Divide or unite?

I love history. Knowing where we came from and how we got here is important. “Real” history—not the fairy-tale version we seem to prefer—teaches us valuable lessons. In particular, understanding the historical path leading to common-coin words and terms is paramount because words and terms are the building blocks of ideologies—the way we think and understanding what unites and divides us.

December 8 is an auspicious day few even know exists, and I’ll get to that in a moment. But first, I’d like to write about another day of which nearly everyone, throughout the world, is aware—December 25, the day Christians (and others) celebrate the birth of Jesus. We know that day as Christmas. But time has erased from our collective memory the origin of the term “Christmas,”—The Christian festival celebrating the birth of Jesus occurs on December 25. The English term Christmas (“mass on Christ’s day”) is of recent origin. The earlier term Yule (e.g., Yule-tide) may have derived from the Germanic jōl or the Anglo-Saxon geōl, which referred to the feast of the winter solstice: A purely secular root to what has become a day of giving and receiving gifts on Christmas, supposedly as a celebration of the birth of Jesus.

Since the early 20th century, Christmas has mostly become a secular holiday. In this secular celebration, a mythical figure named Santa Claus plays a pivotal role. For the most part, Christmas is a family holiday, observed by Christians and non-Christians, devoid of Christian elements. And we are now in the midst of “Black Fridays” (plural, since the day, has become an entire series of days), designating the annual rush to purchase the most for the least, in anticipation of getting ready for Santa Claus. “Black Friday” also has a historical path, but I don’t want to overlay one divergence on top of another, or I’d never get to the point. And what is that point? The point is the preference for myth over fact—Fake News or disinformation, making it nearly impossible to know which end is up. We seem to love snake-oil and those who sell it because we are essentially lazy and don’t make an effort to dig beneath the surface and discover what lies within.

There is a method in my madness for this short Christmas diversion, apart from the significance of December 8. The madness part is that I would delay. And the method part explains my reason, which is to illustrate how we (as a human family) have lost our way. As the saying goes: “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” This very moment we are on the verge of doing just that—repeating a miserable era that emerged during the decade following 1930. That repetition has much to do with both December 8 and December 25.

Birth—biological birth is different from spiritual birth. In the Christian tradition, spiritual birth happens (or it doesn’t) when aspirants confess their sinful nature and accept the Holy Spirit (supposedly the aspect of a triune God—trinity, promised by Jesus) into their spiritual hearts and souls. Then, those “born again” become a new person, armed with The Spirit of God. The matter of salvation (e.g., being set free from the scourge of “sin”) presupposes being sinful in the first place. Without that presumption, the entire proposition falls into a thousand pieces, and like Humpty-Dumpty, can’t be put back together again: another divergent tale worth pondering, but for another time.

While few know the historical facts of Christmas (December 25), fewer still know the historical facts of Bodhi Day (December 8)—the Buddhist holiday that commemorates the day that the historical Buddha—Siddhartha Gautama (Shakyamuni), experienced enlightenment. According to tradition, Siddhartha had pursued and ultimately gave up years of extremely ascetic practice and resolved to sit under a “peepal tree” until he was free from suffering. Siddhartha sat beneath that tree, meditated until he found the root of suffering, and discovered how to liberate himself from it. That process of giving up asceticism was preceded by giving up what none of us would give up (great wealth) to travel the other path that lead to a dead-end. On the other side of that end lay the opening to ultimate freedom—a goal all humans desire; the mythical pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.

When those living in the Western World think of enlightenment, they conjure up “THE Enlightenment,” an era when European politics, philosophy, science, and communications were radically reoriented during the course of the “long 18th century” (1685-1815) as part of a movement referred to by its participants as the Age of Reason, or simply The Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers in Britain, France, and Europe questioned traditional authority and embraced the notion that humanity could be improved through rational change. Ever since that era, the Western World has been on a path defined by rational thought and hardened ideologies. While Christians remained the largest religious group in the world in 2015, making up nearly a third (31%—2.3. billion) of Earth’s 7.3 billion people, they are fragmented into a myriad of schisms (e.g., denominations) too vast to count, each of which claims to be the sole keepers of the truth.

In the Eastern World, “enlightenment” is a very different matter. The idea of “moksha”—release from the cycle of continuing suffering by attaining a transcendent state of mind, is the gold standard. It is within this state of mind that one realizes unconditional truth. Opposing ideologies are anathema to this sort of enlightenment but is instead oriented toward realizing one’s true nature of unity (non-difference vs. ideological differences). And for that reason celebrating December 8 (Bodhi Day) is relevant to the current crisis of chaos around the world. We are in a meltdown mode because of the “I’m right/you’re wrong” vector of ideologies, which align with rational thinking, taking us further and further away from meltdown solutions. 

“Ide-prison-ology”

Rearranging priorities.

It’s time to add a new word to our contemporary vernacular. The addition is a simple adjustment to the word “ideology,” that reflects where our culture has arrived—in a prison of opposition with no legal appeal for release. 

We already have similar words  that approximate this new word, such as “Mexican standoff” or “logjam.” But the essence of this new word is only glancingly similar to those words. What the new word captures, sums up our current state of irreconcilability: a state of cultural and political “my way or the highway” stagnation where nothing gets done. 

The principle of compromise appears to be lost in the ash heap of time, and this state of mind is not limited to any one country. It is a global phenomenon that results in a preoccupation with the insignificant at the expense of the significant.

There is so much confusion occurring at the same time it is nearly impossible to arrange priorities. Even if we could, wait ten minutes and the entire deck gets reshuffled and we simply cease to think of what’s important and what’s not. Instead, we have fallen back into a time when legalism was abhorred by moral giants such as Jesus and The Buddha, both of whom fought to rectify the problem by pointing out what the laws of the time needed as a substratum—the spirit of the law. 

That focus has been lost as well, thus the need to establish this new word by recognizing what ought to be obvious but is not: We have fallen prey to dogmatic, inflexible positions of opposition where nobody but the rich and powerful—who rig the system to their advantage, perhaps by design, to keep us all confused and distracted by what is happening behind the scene with what is happening in front of the scene—too much of insignificance to enable us to notice matters of ultimate importance.

The question is, why is this happening? That’s a hydra-headed challenge but maybe it is simply a matter of too much comfort by the few at the cost of the many. Money and power are two factors not easily shared. Possessiveness is a stickler and the more a person has the more they seem to want. Maybe what we all need to do (and I’d suggest we begin from the top and work our way down) is go and live in places that aren’t so comfortable, where concern for your life is the common coin. There is nothing quite so transforming as your own experience of suffering. When you are starving, a single slice of bread becomes a feast and the ideology of the whole loaf or none at all descends into la-la-land, right where it belongs.

We have become imprisoned into camps of opposing ideas and values with no escape. It is long past time for us to realize such behavior is shooting everyone in the foot. Life always seems to follow the path we noticed in the Marines: Bad stuff flows downstream, never upstream. The tide needs to turn, and soon.

Eternal frame of mind.

We are facing an unprecedented era of crisis, never seen before.

Not only is there the evident crisis of fighting a global war with an unseen enemy we have labeled COVID-19, but there are other crisis’ roaring along in the background (such as global climate change) while our attention is diverted fighting the virus, with all of its permutations—impact on global economies with the two-edged sword of dying from exposure to the virus or dying from starvation, impact on food supplies, a growing divide among all people, based on placing blame, and the impact on mental/emotional health, et.al.

Conspiracy theories are flaring through social media, dwelling on finding the culprit, punishing them, or those who would simply rather put their heads in the sand and hope it will all just go away. While China may, or may not, be the source of the viral spread, intentionally (which would be total madness) or accidentally, we in the US (with a history going back 243 years, to the signing of the Declaration of Independence) would do well to recognize our comparative national youth. Within recorded history, China dates back 4,000 years, is recognized as one of the four great ancient civilizations of the world, together with ancient Egypt, Babylon, and India. And moreover, it is the only ancient civilization that has continued to this very day. China was one of the cradles of the human race and has gone through countless times of catastrophe. Any group of people that have survived that long probably has something of value to say about “crisis,” and it does.

The Chinese word (written as “危机”) means “crisis” and is made up of two characters: “危” and “机.” 危 means danger, and 机 means chance and opportunity. However, 机 can also mean pivot (a term we hear much today)—a crucial or a watershed moment. Logically, this makes much more sense than looking at a moment of crisis simply as though it were stuck in time. Whether 243, 4,000 years or 200,000 years—the time homo sapiens have been on earth, each and every moment evolves into new, never seen before moments, through good times and bad.

Of course, while in the midst of the “危” (danger) we tend to forget that nature abhors a vacuum, and “机” (opportunities) will follow, as surely as the sun follows the darkness. The question is thus, how to maintain equanimity in the midst of apparent, tangible catastrophes? And this comes down to how we view ourselves, others, and the world around us. If we remain persuaded that life=physical/mortal life, then it follows there most likely won’t be any following opportunities without reverting to the survival of the fittest—dog-eat-dog, kill, or be killed behavior. However, if life is not just tangible, measurable, flesh, bones, or anything else that can be perceived through our senses, but is instead immortal and eternal, then equanimity is much more possible. 

Both Jesus and The Buddha taught that true life is eternal and does not end with bodily death. People put words in the mouth of Jesus (as they did with The Buddha) and texts have been written to support both views. For example, there is the Sutra of Infinite Life and various Christian texts, ranging from Canonical approved ones to others from the Gnostic Gospels (which conflict with each other). The unabashed truth is nobody has ever been able to prove the nature of an afterlife (either for the good or the bad) and I would argue that what we do mortally ought to be the focus, not as a gamble to insure what may or may not happen following our mortal end, but rather because doing good is better than doing bad. So long as we pin our hope on divine justice it undermines our motives to take responsibility in the here-and-now.

Fool that I am.

The fools prison

There’s a really curious matter regarding our self-understanding. For the most part, our unenlightened way of thinking about our self is governed by a mythical illusion, which we take to be wise and compassionate. 

We imagine this being covered in lots of different clothing and we call that person our ego. The term ego in Latin means “I,” cognate with the Greek “Εγώ (Ego)” meaning “I,” often used in English to mean the self, identity, or other related concepts.

When we express this in descriptive words we say things like, “I am an American, a Black man, a Christian, a Democrat, or any other handle.” We identify with such definitions, as we would clothing. So long as we conform to that way of defining our selves we are trapped within a prison of unflinching conformity without even realizing it. We thus live in delusion and always consider ourselves to be wise and compassionate. But are we really? Or are we deluding ourselves?

There is a test that nearly always works to reveal the truth. Can you give an unconditional gift, expecting nothing in return? With no expectation of reciprocal action? Or perhaps a trade is taking place: “I’ll give you this IF you give me something in return. And if you won’t return my favor, then I’ll stop giving you mine.” This latter is being launched by our ego because an ego is only interested in self-serving conditions. Our ego says to us, “What’s in this for me?” An ego lives within the delusion of separation, alienation and greed since that is the nature of an egos house. In that house we are fools believing that we’re not. A fool never knows they are a fool. And a Buddha never knows he/she is a Buddha. No one ever truly knows who he or she is that way. The measure of that arises by actions rather than words.

Nobody is an idea or a concept. Instead, we can learn what The Buddha said about this in The Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra. He said we are an indefinable, and undetectable entity known as the Tathāgatagarbha (loosly translated as the genesis or womb of the Buddha which lives within us all); Reality personified that can’t be found. He said that we don’t have real, separate identities. Instead he said we know ourselves by what we produce. Jesus said the same thing, “By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?” An ego is a thornbush. Our real personhood shares unconditional wine.

We can talk a good game all day long but none of it means a thing. Show me your measure with your life and never mind the words. St. Francis of Assisi said it this way, “Preach the gospel. And if necessary, use words.”

Journey thru Hell to Heaven

I didn’t grow up with any religious or spiritual inclinations at all. I didn’t have any desire to ponder what I considered un-useful speculations. It was only after I was 40 years of age, having traveled far, suffered much and stood at death’s door twice that I began to reach into the unreachable for a practical reason: I wanted to live but knew there was something very wrong with the way I had lived thus far.

At that juncture, I chose to leave “the world” behind and close myself off from one dimension and close myself into another, and my choice was Zen. I chose that path because it held out the hope that I could learn to get beyond the horrors I had experienced that dwelled in memories too egregious to live with. These horrors occupied my unending thoughts, and Zen was all about cleansing my mind by suspending thought. I lived in a Zen monastery for nine months, during which time I joined hands with Dante and walked through the bowels of the Hell I had created. When my journey came to an end, I had drained myself of the infinite swamp of corruption that dwelt in memory only and cleansed my heart and mind of contamination.

I discovered something very rare and special during that time: when all cognitive processes are gone, what remained was emptiness—the face of God. By the time I arrived at seminary, I had seen that face and knew that God was the source of everything. So I began to construct a new life blending thoughts with no thoughts: God in my heart and thoughts in my head.

Seminary was a most curious experience for me. Theology is all about words, thinking, and objectifying what I knew could never be adequately expressed in words. The study of theology was thus most frustrating as I grappled with fusing my ineffable experience with an abstraction of the same thing. It was a process that took me years beyond to assimilate the two with some continuous and substantial academic study. I found myself in constant conflict with people who wanted to do what I had rejected: fill their heads with words and abstractions of an experience I knew was a road to nowhere.

However, one of the most helpful of all words came from Zen Master Bassui Tokusho, who said: 

“One moment seeing your own mind is better than reading ten thousand volumes of scriptures and incantations a day for ten thousand years; these formal practices form only causal conditions for a day of blessings, but when those blessings are exhausted again, you suffer the pains of miserable forms of existence. A moment of meditational effort, however, because it leads eventually to enlightenment, becomes a cause for the attainment of buddhahood.”

Nevertheless, I realized that if I was ever going to be able to convey the experience I had been graced with I had to travel the path they had chosen. It took me 30 years more before I was ready. I suppose it was like a pianist who must practice until the music comes out of them naturally.

There was a message spoken by Jesus in the middle of the beatitudes that says, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” (Mat. 5:8) The passage is not well understood, but it spoke directly to me. I had to read that passage in Koine Greek: the language used to write the New Testament, to really grasp the essence of that statement and when I did I found the key that unlocked the bridge between Zen (the discipline transcendent to words) and Christianity (a religion of words). To Zen, words are reflections: illusions of matters too deep to grasp with our true mind—dreams that dance on hot pavement and create heat waves. To the ordinary Christian, the heat waves are all there is.

So what was the key contained in that passage (Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.)? First, it’s necessary to understand what the authors of the New Testament meant by the Greek word λόγος (Logos, the English translation for The Word). Unlike our contemporary understanding of concepts, λόγος meant the embodiment of meaning expressed abstractly of the ineffable: the very matter that bent my brain for years on end. What Jesus intended in that statement of purity was to cleanse our hearts of an admixture of thoughts, whether good or evil.

When Western man imagines heart, they think of the organ that pumps blood. But to the Greeks, the heart was the center of life. However, to people of Zen, there is no difference between the heart and the mind and was known first by the Chinese as “xin” and later by the Japanese as “shin,” and there is a profound statement in both Chinese Zen (Chan) and Japanese: “Mu shin, Shin.” The little “shin” means that admixture of thought that affects our hearts, whether good or evil. When the admixture is gone, then “Shin” arises: the face of God—that space of emptiness out of which emerges our true nature and everything else. Shin is the unity between our corporeal selves and the source of all, and these two, as it turns out, are really not two. They are the two bound together aspects of life (embodiment): one part limited and objective and the other part eternal. Shin IS the embodiment of God within this limited body, and when anyone experiences that fusion, the world is changed forever.

So now I stand between the two worlds of East and West, and my challenge is to fuse the two just as they were for me, and neither the East nor the West seems to have any interest in fusing with anything not like them.

One of the greatest mystical poets of all time is Rabindranath Tagore.  Sadly, while he lived, he was little known outside of the Calcutta area, and not known at all outside of India, but he captured the essence of my journey when he said,

“The traveler has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the innermost shrine at the end.” 

The Power of Deception.

A couple of days ago, The Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit was convened at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. The President of the Family Research Council (Tony Perkins) introduced the keynote speaker, Vice President Mike Pence, and said of him: He understands himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican,” in that order.

Yet Pence’s speech was as far away from the essential nature of genuine Christianity as one might be. His chosen venue has been designated as an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and what he said affirmed that assessment. 

If you wanted to sum up the speech into a nutshell it would be, look how great we are under Trump—chest-thumping and ideological superiority (e.g., us, the white-hats against them: the black-hats). 

Nothing about his speech promoted unity and caring for our fellow man but instead promoted the opposite. Following a panel titled “How Gender Ideology Harms Children,” which included Dr. Michelle Cretella from the American College of Pediatricians, (also designated an ultra-right-wing quasi-religious hate group), Pence echoed the panel’s perspective that those who define themselves as LGBT are just sick individuals who are determined to break God’s intentions. They are sinful and need to change their ways. 

According to the Family Research Council’s website, the Values Voter Summit was created in 2006 to “provide a forum to help inform and mobilize citizens across America to preserve the bedrock values of traditional marriage, religious liberty, the sanctity of life and limited government that make our nation strong.” 

Cretella has been excoriated by The Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine (SAHM) with a response, titled: “I’m a Pediatrician. How Transgender Ideology Has Infiltrated My Field and Produced Large-Scale Child Abuse,” saying that Cretella pushes a perspective of “political and ideological agendas not based on science and facts.”  I would add further, the ideology is anything but Christian in nature, which if geared to the teachings of Christ, to treat your neighbor as yourself. 

SAHM destroyed Cretella’s position showing how she cherry-picked bad science to reach her conclusion. Nevertheless, Pence continues to endorse Cretella’s conclusion with his own bad theology and in so doing destroys his own view of himself as being “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican.” And why might I say such a thing? To answer that question we must first define some theological terms and say what it means to be a real Christian instead of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

To the second issue (e.g., a real Christian) one must abide by the essential teaching of Christ to “love one another as I have loved you.” It is specious to claim the title without abiding by the essential teaching of the founder. And to the first issue (e.g., Theological terms) when Jesus taught that sort of love he was referring to a term found only in the New Testament. The term, in Koine Greek, is ἀγαπάω (agapē ) and meant “unconditional love”, or if you prefer “love with no strings attached—be they gender, race, ideology or any other means of discrimination”. So the concluding question here is whether or not Pence, and his puppet master Trump, are in fact promoting genuine Christian unity and love amongst all people, or a faux Christian wanna-be agenda that promotes division and one-up-man-ship? 

Surrendering from ourselves.

I’ve never met a person who said, “Today I will conduct myself in a negative and self-centered way.” On the contrary, the odds are extremely high that each of us conducts our lives according to certain ideological criteria, whether implicit or explicit. Everyone thinks they are right and others who don’t share their perspectives are thus wrong. The polarity of ideologies has never been more extreme than now and is ensuring our mutual undoing.

To plumb the depths of this, we need to consider the words of Krishnamurti. Do you align yourself with a particular political party? Nowadays it is hard not to. Or in a different vein, do you think of yourself as a man or a woman? Or how about belonging to one religion or another? Lots of variations on the theme of differences but Krishnamurti has a point worth our consideration: 

When we identify ourselves in contrast to others we unknowingly adopt an attitude of unintended opposition and violence. And nobody takes favorably to opposition and will then meet opposition with opposition.

Some time ago I had a friend who had grown up in the Soviet Union and was thus subjected to unspeakable oppression. He detested every idea that might align with socialism and defended his positions with conviction and passion. Many times we engaged in friendly discussions and we both came to the same conclusion: If each of us had grown up with the experiences and influences of the other, we both would have very different points of view. 

In that case he would understand my perspective and I would understand his. Neither of us came into this world with any point of view and when we die our points of view will die with us, but in between birth and death we remain adamant in our convictions. Our views were entirely the result of what we had experienced, not who we were.

Is there any way of circumventing this dilemma, of bypassing such fleeting bias? In our ordinary way of thinking it doesn’t seem possible, but one of the greatest thinkers in human history had a solution, which is not routinely understood, due to translation problems. According to Jesus, two things are required to solve this problem: dying to ourselves and then practicing unconditional love (the kind without discrimination).

The first supporting scriptural reference comes from the book of Matthew: “He who finds his life shall lose it: and he who loses his life for my sake shall find it.”[1] That passage (as many other translations) doesn’t express well in English. The English word here for life, in the original Greek, was psuchē, which has various meanings, the most prominent of which is soul, later to be translated as a psychic image of self, in other words, the ego—our idea of who we are separate and apart from others.

The second reference comes from the book of John: “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”[2] Again, there is that word life/psuchē. This is perhaps the most butchered and misconstrued expression in the entire New Testament. The literal meaning, contrary to popular belief, is surrendering your psyche (ideas) for your friends constitutes the greatest love.

The question is simply this: what is the prerequisite to surrendering our ideas in order to express the greatest love? The answer is obvious: Letting go of our ideas about who we think we are. It’s a two-step process: once we become clear that we are not an idea (ego) that is hostile to others we can then release ourselves from the death-knoll of polarized thinking. Only then is it possible to have an open mind and be released from the prison of inflexible dogmas. 

In such a case we can conduct ourselves as the Buddha said at the conclusion of the Kalama Sutra: “… after thorough investigation and reflection, you find to agree with reason and experience, as conducive to the good and benefit of one and all and of the world at large, accept only that as true and shape your life in accordance with it. Do not accept any doctrine from reverence, but first try it as gold is tried by fire.” 

In the end, spiritual insight has a most positive, practical and profound impact on personal and world affairs.

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[1] Matthew 10:39
[2] John 15:13

The virtual and real side of you and me.

Our two sides.

We live in a wondrous time of the merger between science and the realm beyond matter. For the most part, we attribute this merger to science, and it is true that we most welcome science-based theories that lead to the edge of the beyond. Science has become our friendly rational doorway to the ineffable. Every day, whenever I post to my blog, Google Analytics provides a tool that allows me to observe the nature of topics that attract the most interest and spread the quickest and most far-reaching throughout virtual cyberspace. What I have learned through this capability is that the idea of relativity and virtual reality has the greatest appeal. So with that in mind, my post for today deals with this matter of virtual and non-virtual reality.

Ordinarily, people don’t think that virtual reality applies to our conditional world, but the most cutting-edge science confirms that our ordinary lives are in fact virtual, and conform to the principle of relativity. Of course in our everyday realm, it messes with our head to consider that ordinary and the extraordinary is one and the same thing different only in terms of descriptions.

To define anything we must do so by comparing one thing to something different. This point was made by many wise people among them being the Buddha, who lived, by most accounts, between 563 BCE and 483 BCE, Śāntideva—the founder of the Avaivartika Sangha in the 6th century CE, and Nagarjuna who lived during the period of 150–250 CE. Even Albert Einstein who was born 14 March 1879 and died on 18 April 1955 confirmed the principle.

Three of these were mystics and of course, one was a theoretical physicist. This idea of defining, by comparison, has come to be known as relativity within the physical realm and dependent origination in the mystical realm. But words aside, they mean the same thing, which brings me to the topic for today.

If you look up the notion of virtual reality you’ll learn that it is a form of reality considered to not be real. This of course begs the question of, what is real? You can’t define one thing except in relation to the opposite of the thing. Thus we only know what “up” is by comparing it to “down.” Motion is only relevant when considered against non-motion (kinetic vs. potential energy). And virtual reality is only meaningful once you define non-virtual reality (reality itself).

The ancient understanding of reality is, that which is never born, does not die, does not move, is the same everywhere found, and doesn’t change. Anything that doesn’t comply with that understanding is considered to be virtual (or unreal). An illustration of this understanding, which everyone can grasp, is watching a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images, with or without accompanying sound. We, of course, know this as television where we observe images changing. None of us ever thinks that these changing images are anything other than virtual, but what we fail to consider is that our entire conditional world is no different from this medium: All of it is moving, changing with a beginning and an ending. Yet nobody thinks of our conditional world as virtual. Instead, we consider it real and think of our bodily selves as real, and this misunderstanding causes undue hardship and suffering.

Another, even more, relevant example, is what can happen when we communicate with someone through virtual cyberspace of the Internet. Discussions occur, and many times people become quite upset over ideas they find disagreeable (which are completely virtual) In such a case we have a virtual being (you and me) conducting a virtual conversation and becoming agitated over virtual ideas. That is what could be called a “virtual triple whammy.” In Buddha-speak (e.g., Sanskrit) that is what is known as duḥkha: translated as suffering, anxiety, stress, or a state of mind of unsatisfactoriness.

The relevant question is, shouldn’t we be more concerned with matters that are real instead of getting stressed over matters that are virtual? That rhetorical question brings to mind the words of Jesus, who said:  “Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” Matthew 7:24-27 

Upon thorough consideration, these two: The virtual and the real are glued irrevocably into One single entity. One of these (the virtual) appears clearly before us and we take it to be real, and the other (the real) is hidden within our virtual sand-being, buried under our feet and remains the unseen solid rock upon which we stand.

If it walks like a duck…

The common-coin understanding is that Buddhism is a Godless religion, and the reason for this view is that the Buddha didn’t focus on the concept of God but instead focused on understanding the mind and overcoming suffering. It’s worth the time and energy to thoroughly investigate this matter.

First is the notion that God can be understood conceptually. The Buddha’s perspective was that such a thing was not possible and, when thoughtfully considered, this is, of course, true. God is transcendent to all considerations and can’t be enclosed within any conceptual and rational framework. To even attach a name such as “God” is to be lost in a delusional pretense.

Sokei-an Shigetsu Sasaki used the name “Great Nature” and “Great Self.” There are many names to point to the nameless creator of heaven and earth but Sokei-an perhaps said it best. He said, “If you really experience ‘IT’ with your positive shining soul, you really find freedom. No one will be able to control you with names or memory of words—Socrates, Christ, Buddha. Those teachers were talking about consciousness. Consciousness is common to everyone. When you find your true consciousness, you will not need the names or words of any teacher.” 

As a result, Gautama addressed only what can be controlled and didn’t participate in fostering further delusion. So the question is whether or not ‘IT’ can be defined, even marginally. What are the characteristics of ‘IT’ and how does ‘IT’ function? Whatever name is chosen, regardless of religious affiliation, the nature of God is understood to inhabit the entirety of creation. 

The creator can’t be severed from what is created, which is the point of the Buddhist understanding that all form is the same thing as emptiness. Rather than using the name “God” (in vain), the name “Buddha” is used, and “Buddha” means awakened to the true essence of oneself. We might use any name but the essence would not change. An awakened person is said to enjoy the mind of enlightenment. 

If you read Buddhist literature extensively, you’ll find a laundry list of sorts, which speaks to this mind of enlightenment. It includes the following qualities: complete, ubiquitous, full of bliss, independent, transcendent, full of wisdom, never changes, the ground of all being, the creative force of everything, devoid of distinctive nature (ineffable) yet all form endowed with this nature.

When we take all of this in and digest it, a duck begins to emerge that walks, talks, and looks like a duck. In the final analysis, a name is fleeting, but the substance remains forever. Here is what Jesus is recorded as having said about where God lives: 

“If your leaders say, ‘Look, the Kingdom is in the Heavens,’ then the birds will be before you. If they say, ‘It is in the ocean,’ then the fish will be before you. But the Kingdom is inside of you, and the Kingdom is outside of you. When you know yourself, then you will know that you are of the flesh of the living Father. But if you know yourself not, then you live in poverty and that poverty is you.”—Gospel of Thomas 3.

We must acknowledge that languages are means of articulating something but the something is never the same as the words we choose. What possible difference does the name make? We have grown excessively protective of our own names of choice and sadly have lost touch with our very own souls.

Discrimination or not? That is the question.

On the outside looking in.

To discriminate means what it says: to divide one thing from another. It begins with perception. We can see one thing only against a backdrop of difference. Orange and blue appear to the eye as two different things. What’s the opposite? No discrimination, where everything is the same.

The fundamental teaching of the entire New Testament can be summed up in one statement: non-discrimination, otherwise known as agape love (unconditional love). And the same thing is right for Buddhism. The names are different, but the principle is the same. Here the term used is compassion (ancient Indians didn’t know Greek), which actually means merging with another to the point where there is no longer you and me. There is just us.

Sadly many regard themselves as solid Judeo-Christians who have deluded themselves with the notion that they can practice hatred, discrimination, and bigotry as substitutes for love. But in fairness, many in every religion forget about the essence of their faith-expressions yet can quote chapter and verse to justify their disdain for their fellow humans.

Think about how magnificent life would be if we actually practiced love instead of hate. Then instead of attacking each other, we would exist in harmony. Now that would be revolutionary. 

Shantideva said this:

“All the suffering in the world comes from seeking pleasure for oneself.  All the happiness in the world comes from seeking pleasure for others.”

That is only possible when there is no difference between oneself and others, which is, of course, what Jesus meant when he said,

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Easy to say and so hard to do.

Mixing it up.

We’re a curious species. Being human puts us at the top of the food chain. It also puts us at the top of other chains, such as the chain of creativity. No other life form (at least none that we know of) can imagine and solve problems as we do. 

Unfortunately, this seems to be a two-edged sword. One way cuts in the way of creation, and the other way cuts in the form of destruction. We are masters of both.

Awhile back, I wrote an article called a “Bird in hand” and spoke about compounds that result from mixing different things together. The point of that article was that once mixed, an entirely new compound results. The separate ingredients can then no longer be detected, but something new has been created.

I’m an old man now and have been kicking around spiritual conclaves for quite some time, and I’ve noticed a meaningful thing about compounds. People show up in a wide variety of such places for various reasons, but the alleged reason is they go there seeking God. After a time, many remain for other reasons, and they forget about why they came in the first place. A rare few figure out an essential truth: God doesn’t live in churches, synagogues, or temples. God lives in people.

Many people pay lip service to what their own scriptures tell them. For example, Christian scripture says that “You are the body of Christ.” If you happen to be a Buddhist you’re taught that everyone contains the enlivening essence of The Buddha. But too few seem able to accept the resulting compound and just go ahead and act like God is absent from the true temple of themselves.

Have you ever wondered what our world would be like if everyone conducted themselves by embracing this fundamental principle? If we really want to make the world a better place, begin to see yourself and others as a compound container of divinity. I am aware that most of us exhibit some less than ideal nastiness, but it’s also mixed together with genuine love and compassion. Adversity seems to bring out the goodness that is always there. And even if you don’t accept the idea that we are the resulting compound mixture of spirit and matter, it never hurts to pretend that we are.

Crisis—Danger and Opportunity

Who am and who are you? To answer those questions, let’s go try a virtual experience. In your mind’s eye, I want you to see yourself in a movie theater.  You are there sitting next to your favorite movie-going buddy, and the main attraction begins. Make it your favorite of all time. Wow! This is a great movie. You are really engrossed, almost like you are in the film, except for one thing: You aren’t (in the movie). As much as you might be enjoying the experience of watching, you always know you’re not “in the movie.” The film is on the big screen across the room, and you are there in your seat. Two separate things: you (the watcher of the film) and the movie (projected onto the big screen).

If you were to describe that experience to your therapist you’d probably be prudent to avoid saying that you were in the movie. If you did say such a thing your therapist might give you a new name, like nuts and start making out some papers with labels of “delusional.” Please avoid such a report.

Now prepare yourself because I’m going to tell you something too incredible for it to register and you’ll probably want to start making those papers out for me. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a Buddhist—at least as far as I know. Maybe he was. But he did say something very Buddhist. He said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” which paraphrases a statement by The Christ in The New Testament. Many very intelligent people say smart things regardless of affiliation and labels. The occasion was the Republican State Convention on June 16, 1858. The place was the statehouse in the Springfield, Illinois, and Lincoln had just been chosen as the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate to run against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas. The details of what, where, and when are not particularly germane to my point but I throw them out for you to get the picture. What is germane is what he said during his acceptance speech: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Lincoln was of course referring to the Union and the looming cessation by the Southern states. And his point is applicable to who we all are as people.

Many Buddhist sages have said pretty much the same thing but meant it as a definition of reality—all of reality, but in our case, applied to people. Our house—our beingness—also can’t stand when divided against itself. There is no division separating our nameless essence from our physical and psychic being. They are a single, indivisible thing. We are not some name or a nameless essence. We are not a function or a nameless essence. The division is a phantom. It doesn’t exist, except in our illusionary minds, but never in fact. 

The very moment (down to an unmeasurable dimension of time) there is a watcher and there is what is watched. The instant there is something watched, there is a watcher. Watched and watcher arise together. Instantly. Not one first and then the next. They are flip sides of the same coin. And the opposite is true. When one vanishes, so does the other.

Ladders and Walls come into being and cease from being in a flash. They are bonded eternally together as partners and can’t be separated. So what’s this got to do with movies and who we are? Simple—but actually not so simple to put our heads around. What we normally do is imagine our identities, as separate and independent things (rather than linked, interdependent things). We are thinkers thinking thoughts—illusions lost in illusions. We have all kinds of ideas about ourselves. We imagine and label ourselves with Lao Tzu’s “ten thousand things.” And all of these ideas come to be who we think we are. 

When we meet someone we may be asked to introduce ourselves and how do we respond? “I am so-and-so”—we provide a name. What we don’t say is “Oh I am Ms. Nameless.” Either named or a name we call “nameless” is not who we are. We are both—an indivisible house. We are ladders with walls and it can’t be otherwise. You are real. You are not a fleeting and vaporous thought. Vaporous thoughts are just that: thoughts that vaporize. But you are the indivisible Union (Lincoln’s term) of essence and non-essence, otherwise known (in Buddhist terminology) as emptiness and form. They arise and cease together instantly.

One of the central Sutras in Buddhist practice is the Heart Sutra which says “Emptiness is form. Form is emptiness.” Essence and form are glued together. Maybe you prefer to name essence as God. That’s okay so long as you don’t try to conceptualize God as an imaginary being. God is transcendent—beyond defining characteristics (meaning nameless), so whatever handle you use is irrelevant. What is transcendent is bonded together, not two but One. God doesn’t come and go. Coming and going implies movement from one place to another. If you are essence—God is essence—there is no place that you are not, so how can you come and go? 

You’re already here. It is an illusion to imagine these as separate matters like sitting in the movie theater with our movie-buddy, watching a movie. There is no watcher without what is being observed. Nor is there something watched without a watcher. And to watch at all is not possible without the animating spirit of essence. Otherwise, we’re just talking about flesh, bones, blood, and everything that comes along for the ride.

But what happens in normal “everyday life?” We get caught up in our home movies (buzzing brains) and stop being. We replace being with thinking about being. We don’t eat cake. We think about eating cake and eat the illusion. We don’t just sit. We think about sitting and sit on an illusion. We love to multitask and think we are efficient and productive. 

Actually, we are being distracted with no focus. We don’t work at our jobs (which we may hate), so we think about hating the job and think about where we wish we were. We don’t work with our spouses to manage difficulties; we think about everything that is wrong with them and why they don’t do what we want them to. 

Nothing is scared that way. While we are thinkers, we are not be-ers, and there is nobody at home. And because we do that, we experience fear and anxiety. At the deepest part of our essence, we experience separation and lack of intimacy. There is no way we can be intimate with someone we don’t even know, and I am speaking about our own identity—our real SELF, not the illusionary one.

What we need is integration and what we get is self-created division. We have a primordial knowing about our unity (and lack thereof). When our sense of being is based purely on a fabricated self (otherwise known as ego—home movies), we are rightly fearful because that is shifting sand with no stability, just like one-legged ladders without a wall.

When our identities are tied purely to the shifting sands of life, we know we are vulnerable; nobody has to tell us. We know, and it fills us with anxiety and fear. It can, and often does, paralyze us into inaction, like a deer fixated on the headlights of an oncoming car, frozen with fear, desiring to know the next moment and not able to be in the only moment we’ll ever have: The present one. When identity crises arise, there is both danger and opportunity. We can stay in trouble, like the deer, or we can come to our senses and grasp the opportunity. So how do we get out of this trap that has dominated all of humankind since we first arrived as a species? That’s a matter for my next post.

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.