationship by looking to what qualities characterize that mind, and emulating precisely what they find. Fools, you "wash the outside of the cup!" You cannot cause by fiat what enlightenment produces with ease. What you see on the outside has grown out of what understanding lies within. To attain those fruits you should not seek the fruits, but rather the "vine," the transformative understandings out of which they naturally flow.

Yes what you are praising is good, but you must understand that the rule does not make you see, and that when you do see, there is no need for the rule, because what you truly believe, what you understand clearly, becomes automatic, easy, unforgettable.

In my dream the voice presented two spirits of failure: to be thrown out, like the high and goodly who squeeze themselves through their conception of what they believe they should be, ending up nothing but a half-finished and derivative project, stuck at a dead-end in maturation, although without, perhaps, serious problems like the other route, rotting, being overrun by unruly problematic growth, the accumulation of unsolved problems. There is, however, a third way. A way of approaching the world guided by the "Truth in Love."

With a genuine understanding of this third way, who you are can be seen in a positive light, and the relationship - built on a rock.

Here, I'll go through the Sermon on the Mount, which I see as a presentation of this novel ethic as it applies to the context of intimate relationships.

Preamble

The beatitudes act as a preamble, and a foretaste, of what will become explained through the Sermon. Others have claimed that the beatitudes act like signposts, which one can use to assess a person's affiliation with Christ. This I think is near to the best interpretation, although the frame needs shifting. I would say that each statement explains how you know you're on the right path, given the revelation of the following central thesis of the Sermon.

I do not believe that these are meant to be read as informative correspondences between the two halves of each statement, for three reasons:

• You wouldn't open the speech with a set of information that analytical; you open it with a more imagistic and abstract taste of what is to come, which is informative at a deeper level. If you open with heavy logical statements, then the listener is held up right from the beginning with parsing those, before sufficient content has been provided to. Instead, you open with the broadmost conceptions, and file subsequent points beneath a persisting and known overarching banner, much like an essay opens with a summary.
• The omission of the verb in each after the first statement suggests that this is to be felt as a list being rattled off somewhat quickly or casually, as if each item is another singular point being added to a picture, rather than a puzzle in and of itself.
• What content appears firstly counter-intuitive is not the correspondences being alleged, but the very fact that blessing is being attributed to the mourning, to the poor in spirit, to the meek, etc. You would not open a speech with statements containing two different mysteries. Rather, the mystery of each statement is its presence within the list as a positive.

For these reasons, I believe the second half of each statement is to be conceived of as a general statement of blessing, rather than some specific logistic claim about the pragmatic effects of the preceding clause.

Central Image

This, I believe, is the central tenet of the Sermon on the Mount, in these verses. It acts as a header to the rest of the speech, while subsequent paragraphs are various particular applications of this overarching lesson.

Human beings are fundamentally: perspective and potential; Known and unknown, belief and ignorance, what you are and what you could become, what you have to teach and what you have to learn. Christ sets down a flag stating that the raw substance out of which the world is made is information, knowledge — wisdom.

Salt is frequently interpreted as a reference to preservative capabilities of salt in food storage, which, while a laudable attempt, is insufficiently embodied of a symbolic interpretation. Sooner would I consider relevant two aspects of salt which are much more primordial: (1) Salt is vigor, the electrolyte which gives us fundamental energy to work by increasing blood volume, an association more primal than later derived preservation techniques, (2) the hallmark of the great Sea, the expanse of dangerous yet fruitful darkness, a cross-cultural, ubiquitous, and primary symbol of the unconscious, or more accessibly put, unrealized potential. He insinuates that if you have lost touch with your potential, you are like the mountain (Mark 11:23) or tree (Luke 17:6) which must be thrown into the sea, if ever to regain its worth. The Greek even uses a term for "loses its saltiness" primarily meaning to be made foolish or become insipid, which I have here translated with a phrase that better captures the multiple meanings, "become dull" (unvibrant, foolish, tasteless).

How can a person become a seasoned master of anything, without first being cast forth into experience beyond their knowledge?

Interestingly, he puts 'potential' first, and 'perspective' second. The light of your consciousness has been brought into the world in order to encounter it forthrightly, to state your case, and put your understanding on the line. When you are integrated, 'atoned' (lit. at-one), earnest, you can move forward without reservation. You are under no obligation to be guilty before you've known to be.

Part of what the symbolic revelation of Christ crucifixion means is humanity's dream-like realization that moral restitution can be achieved, rather than by physical punishment of the body, by the voluntary sacrifice of the Word. Instead of giving up blood for our mistakes, we can choose instead to give up our understanding, our perspective, and engage in the Word, which is the process by which potential becomes reality, by which new knowledge is formed, by which we use our embodied exploratory and linguistic capabilities to crystallize useful information out of the morass of the complexity of our experience. "The Spirit dies in our stead, absolving us of our sins." This is why the revelation comes alongside the Son of Man, the image of the transforming individual.

The Father is often regarded by his hallmark accomplishment, Creation. The Son of Man is the image of the dying, transforming, resurrecting individual. This statement emphasizes a mutual hiddenness, inter-embededness, of the process of transformation with God's creation. This is because the revelation of Creation—Wisdom of Life—is brought about only through Transformation, which itself is only brought about through encounter with Creation. And through that transformative encounter, wisdom of creation is revealed to us.

If we could not learn, we would be left with no solution but physical force. Indeed, when we ourselves refuse to learn, we try to substitute our forsaken lesson for internal authoritarianism, demanding futilely that we be a certain way, have certain thoughts, value certain things. With the revelation of transformation comes the realization that moral debt can be repaid with the changing of one's mind, rather than the barbarity of bodily operant-conditioning punishment.

But with this change in perspective, we are freed to live out exactly what we find to be the case in the here and now. Yes, you're wrong. Yes, you'll make mistakes. You will run afoul of trouble and be misunderstood as evil, in the pursuit of a higher good than mere absence of flaws. But mistakes, sin, and trouble are only to be feared when we don't know how to navigate them, when they are the end of our best plan, rather than the moment when we step forward in a greater aim for maturation, into that "metanoia" — meta-thought — thinking about our thinking, about our actions, our values, our reasoning, in order to once again adopt the Holy Spirit, to embody the divine personality, whose plan contains the transformation of plans, the mindset which is not destroyed by the unknown or unexpected, but aided on its course yet again towards a greater and higher vision of the Good via the exploration of the emergent, the serpent. The obstacle has become the tool, the stone that was tossed out — the cornerstone. An unshakeable sanity forged in the flames of passions.

(Moses lifted up a bronze snake in the wilderness, so that whoever looked upon it would be saved from the venomous snakes, healed, hence the snake on the cross is still today the most known symbol of medicine.)

Given the clear route not just to mere forgiveness, but to a greater world on the other end of mistakes, we are given license to 'let our light shine,' despite the foremost fact of the fount of trouble that will become. With nothing but salt, we are the cancer of the bread that rots. Nothing but light, we are the unchanging Pharisee.

The Salt needs the Light, and the Light needs the Salt.

Law & Knowledge

Notice that he says that those who teach to break the law are called least in the kingdom... Yet they enter. This is Christ describing the virtue, necessity even, of interpreting the scriptures genuinely, even to such an extent that you may for a time reject some aspect of the law. He also, however, specifies that although this is okay insofar as the honest among us will form divergent opinions in their pursuit of wisdom, the truest understanding he announces will be revealed via a total vindication of the law, in some form or other. Compare for instance, that Jesus' disciples are frequently seen not following the usual Hebrew laws, not least the whole healing on the Sabbath thing. This is part of the essence of the Gospel, and the core Parable of the Sower. To understand truly the law means understanding the spirit of the law, not the letter, and thereby knowing what good was intended to come of the low-resolution representation of the law, such that you can consciously formulate alternative modes of being in the world, which may even be more good than the mere admonishment of the law, and yet appear to those who only read the law as though immoral action and a refusal of the law.

Christ here states that although you are about to hear novel things, which, in fact, may seem to contradict the Law, you do not understand. Those who understand the true intention of God, so to speak, will see deeper than the mere words of the law.