Christian Yoga

Part Five

by Tony Crisp

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The Wilderness Years

There cannot help but be a repercussion, a response in your life to the new energy and potential you are releasing. This is represented by Jesus going into the wilderness and being tempted by the devil. It is described in the New Testament as follows:

And Jesus, being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, being forty days tempted by the devil. And in those days he ate nothing: and when they were ended, he afterward hungered. And the devil said to him, ‘If you be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread.’

And Jesus answered him, saying, ‘It is written that man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.’ And the devil, taking him up into a high mountain, showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

And the devil said to him, ‘All this power will I give you, and the glory of them: for that is delivered to me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If you therefore will worship me, all shall be yours.’

And Jesus answered and said, to him, ‘Get you behind me Satan: for it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve’.

And he brought him to Jerusalem, and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and said to him, ‘If you be the Son of God, cast yourself down from here: For it is written, He will give his angels charge over you, to keep you: and in their hands they will bear you up, lest at any time you dash your foot against a stone’.

And Jesus answering said to him, ‘It is said, You shall not tempt the Lord thy God’.

And when the devil had ended all the temptations, he departed from him for a season. (Luke 4:1-13)

Everything new is confronted by the old. In our everyday activities habits serve us well. Without them we would not be able to stand, walk, or talk. Some habits we have created simply through repetition, such as those in learning to ride a bicycle or drive a car. But some have been etched into us by great pain, by punishment and reward, or by the enormous pressure of social opinion and peer pressure. The outcome of all this is that we respond to the world and to our own urges and perceptions in particular or predictable ways. These responses are not necessarily well thought out. They may not serve us well. How often have we heard of a person making the same mistakes again and again; or of a man or woman who consistently fall in love with partners who are apparently trying to destroy them?

Therefore the temptations described in the New Testament are subtle commentaries on the habitual responses that often arise out of our own inner darkness and pain. If not that, then they have arisen out of perceptions of the world that tell us there are no living connections between ourselves and other people, between ourselves and the rest of the universe.

The Personal Desert

In 1927 Buckminster Fuller stood on the shore of Lake Michigan contemplating suicide. He said to himself: ‘I’ve done the best I know how and it hasn’t worked.’ He was still grieving the loss of a daughter who had died five years earlier; his business had just failed. He was penniless and 32 years old. He wondered how he could support his wife and newly born baby, but, after struggling with his despair for hours in the dark and the freezing wind, he decided to live the rest of life like an experiment. He wanted to discover whether the golden rule of life was dog eat dog. He would find out by seeing what could be physically demonstrated. To free his mind of conditioned thinking and reflexes he stopped talking for a year because reading Korzybski had convinced him that language structures caused conditioned associations or mechanical reactions that lock us in fixed perceptions. When he began to talk again he refused to use the words up or down, because there is no up or down in the universe. He also saw, as one of his insights gained through experience, that the golden rule was, ‘If I worked always for others and only for all humanity, I would be optimally effective.’

Buckminster Fuller went on from there to design the Dymaxion House, which was mass producible; the Dymaxion world map, which is the only flat map with hardly any distortion; the Geodesic Dome; the Floating Breakwater, and to become one of the world’s great prophets of a sane, human future, coining the phrase ‘Spaceship Earth.’

Bucky Fuller managed to step out from behind his habits, his conditioned responses, and create a new life. In fact from failure he managed to express his amazing potential and leave an indelible mark in the world.

The shore of Lake Michigan was Bucky Fuller’s wilderness. It depicts exactly the situation we will each meet in our own way at this stage. The wilderness confronts us with a choice. On this stretch of the way you will have experienced for yourself the realisation of eternity and the recognition that your thoughts and emotions can never encompass reality. Therefore any sense of failure you might have, any rigid judgments you make about yourself and others, any belief you entertain that money and power alone will give you happiness or wholeness, can be seen as illusions. The problem is that old habits, old responses, will tempt you to follow these illusions because for all your life they have been what you have taken as truth. So the choice is this; will you follow your old habits and your old illusions, or will you trust your sense of the eternal and your awareness of the life beyond the paradox of right and wrong, good and evil?

Christian Yoga Part Six