Sofia

I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one
and the scorned one.
I am the whore, and the
holy one. I am the wife
and the virgin.
I am the mother and the
daughter....I am she
whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a
husband....I am
knowledge, and ignorance.

THUNDER, PERFECT MIND, Gnostic poem, 100 A.D.

Death is Rebirth

From Robert Augustus Masters

When your honeymoon with spirituality ends — and it will end, marked by the arrival of STDs (spiritually-transmitted disappointments) — and when your affair with being spiritually correct and spiritually in-style runs dry, you may say so long to spirituality, but it is a premature goodbye. Disillusionment with spirituality is inevitable and necessary, so that spirituality might be thoroughly deglamorized. When that disillusionment has had its say — cynicism’s couch now being no more than a pain in the ass — and when your fear of reentering the spiritual no longer frightens or disturbs you, your spiritual life really begins.

Most of the books will be gone; the ones that remain will feel like old friends you don’t tire of revisiting, even if only for a page or two every couple of months. Most of the practices will also be gone; the ones that remain will feel as natural to slip into as your favorite jeans or T-shirt, at ease with both being worn and being worn out. Then, instead of being at war with our weaknesses, we bring them into our heart. Instead of trying to eliminate what we don’t like about ourselves, we develop a better relationship to it. Intimacy becomes more our path than transcendence. And so emerging from our own ashes becomes no big deal, but just the way things are. We get up, brush ourselves off, and bite into what is next, bibless and happily anonymous, even if we are famous. Here the ten thousand sorrows and the ten thousand joys intermingle in unparalleled song, we their infinite notes, and we also the music that goes on, in the one moment that is all moments.