Being special.

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

Not many books on Zen have achieved the notoriety of Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. The message is simple and straightforward, yet the instruction runs counter to our ordinary way of living.

All of us aspire to become an expert, and few indeed are those who think of themselves as a beginner. Our desire for being someone special works against such simplicity. We reason if the solutions of yesterday worked, then why not apply them again today.

The answer to that thought ought to be self-evident in the West, but due to the lack of familiarity with Eastern Wisdom, it has not attained the status it deserves. The reason is that yesterday was, and today is today. Nothing in life is constant, and as circumstances change, the challenges change as well.

Change is inevitable and continuous. There is nothing spiritual or psychological about that. Change becomes a problem when we desire to turn continuous change into an ideology of permanence. When that conversion occurs, it becomes like trying to bulwark the tides with the consequent result of pulverizing us into the sand.

How we manage change in our lives determines the quality of how we experience life and what we create. All of us want goodness and resist adversity. That is a natural way, but neither of these remains permanent. Thus, we have a choice to savor the good and accept the inevitable loss. Facing what is, as a continuous beginner—versus trying to force what we want as an expert—opens up many possibilities that are not available to those who resist and cling.

On the journey within.

 

Inside, outside; neither can exist apart from the other. The outside is what most people are concerned with, giving little concern, if any, to the inside. 

Do we grow by manifesting external things? Or is it the inside that gives growth to the outside? Nothing comes without a seed; an embryo that gives rise to what becomes a visible manifestation. Drink a cup of coffee. Is it not contained from the inside? When finished, would we then wash the outside of the cup and not the inside?

Observe a tree. Do we not see the magnificence of the outside, but know it could not be so without growing from a seed beneath the soil? 

Everything observable is seen by the outside with the inside remaining unseen. The seen and the unseen must exist as a single entity. Common sense explains this, and yet we dwell on the seen without the other.

This matter is not limited to one discipline or another. All disciplines (e.g., spiritual and phenomenal—physical and metaphysical alike) can understand this simple truth yet we dwell on “looking good” without acknowledging the seen and unseen come together. We reap what we sow and how we use our time. We may invest years earning accolades and badges of honor to tell the world of our importance. Yet the embryo from where these externals emerge is naked and unformed—A true man without rank or privilege.

One of the greatest of Zen Masters (Master Bassui Tokusho—1327-1387) was lucid in explaining this from the inside essence, and concluded it was the enlightened mind, always present but never seen, that gives rise to all phenomenal things. In one of his sermons he said:

“If you say it is nonexistent, it is clear that it is free to act; if you say it exists, still its form cannot be seen. As it is simply inconceivable, with no way at all to understand, when your ideas are ended and you are helpless, this is good work; at this point, if you don’t give up and your will goes deeper and deeper, and your profound doubt penetrates the very depths and breaks through, there is no doubt that mind itself is enlightened. There is no birth and death to detest, no truth to seek; space is only one’s mind.”

The journey to our depths finds nothing, where there is no birth and no death—There is nothing to find within the emptiness of one’s mind, yet all things come from there.

The isness of IS.

Everyone desires certainty, but it doesn’t come about; the ground beneath our feet is different from what it was yesterday, and consequently, only new solutions will work today. We surely know that in today’s world with COVID-19.

We can’t recycle old solutions, we must create new ones to fit today’s terrain. That makes unquestionable sense so why do we not see the shifting sands? Perhaps we don’t see it because we don’t want to. It is easier to shape life as we want it to be, instead of the way it is. “Suchness” or “thusness” is the desirable way of the heart: Accepting what is vs. what we wish. Desiring what is not, is a fool’s journey since what exists in this present moment is all there can ever be. The clock doesn’t run backward. That, however, does not stop us from engaging in fantasy and wishful thinking.

This sage observation is not singularly a matter of psychology or spirituality but is also a reflection of biological necessity and survival. According to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, 

“…it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives, but the species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself.” 

Numerous examples of failed societies can be found⎯from the Vikings in Greenland to the Jews who were deceived in Nazi Germany, believing Hitler would not follow through with his final solution⎯when refusal to adapt and blindness ruled the day. There is no guilt implied here. Often times circumstances shift suddenly and being creatures of habit, we are lulled into states of denial. When people or other species have not adapted, they have perished. This is as much a psychological matter as it is a spiritual one.

We have some psychological blind spots that can be dangerous. Cognitive dissonance is one of these blind spots. So is “herding,” “crowd mentality,” (a significant problem today in social networks), the “boiling frog syndrome,” “denial” and so too bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, and racism⎯bias against accepting what is and desiring what is egocentric, fear-induced and self-serving. 

Learning to accept the essential goodness in all things requires releasing ourselves from fear, and then embracing the unity in all. When we see ourselves in others then we can say as Shantideva, the 8th-century Indian Buddhist scholar, said: “When I act for the sake of others, No amazement or conceit arises. Just like feeding myself, I hope for nothing in return.”

The power of “me,” and the power of “we.”

Flattening the curve.

A dear friend, from my time as a Mad Man on Madison Avenue, sent me the image to the right. I responded by saying, “The power of me must first decrease before the power of we can increase,” and suggested the curve is upside down to allow “me” to bottom-out.

The point of those posts is the same as nearly every post I’ve written: Within us all lives the ineffable, indefinable true nature that unites us—The We. If we don’t discover it on our own, the virus will do it on its’ own by removing the “Me’s.” (not a word, nor in truth, a reality).

Nature is having a field-day with COVID-19 since the virus is indiscriminate, affecting everyone without preference for political affiliation, ideology, measures of intellectual acumen (or not), intuitive capacity, or any other criteria that define and keep us opposed from one another. It doesn’t read. It doesn’t calculate, speculate, or articulate. It does one thing only, supremely well—finds and infects a willing host. It is a traveling guest seeking an immovable host and reminds me of several posts I’ve written previously: “Guests and Hosts,” “Perpetual host; Holy ghost,” and  “Perpetual Motion.”

Back to grammar school: the ghost of you and me.

Who’s that in there?

I began posting to Dharma Space 10+ years ago, recognizing the task before me was an impossible one: Trying to convey with words and images that which can never be adequately accomplished. Ineffable matters are beyond description. 

Lao Tzu began his now-famous Tao Te Ching with this very thought: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

I chose this joisting at windmills for an excellent reason. I was (and am) persuaded that if I could influence just a few, with seeds of doubt that challenged preconceived, dogmatic stances (held by the majority), there was the possibility of making a substantial, positive difference in how we think about, and relate to, one another.

If you’ve spent any time reading and mulling over what I post here, then you’ll know that I don’t wed myself to any particular spiritual venue but instead take wisdom from wherever I’ve found it. My task is then to digest and synthesize these pearls and recast them in a way that a contemporary reader can grasp. I consider this an obligation since some may not have been exposed to the breadth and variety of spiritual practices I have. So my methods are, by design, an attempt to simplify something that can be a bit daunting. Consequently, I employ frames of reference understood by an audience that is more than likely far removed from my topic. Such is the case in today’s post.

Often we learn something within a given context (for example, grammar) and don’t apply it in a different context. It’s a bit like becoming accustomed to a person in one context and then finding them in another. When that happens (if you’re like me), you may find yourself saying, “I think I know that person, but for the life of me, I can’t recall from where.” Our memories are constructed in such a way that we file data under particular headings, and when we encounter something familiar, but out of context, we are disoriented until we can remember the file heading. Then we say, “Oh yes, that’s where I know them from.” Today’s topic is one of those I can’t recall from where, déjà vu re-positionings, only I’m going to fill in the blanks for you. And the context takes you back to grammar school.

I wasn’t very interested in, or good at grammar—all of those conjugations, parts of speech, and diagramming left me cold. But there was one part of this discipline I did find intriguing: subjects and objects. The rule was, as you may recall, an object was a noun—a person, animal, place, thing, or an idea. And similarly, a subject was what (or whom) the sentence was about. 

To determine the subject of a sentence, the rule was first to isolate the verb and then make a question by placing “who?” or “what?” before the verb, the answer to that question was the subject. Not so hard until you write a sentence like, “I see myself.”  That was a thorny problem because it had to be based on the presumption that the subject and the object were the same.

The clear and obvious conclusion was that if I looked in a mirror, what I would see was the objective part of me. But what part of me was doing the seeing? Was it not the subjective me? Later on (long after grammar school), I learned about the word “sentience”: awareness—a state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness—which just happens to be universally distributed among all sentient beings in an indiscriminate, unconditional way. Then I wondered: Can an object lacking sentience be “aware?” Unless there was something else to learn, regarding stones and other objects lacking sentience, it seemed reasonably clear that the subjective part of me was the part seeing that objective me in the mirror. And furthermore objects lacking sentience can’t be aware of anything, much less themselves.

I must confess that putting these seemingly disparate pieces together was a moment of enlightening amazement. Obviously, inside of me (and every other sentient being), was an unseen faculty of consciousness that could rightly be called the subjective nature—but lacking ordinary definitions—that was exactly like every other sentient being: the seer seeing objects, including sentient objects, but not necessarily aware ones. All objects are discriminately unique and different, yet subjectively, there are no differences because sentience is a state of elementary or undifferentiated consciousness.

Ah-ha, I thought: I’m two people perfectly fused into a single being. Remove the sentient part, then I’d turn into a stone or remove the non-sentient part, and I’d turn into a ghost. One part of me (the objective element) is 100% differentiated, unique, and set apart from every other object (like unique snowflakes). The subjective element is 100% undifferentiated, just the same as every other hidden subject (like fundamental snow). Melt the snow, and it all becomes H2O (water). This latter is the basis of unity (what brings us all together), and the prior is the basis for discrimination (what pits us all against each other). And neither the objective nor the subjective me (or you) could possibly exist apart from the other. These are not two but rather one, inseparable entity. Now that is pretty cool: ghost and a non-ghost, at the same time!

Reality and perfection.

I am a subscriber to an email newsletter from Windmill, the header of which says: “You do not need to be ashamed of being imperfect. We were all made that way. You do not have to be ashamed that it’s so hard to work with your imperfections: the very tools you have for doing this are imperfect. We are all truly doing a difficult thing in being human.” 

I enjoy Windmill and think it is helpful in many ways. However, I want to address an essential point in this post within their header: “You do not need to be ashamed of being imperfect.” Due to some fortunate education, which others may not have been afforded, I learned to read Koine Greek—the language used to write the New Testament of the Bible and discovered much of value, not the least of which is how perfection was understood and defined way back then and has continued to find it’s way into modern culture.

The word “perfection,” properly defined in Koine Greek is not some abstract notion of being without flaw. The word (and it’s definition) is enlightening. The word for perfection is teleos and means complete or finished. Aristotle apparently said, “‘Nature does nothing in vain.’ So far, there’s no teleology to explain why you haven’t left the couch for several hours.”

Unfortunately, we still cling to the incorrect idea of being without flaw. I do agree it is impossible to be flawless living as a mortal. However, that is a side issue to what I want to convey in this post, which is reality. Until we get that issue right it doesn’t matter how we understanding anything, perfection included. 

So what is real? Those locked into the physics only, perspective, define reality as tangible, measurable phenomena (in other words objects known through the senses rather than through thought or intuition) or alternatively, a temporal or spatiotemporal (e.g., belonging to space-time) object of sensory experience as distinguished from noumenon. 

From this understanding, we can glean two essential points: There are measurable phenomena and noumenon (a thing as it is in itself, as distinct from a thing as it is knowable by the senses through phenomenal attributes). Noumenon goes by various names, among them Suchness and/or Thusness. Both terms arise from mystics, such as The Buddha or Meister Eckhart, as well as anyone who has plumbed the depths of consciousness to their ineffable core to find the true nature of reality—the basis, or foundation of all things (phenomena).

To repeat myself, what’s real? The realm of phenomena is physics based, and the realm of noumena is metaphysics based. Therefore there is a world, subject to perception (which we naturally assume as all there is). Does that make one right and the other wrong? Not at all. We humans are a mixed bag of both a physical, tangible, perceptible body (our house) and a metaphysical, intangible, unseen noumenal soul.  

Reality is thus like a coin with two sides (heads and tails) and perfection (completion/perfection) entails moving on a pathway leading to an awakening of that which is undetectable, yet the basis of all things. And when, at last, we awaken, it changes everything and we see with new eyes the two-fold nature of ourselves and others, one part of which is complete and the other part is a work in process— birth, change, growth and ultimately death of the “house” with the soul (which never dies) released to move on along the ultimate pathway to indwell another house.

“When you do things from the soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.” and, “My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there.”—Rumi

An imagined you.

Do you have any idea who you are? Begin with this simple understanding: An idea is a mental image, otherwise known as a thought. When you imagine yourself you form an image. It may be a composite image constructed with many parts such as your standing vis-à-vis others, the values you hold dear, or just about any other contribution. But in the end, you have an idea about yourself, which you assume constitutes your being.

This process forces the matter of selfhood. Are you the result of this process—a composite image (a self-image)? Or are you the one who conjures up this image? If the former then you are in constant motion with continuously changing vagaries. In other words there is no permanent you, instead, you remain vulnerable and never at ease (e.g. dis-ease). On the other hand, consider the possibility that the real you is not, and has never been any sort of image but is rather the never-changing and constantly present, ineffable imaginer: The one doing the imaging that can never, ever be imagined.

In today’s world, we have a different name for a self-image. It goes by the name “ego” which if researched means “I” as when we say things like “I am a special being” (of some sort). And this ego understands itself as being uniquely different, special and in conflict with every other ego. It’s a world of me against you and if I am to win, you must lose.

Now this other entity, the imaginer, has no defining characteristics. If it did then it would be constrained to some characteristics but not others. One characteristic only has meaning when understood against some other characteristic such as up vs. non-up (otherwise known as down). Can anything be both at the same time? Our ordinary answer to that questions is no due to meaning and understanding, which is to say that everything can only be understood and have meaning when compared to something else: thus discrimination and discernment.

But how about this: My imagination is the same as your imagination and neither of these can be understood, just recognized as the wellspring of every thought and image. The imagination has one purpose only: to imagine. And the imagination has no limits or forms of difference. In truth, the imaginer is exactly the same from one person to another. We are all just a commonly shared mind without limit or constraining dimension.

Think about that! Better yet, don’t think about that. Just recognize this: You and I are the same non-thing, without limit.

Inherent goodness.

You are not made good by your beliefs. You are good already. When you realize your inherent goodness there is no longer a need to believe. Then you know.

Who stands before me?

One of the most profound stories concerning Bodhidharma, the figure who is credited as the originator of Zen, occurred in China during the 6th century CE during a conversation with Emperor Wu. The Emperor had invested himself in many ways to promote Buddhism and thus felt deserving of special merit. He said to Bodhidharma, “I have built many temples, copied innumerable Sutras, and ordained many monks since becoming Emperor. Therefore, I ask you what is my merit?” 

At the level of vast emptiness, there is nothing special, or the opposite: Specialness. In response, Bodhidharma replied: “None whatsoever!” Emperor Wu then responded with, “What then is the most important principle of Buddhism?” Bodhidharma answered: “Vast emptiness. Nothing sacred.” Shocked by his answer, the Emperor then said, “Who is this that stands before me?” Bodhidharma: answered, “I don’t know.”

Without a doubt, to students new to the practice of Zen, this story must seem bizarre. How on earth could such apparent ignorance, expressed by the founder of Zen, be considered profound? To sweep away the cloud that covers over the significance, we must explore a common dimension of human nature: The desire to be somebody special, and the corresponding quest to be involved in doing something we all consider important that moves us toward that goal of specialness. 

So long as we are not doing whatever it may be we consider as important, the more guilt we feel. For many, we begin in childhood with feelings of inadequacy. Some people are so consumed with “doing” they become obsessive-compulsive, doing the same thing over and over to experience some relief. The rest of us, at the very least, feel uncomfortable thinking that we are wasting valuable time by not doing something.

Two points: Who is consumed with this desire? And what’s the difference between “being” and “doing?” Let me address the second point first: The issue of beingness which concerned Bodhidharma’s unknowing. He seemed to be saying he didn’t know himself, and if anything is central to Zen it is the unveiling of our true nature. You really can’t understand this issue without the other part of his answer: “Vast emptiness. Nothing sacred.”

Instead, there is nothing whatsoever, yet within emptiness, is completion. That state of mind is the base upon which everything we do is based. Without “beingness” it is impossible for “doing-ness” to exist, thus the catchphrase, “Be here now.” We have been so conditioned to think that just being without the expression of acting in some way toward our goal, is to be considered as a useless bum. 

There is special significance in being present—fully present in the moment, but the question is “who is being present?” The knee-jerk (and unexamined answer) is, “Me.” But this me can be expressed, both in many definable terms (e.g., The ego, which is mere clothing upon a mannequin, changing moment by moment, depending on changing circumstances), or the indefinable true person that we are, neither special nor not.

So then we come to the first point of the “Who,” to which Bodhidharma answered, “I don’t know.” Why does that make sense, whether we know it or not? It makes sense simply because emptiness—the realm of completion and the lack, is the same realm lacking definition. Nobody, not even a Buddha can define what is essentially indefinable except to note the obvious: doing and being are essential partners. 

If this is the case, how are we to know, not only ourselves but also other people? The Buddha himself pointed to the answer with his statement in the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra when he said, “Seeing the actions of body and mouth, we say that we see the mind. The mind is not seen, but this is not false. This is seeing by outer signs.” In other words, we not only know who we are, but we also know who others are, not just by what is said but by how actions speak louder than words alone. Our words and actions together define the person that stands before us all.

The road to an imaginary nowhere.

I recently came across a statement that suggested that a precursor to moving beyond our egos was to first have a good or healthy one. There was something that troubled me about the suggestion that may have appeared worthy until thoroughly examined. 

Good egos/bad egos are both judgments, but to first make such a judgment, it’s necessary to describe the nature of ego and to distinguish it from our true self. In another post (Irrational exuberance and the tradition of silence), I shared what Chán Master Sheng Yen, said (Complete Enlightenment—Zen Comments on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment) about the self/ego. He said:

“… there cannot be a self (e.g., ego) that is free from all obstructions. If there is a sense of self, then there are also obstructions. There cannot be obstructions without a self to create and experience them, because the self is an obstruction.” 

To pick and choose one phenomenal condition in contrast with another and feel righteous about our choice runs the risk of becoming self-righteous. So it is with care and sensitivity that I approach this matter.

In spiritual vernacular, noumenality (in contrast to phenomenality—known by our senses) is known as our true spiritual nature and is understood as the wellspring source of all. Noumenality is neither good nor bad. It is just what it is until contaminated with judgments. Whether we are aware of this nature being universally imbedded in all sentient forms is somewhat beside the point. We have a human history of being unaware of many matters that changed our view of the world, for example, the idea that the earth was the center of the universe. This was, of course, not true despite our belief to the contrary. It is likewise analogous that the world does not revolve around us either.

Noumenality is translated as a-thing-unto-itself of which the senses give no knowledge, but whose bare existence can be intuited from the nature of experience. It is our seed—our jewel of great value. The name we choose to articulate this transcendent seed is arbitrary. Any and every name is as good or bad as the next. No name can adequately define what is transcendent and every name chosen leads us to conceptual error.

I’ve used the following quote so often in my writing I run the risk of over-kill. But it is so insightful that I find it difficult to resist repeating. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is quoted as having said: 

“If those who lead you say unto you: behold, the Kingdom is in heaven, then the birds of the heaven will be before you. If they say unto you: it is in the sea, then the fish will be before you. But the Kingdom is within you, and it is outside of you. When you know yourselves, then shall you be known, and you shall know that you are the sons of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you are in poverty, and you are poverty.”

Contrast this teaching with the ordinary understanding—That the Kingdom is in fact in the sky somewhere (e.g., in heaven) or just about any place other than indiscriminately distributed—transcendent to space-time. Here Jesus was saying that the Kingdom is not limited to space-time, not even singularly within or outside. But instead, we find the Kingdom everywhere and then we come to know ourselves as sons of the living Father. He closes this verse by saying if we don’t know who we are then we are indeed poor. We could easily travel for an eternity, trying to find what is always the Kingdom’s spiritual air we breathe. We would be like fish not knowing they swim in the water.

This is a startling teaching, only because it is so radically different from the ordinary dogmatic Christian view. In fact, it is very similar to the Buddhist teaching about enlightenment. That teaching says that our only reality emanates from the body of truth, which is not limited or restricted in any way, and it is the loss of ignorance, which reveals our true nature. 

This body of truth was known as the Dharmakaya (The One Mind—pure, unrestricted, consciousness), equivalent to the Kingdom. Indeed this teaching says the same thing—we are poor because we have not discovered who we are. We are deluded (and poor) because we mistakenly believe that we are a shadow (an ego) of our real self. When we awaken to our true nature then we join the ranks among the Buddhas—The Awakened ones and are recognized for who we truly are: as sons of the living Father.

Meister Eckhart, a German Christian theologian, philosopher, and mystic who lived 700 years ago clarified this distinction between God and the idea of God. He said, 

“Man’s last and highest parting occurs when for God’s sake he takes leave of god. St. Paul took leave of god for God’s sake and gave up all that he might get from god as well as all he might give—together with every idea of god. In parting with these he parted with god for God’s sake and God remained in him as God is in his own nature—not as he is conceived by anyone to be—nor yet as something yet to be achieved, but more as an is-ness, as God really is. Then he and God were a unit, that is pure unity. Thus one becomes that real person for who there can be no suffering, any more than the divine essence can suffer.”

My use of this quote underscores the important distinction between ideas and what is represented by ideas, or more aptly, an image, and what is represented by an image. This distinction is as meaningful for expressions of the ineffable as it is to tangible, measurable life. The philosophy of Zen does not require belief as blind faith. It considers this as an obstruction to the discernment of truth. To hold onto ideas, good or bad—however pious or well-intentioned—is considered part of the problem. 

It would seem that Eckhart would have agreed. Any and all givens are pieces of our own self-constructed prison bars, which reflect closed-mindedness and obstruct a-thing-unto-itself.  When we refuse to see what lies clearly before us, we forgo clarity in the interest of obligation and blind allegiance. These are mental anchors responsible for creating friction and emasculating our ability to adapt to changing circumstances, which in the nature of change determines genuine truth and justice.

The goal of Zen is to strip ourselves of illusions so that we can embrace life as it is, not as we decide it should be, and the means prescribed by the father of Zen (Bodhidharma) was simply to not think. Thinking is probably the greatest form of all delusion since is based on perception, which is completely phenomenal (as things appear through our senses).

Dogmatic constraints are gilds that distort life by requiring it to conform to artificially imposed constraints or suffer the consequences of rejection and condemnation, and the most pernicious shoulds are those, which we impose upon ourselves. 

Self-judgments result when we internalize the votes of others or impose judgments upon our selves and make them our own guiding force. In many cases, it takes years to break this cycle of self-judgment and recrimination, which lies at the heart of the manner in which we judge the world. By and large, we see life as a reflection of our own biases. Zen is a process, which can aid us in that endeavor by helping us to experience the contingency and emptiness of our egos and thus strip away the fences we create to set us apart and exalt us from others.

When we succeed in coming to terms with the fragile and fabricated nature of ego construction and dependency, we begin to notice that every other aspect of life is linked to this phantom entity, which drives the process. Pressed through the collapsing floors—dropping mind and body— to the ground of our being, we finally see our true linkage and are forced to accept union with our fellow humans and every other dimension of life. 

The result is deeply rooted compassion and desire to join with the unending ranks of those who have likewise plumbed the depths, survived the trip and found peace. When that occurs we realize that such discriminations and judgments like good and evil are nothing more than prison bars, which obstruct and diminish life and our relation to it.

The perversion of our correct selves into good or bad images degrades both our sense of the world and ourselves. An image of who we are, taken in one extreme direction results in feeling special and exalted compared to others. Taken in the opposite extreme, results in feelings of being worthless and lesser, compared to others.

Regardless, a rotten fish by any other name smells as bad. An ego is by nature a phantom idea or image of our true self and thus called a self-image. An image is a product of our imaginations: an unreal projection and can be nothing other than an image regardless of spin, and its nature is greedy, self-centered, and defensive. 

The perversion of our true noumenal nature is like a cloak masking our immaculate selves or a gild on a lily. It is not only not needed it is destructive. Eckhart reminded us that, 

“Humanity in the poorest and most despised human being is just as complete as in the Pope or the Emperor.” And we know what sort of clothing the Emperor wears—none.

Thus a good ego or a bad ego is in truth an oxymoron. If we wait until we have a good idea of self there would be no motivation to be rid of it. Chan Master Sheng-yen once pointed out, 

“Generally, unless a sleeping person is having a nightmare, he or she will not want to wake up. The dreamer prefers to remain in the dream. In the same way, if your daily life is relatively pleasant, you probably won’t care to practice in order to realize that your life is illusory. No one likes to be awakened from nice dreams.” And as one who had years of bad dreams about the despicable person, I thought I was, I can assure you I was very eager to wake up from the nightmare.

God in a Box

The temptation

Confusions about the nature of God are always lurking in the background and complicating clarity. So I want to offer alternative perspectives on a fundamental Christian principle that arises from Matthew’s book in the Bible. Here’s the passage:

“For whoever wants to save his ‘life’ will lose it, but whoever loses his ‘life’ for me will find it. For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his ‘life.’” Matt 16:25-26

The New Testament of the Bible was written in Koine Greek. There are two different Greek words in this passage for life. As is the case in any translation, this difference is lost to the English eye, distorting the intended meaning. The two occasions in the first sentence mean “soul”—the Greek word used was psuche, from which we derive the English word Psyche as in Psychology (and has often been interpreted as ego—“I”). The other life in the second sentence means life eternal, in the absolute sense (In a word—essence—and the Greek word was Zoe).

Many Christians think of “soul” as the vessel of enduring life, which designates the individual, and we say things like “He’s got soul,” which means “personality.” Another ordinary expression is “soul-mate.” Another still—“soul-food” or “soul-brother.” The common-coin understanding of “soul” is selfhood, which is characterized by our idea of who we are: Our image of self or self-image—the idea, rather than the reality of our essential being.

An alternate reading, or understanding, of psuche, is mental faculties. The soul is often believed by ordinary Christians to represent that part of the person, which rises to heaven after death (or gets a ticket to another place). Still, such understanding could only make linguistic sense by merging psuche and Zoe, and that merging does not exist in the selected passage.

This passage from the Bible can be understood in a variety of ways. One way—the orthodox way—is that a person must lay down their life (tarnished soul or self-image, figuratively) and be born again thus receiving the essence of God lost in Eden—to trade in the old fallen person for a new person with the Holy Spirit resident in their being, which couldn’t be there before due to our polluted and fallen nature. In other words, to accept Christ’s payment, on the cross, to redeem us all from the debt owed for the sin of disobedience in Eden. God wants justice and demands payment; otherwise, the breach of separation will remain, and we’ll just head for purgatory.

This entire explanation rests on the head of a pin: the basis that there was, in fact, a debt to be paid for the unjustified sin of disobedience in Eden, which becomes moot if Eden was metaphorical vs. an actual place. That sin was seen by God as so horrific that it required the sacrificial death of God’s only son—a curious notion since Genesis 2 is the story about God creating another son, Adam. And what was that terrible sin? Eating an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, instead of fruit from the tree of life. In other words, trading away eternal life by gaining mortal discernment.

Clearly, the severe punishment was unwarranted since Adam and Eve didn’t yet possess the capacity to know they were making a bad choice until after they ate from the wrong tree. This would be equivalent to imprisoning your child (and their eternal progeny) because they made a poopie mess, for the rest of their life, before you potty trained them. They could only have known wrong following the choice, which equipped them with the requisite capacity for discernment, and to understand wrong, you must know what is right.

This presents a serious dilemma. Either God’s sense of justice was flawed (punishing the entire human race for a naïve choice). This story is a metaphor—the most logical possibility—in which case one needs to ferret out the more profound meaning. If you follow the story carefully, mortal discernment came along as a package deal which involved self-consciousness. Before eating the apple, neither Adam nor Eve had any self-consciousness. After they ate it, they became self-aware and covered their nakedness. Before that point (assuming there is a dimension of time called before and after—a separate topic, worthy of consideration), the two were naked as a jaybird and didn’t know there was anything else.

And forever after, good Christians regard their nakedness as evil—the stain of Satan/the serpent—and the temptation of Adam by Eve, which has caused a significant burden of guilt and perverted sexuality among millions of Christians for centuries. So the story goes, God was angry about the choice to trade away eternal life to get mortal discernment, so much so that he cut off the entire human race from his union, and thus created separation and duality. If a human father acted in such a heavy-handed and unjust fashion, he would appropriately find himself standing before a judge in a family court charged with child abuse.

On the other hand, there may be an alternate understanding. Perhaps the first understanding is not what Jesus meant at all. There is no support for this convoluted story, spoken by Jesus, anywhere in the Bible. The story is there, but not spoken by Jesus. The story has been knit together with various strands through a process known as proof-texting: the practice of using de-contextualized quotations from a document to establish a rhetorical proposition through an appeal to authority from other texts; A sort of a consensus by proxy (e.g., circular thinking). It is possible to knit pieces of different yarn together to make any fabric you wish. Isn’t it possible to see this as a metaphor with deep meaning rather than a factual account of a real place with real people and a real talking snake? The clear answer to that question is a resounding yes.

Perhaps what the text meant was that we must lose our mental/mortal illusions or ideas to experience God's immortal essence without fabricated mental images. This second possibility is very close to the Buddhist formulation. The lack of orthodox endorsement does not mean that there haven’t been solid Christians (Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Francis of Assisi, John of the Cross, many others, and most important of all, Meister Eckhart—a German Christian theologian, philosopher, and mystic who lived 700 years ago) accepted this second version. A case in point comes from him. Here is what he said:

“Man’s last and highest parting occurs when for God’s sake, he takes leave of god. St. Paul took leave of god for God’s sake and gave up all that he might get from god as well as all he might give—together with every idea of god. In parting with these, he parted with god for God’s sake, and God remained in him as God is in his own nature—not as he is conceived by anyone to be—nor yet as something yet to be achieved, but more as an is-ness, as God really is. Then he and God were a unit, that is pure unity. Thus one becomes that real person for whom there can be no suffering, any more than the divine essence can suffer.”

God, according to Eckhart, is “divine essence—is-ness.” Not an idea, but a nameless, indefinable, immortal reality from which there is no division. The Buddha used the expression “thusness” to speak of the ineffable. Eckhart’s “Is-ness” is the same as the Buddha’s “thusness.” Both mean unembellished essence.

These are very different viewpoints with very different results. The orthodox church promotes the first understanding, but many serious Christians accept the second. In any event, with mortal ego-centricity intact, suffering continues. Common (or uncommon) sense proves that.

By accepting the first explanation, a conventional born again Christian must only speak some words of acceptance (either silently or otherwise)—“I confess my sin of disobedience and accept Christ as my new lord and savior.” Nothing else is required or needed. The mortal ego-fabrication can stay entrenched and functioning with all associated corruption continuing, and no motivation to change it. No further action is required beyond the confessional words.

The presumption is that the Holy Spirit will, thereafter, do everything else with no action required from the corrupted person. After those words of confession, you become a robot moving at the dictate of the Holy Spirit (allegedly), and Katy bar the door for anyone questioning the convictions of a born again Christian since, in that case, it is God speaking through a person. To a serious Buddhist, this point of surrender is the starting point, not the ending.

By accepting the second explanation—not recognized by orthodox Christian dogma—there is a different form of acceptance: by ridding oneself of a fabricated mortal self-illusion (psuche/ego), it becomes possible to accept one’s immortal essence and reality as a genuine creation of, and inhabited by God, and by so doing acknowledge what has always been and can never be otherwise—the presence of God’s ubiquitous essence (Zoe). Duality is a myth. Unity has always been. If there were a trick of Satan (ego?), that trick was to create an image of God (A Matrix of illusion) that masks the reality of God.

If God actually (vs. metaphorically,) created duality, that would be the same as God undoing his intrinsic nature (his immortal essence, which by definition is unified, ubiquitous, and omnipresent). God is everywhere all of the time—and that means within and outside—so how can God come and go? And even if God could come and go, does that depend upon human behavior? To suggest such a perspective turns God into a sort of yo-yo traveler dependent upon mortal circumstances. The Bible says that God’s love is unconditional and that a defining mark is omnipresence.

There seems to be a conundrum here. The problem is not God’s immortal presence—God never left—but our mortal awareness, which is obscured by self-generated illusions of a soul, placing the ego (e.g., ego-centric) at the center in place of God. The only eternal thing is God’s ever-present essence. You—the mortal you—flesh, bones, blood, and matter (including mental fabrications), will pass away like leaves in the wind. However, your nameless immortal essence endures forever because it is never born, nor does it ever die.

To many, this is a critical and delicate matter. It was for me. I struggled with the apparent dilemma for years, thinking I had to choose one side or the other. The fact is there really was no choice, only the one I imagined. If the matter of handles can be set aside if only briefly, it is possible to examine the underlying metaphorical meaning which transcends words and labels. If you read my post on “The Wall—Essence,” you will see my thoughts about transcendence. In that realm, there are no names nor labels. These are things that we mortal folk use to communicate ideas. If God exists—and how can there be any serious question about the matter—then the nature of God is an eternally ever-present, immanent, transcendent essence—Zoe. The Buddha used the word “Dharmadhatu”—he didn’t speak Greek, to say the same thing. Immortal essence is blocked by the mortal illusion—psuche.

I do not refer to myself as a Buddhist or a Christian. These are just names that cannot encapsulate our intrinsic, essential self-understanding. Words are just boxes (limitations) that we must struggle to get beyond. The Buddha cautioned not to be attached to names, even holy ones. He said, “So-called Buddha-Nature is not something that has been made.” Words can be prisons when we become attached.

It is what lies beneath the words that matter. In the final analysis, God is not an idea. Not even a name, but is everywhere yet, not abiding in a particular place: “Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.” (Spoken by Jesus; Matt 8:20) The Buddha expressed this non-abiding like this: “The Dharmata is Nirvana—the true essence of all Buddhas. Nirvana has no grotto or house to live in.” (Mahaparinirvana Sutra) The meaning of both of these expressions is that transcendence infuses all of existence yet is not restricted to place or form.

My blog’s name is “Dharma Space,” which means “Integration of one’s temporal nature with the underlying life principle by undoing of all egoistic falsehood”—thus accepting the indivisible conjunction of matter with essence. That premise is not limited to a particular perspective. I subscribe to the teachings of The Buddha because they come along with a minimum of baggage, with a complementary focus on freedom from dogma.

I also accept the truth about this integration from wherever it may be found. Jesus spoke such truth. Ego-centric humans have polluted the water of truth by pouring the poison of a mortal self-image into the well of life and ruined the lives of many in the process. Awakening is what Buddhism is about. That is the meaning of a Buddha: to awaken from a mortal ego’s self-created nightmare and accept your immortal essential nature. If you do that, it doesn’t matter what label you use. You can use the label of Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Jew. It won’t matter. You’ll be a Buddha with a meaningless label.