The Fear of the Breaking Seed
It’s terrifying to lose control. So we build systems and little white lies and really big lies to give ourselves a constant sense of being in control of our lives. We don’t want to admit that they are all an illusion, even though deep down inside we know that’s exactly what they are. On any random day, the storm might come and take us. That’s a terrifying thought. If we’re not careful, we will give in to that fear and allow it to control us. Then we will pretend that its power over us is our power over the world itself. Its lies will blind us to the truth.
We are afraid of change. We are afraid of death. At the heart of it all, we are afraid of losing control. When we look at nature, we see that life emerges from these moments where control vanishes, when it ruptures and breaks open. Seeds die. Decay fertilizes the soil. Fires renew the land. The cosmos is wild. And we want to tame it.
A dog is our friend. A wolf is our predator. So we set out to domesticate the cosmos, believing that we are somehow able to control the infinite number of factors out there that lead to an infinite number of changes. It’s maddening, if we’re not careful.
We are afraid of emptiness because we believe that it means our own annihilation. Narcissists deny its very existence. Nihilists long to have it consume everything in the great nothingness they imagine. We are called to different paths.
Nothing stays the same forever. It sounds like a platitude to say that the only permanent thing in life is its impermanence. If I were to say that change is the only constant in our lives, many will say that I’m just spouting clichés. That doesn’t make it any less true.
If we could look past the foggy mirror and behold ourselves in reality as it really is, and see our true identity, it would be a marvelous and wonderful thing. Instead, we cover up our true appearance because we believe if this facade cracks, we will disappear forever.
In all these ways, we try to control reality, not understanding that we have to participate in it. Reality is what is, and we are only a part of it. That’s terrifying, to lose control of our lives and to understand how much of it is governed by random chance and circumstances that we have no ability to predict. But when we remember that our goal is to enter the flow of life and to dance with it, not to control it, not to govern it, but to enter that divine interrelationship with it, the nature of the world changes.
All things must pass away for the new to arise. That is the way of things. The way of nature. To fear change is to fear existence itself. That fear that haunts us so deep in our hearts arises from a misunderstanding of the cosmos and its most intimate functions. Once we learn to see things as they are, all of those things that once frightened us, we realize are our strengths. All of those ideas that struck terror inside us are the most beautiful facets of reality.
When our eyes are opened and we see clearly, we behold the endless forms most beautiful, ever spreading out through this cosmos, to an infinite web of change, growth, and evolution.
The Seed That Must Die
What is a seed? Seriously, stop and think for a minute. What is a seed? It grows on a plant. So is it part of the plant it grew on, or is it something separate and distinct? What happens when you plant the seed? It germinates, and a plant grows. But what happened to the seed? Where is that seed in the new plant? When did the seed stop being part of the plant it grew on? And when did the plant that grew from it stop being the seed?
While you’re contemplating that, think for a minute that Jesus compared us to seeds:
John 12:24-25
24. Most certainly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.
25. He who loves his life will lose it. He who hates his life in this world will keep it to eternal life.
If a grain of wheat remains itself alone, it cannot bear fruit. It has to fall into the earth and die to bear fruit. It cannot hold on to its identity and pretend that it will always be a seed because if it does so, it is denying its life and its part that it plays in the unfolding of the cosmos. It has to open up. It has to give in and surrender to the purpose for which it was born. It has to trust that new life within it so much that it will sacrifice itself for that life to spring forth.
Then Jesus says: “Whoever clings to their life will lose it. Whoever releases their grip on life in this age will preserve it for life of the age to come.” When we, like that seed, let go of that identity of calling ourselves the seed and allow what is in us to flow forth into this world and surrender to that divine urge to bring about what is new and that needs to grow, we preserve our lives to eternal life. We weave ourselves into the infinite chain of cause and effect that is the nature of this cosmos.
The seed is an effect of the plant. The plant is an effect of the seed. The plant is the cause of the seed, and the seed is the cause of the plant. Where does one stop, and the other begin? At exactly what point in germination does the seed stop being the seed? When it breaks open, when the shoot comes out, when the roots go down?
If we do not let go of our illusion of separateness and engage in the dynamic interrelationships all around us, we are not engaging in life. If we are not participating in it, we cannot be surprised that we feel isolated and alone. The only way to be alive is to live. That might sound overly simplistic, but we tend to believe that just breathing, eating, sleeping, and going through every day is living. That’s just surviving. We erect walls and controls that prevent us from losing our illusion of control and deny ourselves participation in the vast weave of life. Then we go on to wonder why that life feels unsatisfying and hollow.
We cling so tightly to what is now that we deny ourselves what could be. Fear of change, of risk, of pain prevents us from actually engaging and participating in the world. When we do that, we die while we still walk the earth. We are shells of who we could be. Whitewashed tombs filled with old, dry bones. Just waiting to return to the soil.
We have to touch the earth, enter into its infinite processes, and become one with them, living our life and becoming truly alive.
Losing Life to Find It
This is why Jesus said:
Matthew 16:24-25
24. Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone desires to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
25. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, and whoever will lose his life for my sake will find it.
To say that more clearly: “If someone wants to walk the way behind me, let them renounce their old self, pick up the execution beam, and keep following me. Because the one who tries to preserve their life will lose it, but the one who loses their life because of me will discover it.”
Jesus is not teaching us to hate ourselves, but to renounce the allegiance many have to themselves first, before anyone else. When we center on ourselves we pretend that we are the center of the world, but we aren’t. There is no center to the world. The cosmos expands from every point within itself. We feel like we are the center because our minds are the core of how we perceive the world beyond our skin. We do not know what others are thinking or feeling, only what we are.
When we renounce ownership of ourselves, and enter right relationship with the world, we don’t disappear, we open ourselves up to how we affect others and become mindful of how we affect others. It isn’t an erasure of self, it is acknowledging the way life works.
Why do we take up the cross? Because the seeds who are still locked in their shells will see us opening up and fear their own opening. Fear reacts and makes us vulnerable because we have chosen to live rather than remain fossilized in our shell.
Those who seek to save their lives, remaining in their shells without roots and branches that connect them to the wider world, lose their lives because they embraced the illusion of separate self. None of us are separate. We are all interconnected. An unknowable number of causes brought us into this world, and our lives have an unknowable number of effects on the world. This is true whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.
When we embrace this understanding of life, we accept the nature of the cosmos as it is. Like the Buddha, we can see the interdependence of all things and how they are empty of separate self.
We have no separate self. To pretend otherwise is to suffocate the life within us. It is like imagining we can survive if we stop breathing, eating, and drinking. We have to enter the flow of life and learn how to live in right relationship, allow God to move through us, because none of this belongs to us. We are all a part of a seamless whole.
The Narrow Way
Matthew 7:13-14
13. “Enter in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter in by it.
14. How narrow is the gate, and restricted is the way that leads to life! Few are those who find it.
Enter now, decisively, through the narrow gate. Do not drift past it. Because the other gate is wide, and the road attached to it is spacious and easy to move along. It feels open, unconfined, and natural. That road is already carrying people along toward ruin, toward a wasted end, and there is a steady stream of people continually choosing to go in that way.
But the gate that leads to life is strikingly narrow, and the road beyond it is not merely tight but pressed in, shaped by pressure, hemmed in on all sides. It is a way that forms you as you walk it. And only a few are the ones who actually perceive it, who recognize it for what it is, and so find it at all.
The road that leads to destruction feels easy and broad, because all it asks from us is to stop questioning the way things are. It provides targets for our rage, and focuses for hate. It doesn’t ask for change, just obedience. It offers answers so no one has to work out the hard answers of life, they just keep moving, doing what they do, changing nothing. The wide road prevents growth by trampling the seedlings underfoot.
Through the broad gate, empire catalogues and extracts wealth, power, and agency from the people, and exercises its dominance over people by convincing them that their way is natural and easy. “This is just the way things are, there is no changing it.”
That way feels easy, because it allows people to go with the flow and not have to think for themselves. Self-actualization is hard, and requires people to work on themselves. It shows us parts of ourselves and our lives that we want and need to change. Change takes work, and the systems of Babylon that control the broad path keep people so busy they don’t have the time or the energy to do the work. When the need to survive is all we have, everything else feels like a burden. It is easier to go with the flow and stay within the crowd.
The narrow path is different. It asks us to help others, even when we are worried we don’t have enough. Together we have more than we need. Isolated, we are trapped in the struggle. The narrow path shows us that nonviolence is the only way to break their machines, which constricts our desire to strike and lash out. Compassion shows us that everyone is a victim of the system, even those who build it. We don’t want to have compassion for our oppressors. We want to hate them, but hate serves their interests, not ours. The narrow path calls us to the hard work of healing, when it feels so much easier to ignore the pain.
The wide gate is built on a worldview of extraction, alienation, and isolation. It says: “Take what you want. You are all that matters. No one understands you like you do. No one cares like you do. People just want to use you, so use them first.” It makes up lies about the “laws of the jungle” and “survival of the fittest.” It doesn’t know that cooperation is a basic component of nature and evolution. They want to define nature as struggle and war so they can justify the struggle and war they press into the world.
As they convince people to think this way, their systems of domination allow them to extract what they want from us. Driven by fear, greed, and lust for power, they spin their lies into the world to bend it to their will.
By comparison, the path of compassion is narrow because it asks us to set aside the lies of empire, and to heal ourselves and others. It presses on us to do the inner work before we reach out and do the work for others.
The Pruned Vine
Jesus said:
John 15:1-2
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the farmer.
Every branch in me that doesn’t bear fruit, he takes away. Every branch that bears fruit, he prunes, that it may bear more fruit.
The divine will not be contained in our tidy categories, will not be fixed like a stone or named like a possession. The Holy moves. It breathes. It cannot be held like a noun. God asks instead to be understood as be-ing, as verb, a living current flowing through and between all things.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi named the divine as a mutually interactive verb. Not a force acting upon us from above or a presence we receive. God is more like a sacred conversation, a current that moves in both directions at once, two subjects each becoming object for the other, each changed by the encounter.
When Jesus says, “I am the vine,” he reveals the nature of the sacred conversation itself. Christ is the living current through which the divine moves into the world, the green and growing edge where the Holy becomes touchable, nameable, and present among us.
God is the Gardener, who is not distant, but actively tending, bending close, with hands in the soil, removing what is drawing energy from the vine and not bearing fruit.
This is the mutually interactive verb as a garden. The vine does not grow apart from the Gardener’s attention, and the Gardener’s work has no meaning without the living vine. The pruning is not punishment. It is participation. It is the sacred conversation continuing, the co-arising pressing deeper into fruitfulness.
The vine grows the fruit of the Spirit:
Galatians 5:22-23
22. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faith,
23. gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
The fruit of the Spirit are the qualities that grow in a person who is living in the Spirit: real love that seeks the good of others, a deep joy that is not easily shaken, a steady sense of peace, patience that holds through frustration, kindness in how we treat people, a commitment to doing what is right, loyalty we can be counted on, a gentle strength in how we act, and the ability to guide our own actions instead of being ruled by impulse.
When a branch distracts or works against the development of these fruit, it is pruned so the fruit can grow strong and good. If a branch does not bear fruit, it is cut away.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control sustain and maintain life. They are the antidote to the extraction, alienation, and isolation of the empire that infects the pruned branches. Those sustained by the fruit of the Spirit cannot participate in these things.
It can feel like loss to let go of the false levers of power and wealth the imperial systems offer. We can imagine we are giving up everything, even when we are not. We are walking a different path to the good life which is different from the path of servitude offered by empire.
The Labor of Birth
John 16:21
21. A woman, when she gives birth, has sorrow, because her time has come. But when she has delivered the child, she doesn’t remember the anguish any more, for the joy that a human being is born into the world.
When a woman is giving birth, she feels deep pain because the time has come. But once the child is born, she no longer holds on to that suffering, because her joy is so great that a new life has come into the world. It isn’t that she didn’t suffer, but the new life and her connection to her child overwhelm the moment.
Childbirth is the most powerful image for the dark night of the soul, because it shows us why that night feels so dark and painful. New life is struggling to be born. This is a dangerous time. Many things could go wrong, but that is why we do not enter the dark alone. We go as a community, with our friends, the saints, the angels, the spirits, the ancestors, and God.
The pain is real and remembered. The dark night of the soul is a spiritual passage where a person feels lost, empty, or cut off from meaning and connection, even from the divine. It is not a punishment but a deep process of transformation, where old comforts, identities, and illusions fall away. In this darkness, the soul is being refined and prepared for a more authentic and profound union with truth, love, and presence, even though it may not feel that way at the time. New life is being born.
In this time, we are not lost, empty, or cut off from meaning and connection, but we are unable to continue in the way we have been going, and have to change into something new.
What used to comfort us rings hollow. Our identity doesn’t fit anymore. We can see the world more clearly. We have to see ourselves as this new being, seek out what it finds comfort in, and dare to go out into the world as this new creature.
The seed must die for the vine to grow. Our old self is nailed to the cross with Jesus so our new self can live. The old ways that didn’t support us are pruned away. It can feel like death, because the caterpillar has to die for the butterfly to take wing.
While we will remember the pain, when the new life is born, joy washes over us, and we are made anew.
The Cosmic Rhythm of Transformation
The seed, the cross, the narrow gate, the pruned vine, and birth are all images of the Path of Release, path two, the Via Negativa. This is the place in the spiritual journey where we don’t just let go and let be, but we heal and recuperate.
Life is a repeated pattern of surrender, rupture, and transformation, because as we grow, our skin gets tight, and we need to enter the cocoon to change. This surrender is not obedience, but participation with the flow of life which is living God.
I use that phrase a lot, but don’t often stop to talk about it. I said we live God. I am not talking about a living God outside of us, but the God that is in all things, and all things are in God. This rooted participation with the Divine teaches us to live God into the world. When we look for God out there, we ignore the God within us and within all things. We buy into the imperial lie of separation that tells us that God is beyond us. No! God is here, now.
The cosmos itself is unfolding as the One Life, that is God, flows through all things. This is the way of nature; the way we are called to. This is the way of Jesus, to live in the flow of God to make the world an increasingly better place.
The Fear That Keeps the Seed Intact
It is fear that keeps us from growing, changing, and healing the world so everyone and everything is taken care of.
Fear of not having enough leads to greed. Fear of not being enough leads to lust for power. Fear of emptiness makes us hoard the flow and not share it as we should. Fear of impermanence causes us to hold everything so tightly we choke the life out of it. Fear of losing ourselves leads us to push people away and leads us into isolation and alienation.
Fear strangles life, while convincing people it is giving them an ordered life.
These things are frightening. Life is frightening, but if we are too afraid to live, we never will.
While we are in the shell, the seed feels safe. It can weather the storms, the floods, and the droughts. It locks us in with all we will need if we ever actually grow. Within the seed is all it needs to grow.
If we identify as the seed and believe it is who and what we are, all our possibility and potential stays locked within us. Babylon loves this. Seeds are easy to shuffle around and trade.
When we let the seed germinate, we have to break that hard exterior shell and free our tender shoots out into the world. If we stay a seed, we can stay safe and avoid that risk. If we never grow, we avoid danger until the day we die, and never reveal our gifts to the world.
Liberation Through the Breaking Seed
When the shell breaks, all that remains is us as we are. We reveal ourselves to the world as not the seed, but the life contained within it. While the shell may have made us feel safe, it constrains what is within the seed longing to sprout and grow in the world.
The shell walls us off from interconnection. When we break out, and send our roots deep down in the soil and reach our branches high, we participate in the great interconnectedness of the cosmos.
Life wants to flow, to participate with everything else in the great dance of life. When we let that life flow through us, we crack the shell. Participation in life brings love and love casts out fear.
As we grow in love, moving past fear, we unveil the world as it is. The cosmos is an interconnected web of life growing through mutual aid and support. Together we are stronger than anything that can stand against us.
Living in love teaches us to stop walling ourselves off, quaking with fear of what might happen to us in the world. In this cosmos, vigilance is important, but vigilance is not fear. It is mindfulness and watchfulness that learns to see clearly.
Instead, we reach out to one another and build community for the benefit of all within them and not just for a few. We live our lives honestly, growing into the work we are called to do in our hearts, healing one another, interfering with injustice, releasing what does not help us, creating joy and celebration to the best of our ability.