The Warren Buffet axiom of spiritual wholeness.

That is THE question.

“If you aren't willing to own a stock for ten years, don't even think about owning it for ten minutes.”—Warren Buffett

While nearly everyone is concerned about money right now, this is not a post about earning more or preserving what you may have. It is instead a post about not earning a living. I begin with that quote from Buffet because it aligns with the flip side of a spiritual principle that has made a difference in my life: 

“If your spiritual experience doesn't last 40 years, don't consider giving it credence for even 40 seconds.”

Of course, that’s only possible in hindsight after having lived an extended mortal life. Longevity comes along with a firm perspective that can only be established by looking backward and noticing two phases: 

• First is the phase of “chasing the white rabbit,” sparked by curiosity, wedded with the conviction that down a magical hole lies what Alice sought.

• The second phase answers Alice’s question of “who in the world am I ?” and despite her twisted journey, she says to the Queen of Hearts, “My name is Alice, so please your Majesty.”

What Alice doesn't learn, but we must, is that while Alice thinks she has affirmed her identity with a name, neither she nor we are a name, not even an identity. Our names may change, we may continue phase-one without realizing we are still on a quest to find ourselves, but no-one needs to go anywhere to find themselves.

But going on a quest is essential to have the experience that it is a trip to nowhere. Until then, we will continue the chase, or simply give up thinking we will ever honestly answer the question of “who in the world am I ?”. And that is where the flip side of Buffet’s investment philosophy comes into play. If we don’t give up, what all of us find is we are far, far beyond an identity, name, or any other means of defining ourselves. We are instead, contrary to the messages of our world, already complete, whole, and full of love. There is nowhere to go and nothing to possess that we don’t have already. That is not a fantasy, nor does it take place in “never-never-land.” Instead, it is real, and it takes place in “ever-ever-land.”   

“All beings by nature are Buddha,

As ice by nature is water.

Apart from water, there is no ice;

Apart from beings, no Buddha.

How sad that people ignore the near

And search for truth afar:

Like someone in the midst of water

Crying out in thirst,

Like a child of a wealthy home

Wandering among the poor.”

Zen Master Hakuin Ekaku’s Song of Zazen

 
As odd as this discovery might seem, our real nature is hidden beneath the one we think we are, as gold is hidden beneath what lies above.

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.”

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.

Getting out of jail

Having a clear understanding of a problem is essential to finding a solution. Buddhism may be the best solution to the problem of suffering. But is that the problem or a symptom? Perhaps we need to better understand the root of suffering before accepting it as the problem.

Certainly, illusion is part of the root. An illusion is, of course, something that has no self-containing substance and is fleeting. That is how the four “dharma seals” are defined—All compounded things are impermanent, all emotions are painful, all phenomena are empty, and nirvana is beyond extremes.  More to the point, illusion is the sea in which we swim. We think we live in an objectively substantial world. Still, both the Buddha and modern science say otherwise—That our only ability to discern anything is a matter of images projected in our brain. This nature of illusion is foundational to our existence. Consequently, the root problem must be understood within that all-pervasive context. We are idea people living within the framework of ideas. Or, as the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment says, “We solve illusion by employing illusion.” There is no other way.

Then we come to the matter of self-understanding. How did we get here? And where did we come from? That is not a metaphysical set of questions. It infers the emergence of identity and the process of identity formation. And to understand this process is enlightening. All of us begin life in the cocoon of our mother’s womb, where we are a single being and literally attached. At that point, there is no separation between mother and child. There is no such thing as an idea of a separate self since we are not a separate being. Only following mortal birth are we separated, and only then does the process of individuation begin.

Watching a young child begin to grapple with not being one with the mother is an important part of understanding the root problem. Slowly a child becomes self-aware, not as joined physically with mother, but as a separate person with an emerging and isolated identity. At first, this awareness results in stark terror! One moment mother is there, and the next, she is gone. The unavoidable awareness is separation and difference, and then the next step of psychic construction takes place: If not, mother, then who? This moment is the beginning of the idea of self (ego). From that seed grows fear of survival as a separate and isolated individual with a unique but vulnerable identity.

Phenomenally, mutual discretion is the standard. We see others as mutually discrete from us. We see ourselves as separate and apart from them. In our perceived isolation, we are afraid of dying and trapped in a conundrum: We must emerge as independent but are, in fact, linked, if not physically (as previously with mother), then certainly spiritually and mentally. And the result of this conundrum is possessiveness and greed, the rationale being that if we are separate and isolated, then for survival, we must hoard and insure against risk. It quickly becomes a matter of me and mine and self-absorption.

This idea of self—an extension of our ground of illusion—then becomes the mask which hides our truth: That we are not an objective image, but rather a subjective reality that has never been disconnected from anyone or anything. At the imperceptible level of our true nature, we are interdependently connected, but for this awareness to evolve, the image of a separate self (ego) must pass away. 

The death of a self-image is a suffering matter since it seems so real (just like all illusions can). Thus, the solution is to dissolve this phantom and find our true, never-divided self—To release our attachment to an idea and find our substance. And that is what makes Zen nearly magical because it is a process of releasing from illusions but always from within the illusion context. We are not “just” an idea. We are both an idea (phenomena—discernible but unreal) and noumena—real but imperceptible. We will never be released from an ego. It is our imaginary self and a part of who we are, but we can be detached from bondage, which comes from seeing ourselves as its exclusive prisoner. From that understanding comes freedom—That we exist and that we don’t: The Middle Way.