Contrary to popular understanding, contemplation does not imply quietness or withdrawal. Instead, it is a quality of immediate, open presence that is directly involved with life-as-it-is.   –Gerald May[i]

What I say to you, I say to all: keep awake.       –Jesus[ii]

In A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams introduced us to the Someone Else’s Problem (S.E.P.) Field, a cloaking device that allows things to go unnoticed–such as a gigantic alien spaceship hovering over a cricket match–by tapping into peoples’ natural predilection not to see things they are unprepared to accept.

I have discovered that I project a number of such fields onto other people, making actual human beings invisible behind the veil of my ideas about them.  As a public service–in case we ever meet in person–here is a partial list of the fields I may project onto you:

The P.O.F. (Pokey Old Fart) Field. If you stand still in the middle of the supermarket with your cart blocking the aisle, or drive a car ten or more miles per hour below the posted speed limit, all I am likely to notice about you is your advanced age and how damned slow and in-the-way you are.  You may have risked your life in the Invasion of Normandy or fed transients during the Depression, but that isn’t getting me where I want to go right now.

The U.S.C. (Un-Spiritual Christian) Field. Sure, I see you showing up for church, volunteering to do stuff—but it’s obvious that you haven’t cultivated a deep relationship with God through spiritual practice like I have. You must be really shallow.

The T.W.I. (Third World Immigrant) Field.  Am I  s-p-e-a-k-i-n-g  s-l-o-w-l-y  e-n-o-u-g-h?

The S.Y.P. (Spiritual Yogi Poser) Field. Your cloud of woo-woo swirls around you like so much Patchouli incense; why should I try to look past it into your obviously deeply flaky soul?

The C.J.W. (Canvassing Jehovah’s Witness) Field. I simply cannot see a person under the overwrought suit–only a polite but inarticulate Watchtower dispenser. Bring it, bitch; I know more Bible than you.

The S.I.J. (Self-Important Jackass) Field. I don’t actually lose much sleep over this one (though maybe I should.)

And finally­, and perhaps most pernicious:

The H.C. (Hot Chick) Field.

This one, along with its near relation, The M.I.L.F. Field, is particularly difficult because, besides being highly opaque, obscuring the person around whom I project it almost entirely, its influence often outlasts the interaction, in the form of what classical Christian language calls “impure thoughts.” So while you–a complex, multi-dimensional human being–are kind enough to be talking to me, I am only listening to a stereotype, while under the almost complete control of my inner fifteen-year-old.

Christian moral teaching condemns such unchaste thinking irrespective of whether it leads to illicit behavior, because of the inherently objectifying effect it has on the way we perceive our fellow children of God. Fortunately, we are liable, not for every thought that pops into our heads, but only for the ones we willfully cultivate.

The familiar measure of the sinfulness of such thoughts was of course whether they had been intentionally “entertained,” or merely noticed and released…Truth be told, I was often a willing and cordial host, coaxing these thoughts to stay for dinner and dessert, and perhaps even to spend the night if this were not an inconvenience.”[iii]

So I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that if you find yourself projecting a field around someone, it is highly ineffective (for me, anyway) to tell yourself to stop. “Don’t objectify that Hot Chick in the short shorts,” I may tell myself–or “his reflexes aren’t what they used to be; he’s only trying to be safe”–or “all that arrogance is probably meant to shield a very frightened and insecure psyche”–but I will still be fighting an uphill battle trying to see through the field to the person behind it.

The good news is that spiritual practice works. This is easy for me, a Christian Yogi, to forget, because of the emphasis that both Yoga and Christianity place on mystical experience­. As long as I have yet to be “caught up into the third heaven[iv]” like Paul, or engulfed in samadhi like Ramakrisha, it’s easy to feel like my daily sadhana isn’t “working.” But my soul knows it is, however slowly, because of “the love, joy and peace it receives bit by bit from God as it grows.”[v]

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.[vi] 

The Greek word Paul uses for “transformation” is metamorphosis–to “change beyond” where we started out. Another New Testament word for renewing of the mind is metanoia. Usually translated as “repentance”, it is better understood as “a deep change of mind/heart brought about by a profound moment of clarity and understanding.”

I fear that some of Christianity has emphasized the dramatic metanoia over the quotidian metamorphosis, with the result that people look for something profound while missing the personal growth they are actually experiencing. If we really have to prove we are “born again” by speaking in tongues, then God help those of us who simply aren’t constituted that way. This is why the Zen teacher Sunryu Suzuki hardly ever talked about satori–sudden enlightenment experience–at all: he didn’t want people to fixate on dramatic mystical events and become discouraged if they were delayed in coming.

Of course, even if we never experience dramatic, life-changing events, it is still incumbent upon us to change.

Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.[vii]

I have found that no amount of willing myself to change really has any effect–not internally, anyway. I can “fake it till I make it” sometimes, behaving as I know I ought to until the behavior carves a new set of samskaras in my chitta, and of course going around the sun a certain number of times imparts some experiential wisdom, but for the most part, any positive changes that have happened in me have their roots in regular sadhana, or spiritual practice.

One of these is my increasing ability to release thoughts instead of being hijacked by them. I am still far from the “freedom of Christ”[viii] or the moksha (liberation) of the advanced yogi, but as I learn to check in with myself, letting go of thoughts and awakening, however briefly, from my field-projecting dreams into the wakefulness of the present moment, my “increasing availability to the truth”[ix] is giving me the knack of “seeing through exterior things, and seeing God in them.”[x] Even supple young things in short shorts, on a good day. This is a skill I have developed on the cushion, and which I am now able to deploy in day-to-day life. “What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we reap in the harvest of action.”[xi]

During this season of Advent, Christians around the world double down on their spiritual practice as we await the observance of Jesus’ birth. Many of the hymns and sermons we hear during this time contrast His first coming in a stable to his awaited “second coming” on clouds of glory. Which might or might not be on the docket–profounder theological minds than mine have wrangled over the meaning of biblical stories about the eschaton, or “end times.” But I’ve noticed that the New Testament epistles–especially the letters of Peter–refer far less to the “second coming” of Jesus than to His apocalypsis, or “revelation.” (Literally, “taking away the veil.”) To my mind, this implies that we will see Jesus when the scales fall from our eyes; if we are, as the baptismal vow charges us, to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,”[xii] He must be here already, waiting to be revealed. Christ must be here right now, behind the fields we project around other people, eager to be sought and served.

So this will be my Advent sadhana: to take an active role in the apocalypsis, to midwife the birth of Christ into this world through the people around me; to take away the veil of impurity and self-serving to see the Divine purusha, or Indweller, in every person I meet, including myself. As the 14^th century German mystic Meister Eckhardt said,

We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born. What good is it to me if Mary gave birth to the Son of God fourteen centuries ago, if I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time, and in my culture?

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