Is Buddhist compassion the same as Christian love?

The high bar of excellence.

The answer is, “it depends.” Unfortunately we rarely thoroughly examine colloquialisms, and pretentiousness has become rampant. Duplicity and deceit are so socially acceptable now they are nearly synonymous with contemporary life. 

The terms “compassion” and “love” have become so misused they are now cliches, lacking in true understanding. In some Asian cultures the issue of “face” is of such significance that being two-faced is integral to the culture, causing societal members to be continuously on guard for the potential for saving or losing face. To them, it’s a matter of their reputation, dignity, honor, prestige, and integrity. 

But this preoccupation is not limited to Asian cultures. It is prevalent throughout the world, wherever duplicity is found. The concern stands in conflict with spiritual principles, particularly in matters where surface and social expectations (the face presented to the world) diverge from internal convictions (the internal face). The Buddha said, “The greatest action is not conforming with the world’s ways, the greatest wisdom is seeing through appearances and the greatest effort is not concerned with results.” 

These principles reflect an attitude that transcends social expectations and platitudes concerned with duplicity. To live in duplicity reflects neither genuine Christian love (agape) nor genuine Buddhist compassion, both of which are near mirror reflections of one another. “Compassion is often thought of as akin to pity, but whereas pity may be condescending, compassion springs from a sense of the equality, unity, and interconnectedness of life. Genuine compassion is about empowering others, helping them unlock strength and courage from within their lives in order to overcome their problems.” 

And this human quality arises through true awakening to our inherent nature that fills us with the experience of unity and becomes so powerful as to render duplicity impossible. The highest love agápē (ἀγάπη) is found only in the New Testament and is translated as “unconditional love.” Love that is unconditional is not discriminatory or influenced by changing phenomenal conditions, but is instead steady throughout all conditions. 

The best expression of agápē love is found in 1 Corinthians 13:4-12, which says, “Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails, but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away with. For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when the perfect comes (genuine awakening), the partial will be done away. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now, we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

These genuine Buddhist and Christian expressions, however, while being the gold standards, are not universally embraced. Just because we know what is the standard, does not guarantee we comply. There are numerous examples in today’s world where hypocrisy, denial, and egotism flourish, most particularly within the sphere of politics. It’s a rare individual who, while lost within the grip of ego delusion, can rise above the influences and temptations of greed, anger, avarice, and possessiveness and “do the right thing.” 

Sadly our interpersonal, social, and political systems have become rife with concern for preserving “face,” currying special favors that align us with power and ignores the high bars of true compassion and love. Probably the best depiction of hypocrisy I have seen was displayed in the television series “The West Wing,” when the president (Martin Sheen) puts a faux-Christian in her place. The example stands in stark contrast to the behavior of true compassion and agápē love characteristic of a bodhisattva, who lives by a vow.

A house of mirrors

Our reflections.

It’s dark, and you can’t see anything. Suddenly the lights are switched on. You’ve never seen the light before, so the glare hurts your eyes. 

Days go by, but gradually your eyes adjust, and what do you see? Everywhere you look, you see people with smiling faces who seem to adore you, and these people are exuding love and tenderness all directed at you. They tickle you. They feed you. They comfort you when you’re sad and play with you, and little by little, you come to believe that you’re exceptional. These people are your parents and friends, and they are your mirrors.

That time is extraordinary, but it doesn’t last. Soon you move on and come in contact with other people. You and they relate to each other in the same way—like mirrors. You reflect them, and they reflect you, and little by little each, and everyone learns how to manipulate their environment to glean the best outcome, the ego dance begins, and our identities take shape.

So long as anyone stays in that house of mirrors, there is no alternative but to experience themselves as a reflection. But this manipulation game is complex and often frustrating, fraught with anxiety, fear, and tension. The players don’t cooperate. They want their way instead of your way. Why are these people not adoring you but instead demanding that you love them? Where are those adoring parents when we need them? Why can’t everyone just get along? Why can’t everyone see things as you do, think as you do, construct the world, as you want? 

And the ego dance begins to come unglued, and you are lost, but what nobody realizes is at that moment of loss; that identity crisis is this is a blessing in disguise. Once that moment of disaster arrives, you are ready for the mirrors to fall away and find your true nature. And then, at last, you become the wholly complete person you’ve always been: The one looking into the mirrors; not the one reflected.

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.

---

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

A call to arms!

The world wants you.

With what’s happening now in the U.S. I think it’s time to repost a message I wrote a while back. This post is not going to be one of cozy satisfaction or insular “I’ve got mine, get your own.” No, instead it is going to be one of those, “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore” posts. 

If you haven’t yet noticed, the world in which we live is quite literally going to Hell in a handbasket, and fast. 

• The entire Middle East is a blazing inferno, causing immigrations so massive as to resemble rats fleeing a burning ship; 

• Our nation has gone from the most admired in the world to a miserable excuse of squawking catfights, immobilized by the dogmas of inflexible, political ideologues who’ve been sold to the highest bidder. And we routinely cast aside allies that took years of blood, sweat, and tears to create; 

• Religious bigotry and blame continue to sprout their self-righteous ugliness; 

• Wars have now become routine, perpetuated by the same people who whine about a balanced budget, and unthinkingly slash support for the very people who risked all to defend our way of life, yet give no consideration for the fact that waging war is the most costly human endeavor there is. At the same time Congress is establishing economic policies of slashing and burning institutions that took decades to build; 

• Violence everywhere is sky-rocketing and causing massive tides of immigrants to flee to temporary havens (one of which used to be us, but we are now rounding up and caging them, with no foresight given to their value); 

• Diseases (long considered to be eradicated) are returning and joining pandemic plagues with the potential to kill us all; 

• The gap between the super-wealthy and the burgeoning poor is becoming ever wider (worldwide); 

• Those who could or would care for the less fortunate have stopped; 

• We incarcerate more people in the U.S. than any other nation on earth, and there are more guns in the hands of “ordinary citizens” here who slaughter more ordinary citizens each week than all those killed in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars put together, yet mouth banalities that guns don’t kill people; 

• And worst of all the climate is getting hotter, whole regions of our country are experiencing environmental meltdown and becoming more unstable and threatening every moment of every day…on and on.

I’ve been writing this blog for eight years now with messages that are admittedly inadequate but are intended to accomplish one single thing: promote peace, unity and brotherhood. I have done so under the rubric of Zen because that is what saved my life, changed my perspectives from greed to gratitude and implanted genuine compassion in my heart. And do you want to know what I’ve experienced over those eight years? Two things of significance: an audience that grew from nothing to nearly 100,000 readers worldwide and the continuation of small-minded, self-righteous nitpicking by esoteric experts who express their platitudes yet do nothing themselves to foster unity and peace. Nevertheless they seem to have an abundance of time to criticize me for doing what I can, albeit insufficiently. My patience with, and tolerance of such “head-in-the-sand-do-nothing” people has grown paper thin, and yes, “I’m mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.” 

Legalists are everywhere: Buddhists castigate me for not being a purist (never mind there is no such thing as a Buddhism but rather different sects who argue amongst themselves just as much as any other religion), Christians demean me for not being in their exclusive flock, atheists reject anything spiritual and Zen folk elevate themselves to the status of being superior to everyone else not like them. 

Nobody seems to embrace the essential spirit, but instead can quote chapter and verse of their own sacred texts. Famous Zen Master Bassui said, “If you truly want to read the sutras, you first have to awaken the mind that does the reading. All formal readings from the sutras can be destructive. The wonderful dharma of one’s mind does not change through successive eons; it is the essence of all the sutras.” 

Perhaps if people who think to themselves, as I used to, (“Oh I know so little or can not do very much”) would just support and encourage those who are trying to make a difference (instead of sniping) we would live in a much better world. If only a small number of those 100,000 would merely forward on messages of hope and peace it would make a huge difference. The world is burning, act now, or be prepared to roast along with everyone else (me included). 

Undoubtedly I’ll lose a few readers with this post but that’s okay. Obviously, my critique doesn’t apply to everyone. There are many dedicated, people striving to be selfless servants and attempting to make our world a better place. You know who you are and I greatly admire you. I would suggest you watch this and then do some serious reflection.

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.

The Matrix—Illusory Mind

Image via Wikipedia

In his commentary on the Sutra of Complete Enlightenment, Ch’an Master Sheng-yen said what might seem like a startling thing. He said, “The self (imagined self/ego) creates vexation, and the vexation, in turn, reinforces the sense of self...When there is no vexation, and therefore no self, the mind of discrimination is replaced by the mind of wisdom.”

What’s going on here is a psychic feedback loop. It’s the chicken/egg thing. Vexations and self arise together. Not one and then the next. Both arise together, instantly. Thinkers think thoughts. In this case, the “thinker” is the imagined self who is thinking the thought of a self, which then thinks more thoughts. Feedback loop—one illusion creating another illusion, which creates the next, like one mirror reflecting another. There is no substantial and real “self” inside this holographic illusion. It is a mirage or as stated in the Diamond Sutra: 

“This is how to contemplate our conditioned existence in this fleeting world: like a tiny drop of dew, or a bubble floating in a stream; like a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, or a flickering lamp, an illusion, a phantom, or a dream.”

All of those notions about our identity obscure any sense of our substantial real self; the union and the integrated aspect of our existence. The Ladder-Wall is the Union. It is not a Ladder or a Wall. It’s a Ladder-Wall: one inseparable thing. Form and Emptiness. Essence and non-essence. 

For thousands of years, people have been attempting and failing to rid themselves of the flesh believing that the flesh was opposed to spirit. Even today certain religious sects engage in practices of flagellation. And within certain schools of Zen, there are advocates, who press to rid themselves of all thoughts, which is a psychic version of flagellation. I’ll be saying more about this thrust in a later blog but for now, I’ll just make a quick comment: nonsense! Essence is indivisible from both flesh and our minds.

As long as we are imprisoned within this holographic feedback loop we are unaware of what is real. We are like Keanu Reeves in the classic 1999 science fiction movie “The Matrix.” The film describes a future in which the world we know is actually the Matrix, a simulated reality created by sentient machines. Only our Matrix is self-created and it has been here forever. We are the sentient machines creating our own simulated reality. When we say to “Think outside the box,” the “box” is illusory mind: the Matrix; the realm of the self creating the self.

Like Keanu Reeves, we need to be de-programmed in order to break the grip of simulation. In Zen that is done by pursuing The Middle Way. Much of the harm done by not following this path is unintentional, but real nevertheless. How could we know inside the feedback loop? 

Unlike Keanu Reeves, we follow this way both with a support group (known as a sangha) and by our self. We don’t have to go to a confessional with a priest. We know (deep down in our moments of quiet honesty, when we can get beyond denial and blame) what we’ve done and whom we’ve infected. We know what judgments we’ve made, both of others and ourselves. It isn’t necessary for us to stand before others and announce, “I’m an alcoholic and I’m always going to be one.” 

This is a prison from which we can escape with commitment, patience, diligence, and perseverance. If we wish to escape we can. It just depends on whether or not we enjoy being “In the Matrix.” Some people don’t seem to care one way or another. The entire process is sort of like taking an inventory of the mess in our houses, collecting the trash, dumping it out, and doing the best we can to not continue creating a mess. Rather than garbage in/garbage out it becomes a virtue in/virtue out: VIVO, which in Latin curiously means living that takes place inside an organism.

That is an extremely foreshortened overview of the process. In point of fact it is a process that never ends. Because we live in a conditioned world, dust accumulates. We wash our clothes and clean our houses because cleanliness is more desirable than filth. The same thing applies to our inner house. Dust accumulates (emotional and psychic dust) and we need to keep it clean. If we bring in trash, due to bad karma, we suffer. If we become attached to fleeting stuff we suffer. If we live in the illusions of life we suffer. And all of that suffering makes us cranky and then we just make more bad karma. It is an inverted way of living, which must be turned upside down and shaken about.

And the truth is, none of this deep honesty is possible so long as we remain trapped in ego la-la land—The Matrix. Mr. or Mrs. or Ms ego is extraordinarily greedy and self-centered. From the perspective of our egos, everyone else is right to be blamed for our misery. Ego is very self-righteous. None of it is our fault. It has nothing to do with our own self-generated karma. Inside this hologram of blame and self-delusion, we experience life in competition and defensiveness. The world is either/or. It is either right or it’s wrong (and always my right and your wrong). This world runs according to hard and fast rules and inflexible boundaries and to deviate from the rigor entails fear, perceived threat, and loss. 

There is never enough insulation in this realm, and to share with others is to diminish our share and thus increase our risk exposure. We build fences of all kinds to keep the bad guys out without realizing that the fences also keep us in. The threat is everywhere and there is a good reason for the concern: Everything is changing. The storms will come and we better make sure our life raft is watertight.

Sound familiar? Who can question the exposures to risk and an unknown future? No one. Risk is a part of life but there is a huge difference between living hunkered down and walking tall. The ego, because it is an illusion, is rightly concerned with risk. It should know better than anyone. The ego is fragile and so too is our fleeting world. The alternative is to accept our wholeness—our integrated beingness, and to practice it moment by moment—a sacred act, not as a concept but as a reality. 

How is that done? This is a realm without multitasking. When we eat, we eat. When we talk, we talk. Whatever we do, we do wholly, in each and every moment, whether we like it or not. We just do it and let the illusions subside. It is a practice of being present with all of the grief, anguish, pain, sorrow and joy. We cry when we cry and laugh when we laugh and we do it with gusto. No illusions or expectations or wishes or overlays. We accept life as an un-gilded lily, without embellishment nor judgments nor any other forms of distortion or fabrication. Life just is. The Buddha called this “thusness”—things as they truly are.

This might all sound like accepting everything as unavoidable, but it is not. When we accept our ego-less interdependence—beyond the Matrix, truly, we must see that we are united with all of life. There is no way to disconnect from the ubiquitous dimension of essence. We are glued to our collective world, like it or not, so unless we like living in a mess then we must do what we can to clean it up and join the living. We are not isolated and independent beings, severed from life. We are life and there is no way to have a life without death. They arise as an undivided partnership. When the world suffers we pay the price because we are members of a common family. When the world rejoices, we rejoice with it. We are not just our brother’s keeper. We are our brothers and our sisters. There is no way to sever the link of essence.

This is not an airy-fairy thing. This is reality, inseparable, indivisible, and integrated and the only way to divide it is in the illusions of our imagination. That is where the danger lies. No, this is not resignation, cynicism, defeatism, or victimization. This is the polar opposite. This is a stance of engagement and responsibility, of doing what can be done but remaining hopeful without attachment to results.

The over-riding message contained in the Diamond Sutra regards the nature of enlightenment and compassion. The Buddha was teaching Subhuti (one of his disciples) that the distinguishing mark of a true Bodhisattva is deep compassion that can only come about without any sense of ego or gain. There is no calculation or contrivance since a true Bodhisattva realizes that there is no difference between himself and others. Jesus said something very similar: “Do unto others as you would have them do to you.” When we accept our ground-of-being relationship with life, the unavoidable conclusion is that we share common ground. We are in this together.

Occupy Wall Street expanding to Main Street

The American Spring

What at first seemed like a small and isolated fringe movement in New York City is now popping up across our nation, even in the conservative heartland of Kansas City.

Meghan Whalen, a 30-year-old single mother, said she got involved with Occupy KC because of inequality. “We’re not going to come out of here tonight and say, ‘Okay, guys, we figured it out. This is the one thing why we’re here.’ Because there isn’t one reason. That’s just the truth. People who can’t swallow that and handle that, I’m sorry. There isn’t one reason. There just isn’t.”

She is right. Many overlapping reasons seem so convoluted and twisted together that making sense almost seems impossible. But as Whalen stated so well, it isn’t necessary to figure it all out to realize that something is very wrong, not only in Kansas City but across the globe. What began with the Arab Spring is now metastasizing to everyone’s spring and what is common to all of these is greed, anger, and an unwillingness to just grin and bear it any longer.

The “jobs, jobs, jobs” mantra has become a clarion call for survival falling on deaf ears of politicians and captains of industry who are immune to the suffering of those impacted by their own bad decisions. The world’s wealth is progressively more and more concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer; simultaneously, the chronically poor ranks are expanding. These two trends are not unrelated. The sucking machine of greed is depleting the lifeblood required for meaningful solutions.

The pathway to economic contraction is creating a worldwide imbalance with fewer and fewer able to meet nations’ financial needs and more and more in need. The gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been greater in the modern era than today. The middle class has been the tax revenue backbone of contemporary societies, which has enabled stability and economic expansion and is rapidly becoming an artifact of the past. The chronic poor’s ranks are expanding, and wealth is increasingly concentrated at the top of the socio/economic pyramid.

No economic system can continue for very long with such imbalance. This disparity is clearly illustrated by looking at the distribution of assets in the United States. Four years ago, 62% of business equity and 61% of financial securities were held by the top 1% of the population. In the same timeframe, 73% of the debt was owed by the bottom 90% of the population, leaving just 5% of the top 1% debt.

This imbalance has resulted in close to 85% of total wealth in our country concentrated in the top 20%’ hands and so little owned by the bottom 20% that it is nearly impossible to measure (.1%). When the gap between compensation for heads of industry is compared to compensation for the people they employ, it is understandable how much concentration is happening. This is not unexpected when you consider the following—In 1950, the average executive’s paycheck ratio compared to the average worker’s paycheck stood at 30 to 1. Since 2000 that ratio has exploded to 300-500 to 1. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the Middle Class is gradually sinking into the abyss.

These conditions of imbalance and injustice have profound effects across the economic and political landscape. It is blatantly obvious that some groups must meet the financial needs of our country. The tax base is disappearing, needs are expanding rapidly due to financing continuing war, growing costs associated with the justice system, costs of entitlement programs (e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, VA benefits, etc.) are about to leap into the stratosphere as the baby boomers reach the age of qualification, natural disasters are coming one after another in rapid succession, unemployment compensation, and other contributing factors too many to identify. In the meantime, vast amounts of money are needed to finance new technologies which would ensure our competitive edge in the world market place, pay for the education and training of our population to compete in that market place and slow down (and hopefully stop) global climate devastation which is making this entire scenario worse.

Washington’s political climate has become so divisive that any clear-headed reconciliation seems beyond the pale of possibility. The population segment who can meet these burgeoning financial needs refuses to do so, and the traditional source (the middle class) can no longer. To counter this rising tide, the wealthy, in ever-growing numbers, are moving their assets off-shore and playing other financial shell games to avoid paying more taxes. To avert financial meltdown by defaulting on our federal obligations, our elected officials have chosen, as they always have, to delay, procrastinate and push the dirty decision making down the road onto someone else’s plate. In the meantime, the opposing forces have both pledged to not cooperate but instead play Russian Roulette with our heads as the target.

Taken as a whole, these intertwined conditions have metastasized to the point that no person, however intelligent or clever, can ever hope to unwind them. This complex perspective is what Meghan Whalen and millions of others sense, but can’t define. And unless we find the source leading to this entangled Gordian Knot, there is little reason for hope. What is that source, and how can we find it? Without being evasive or coy, I am now in the final phases of publishing my next book, which lays out the case. It will be available for sale sometime in the next couple of months. The title is “The Non-identity Crisis: The crisis that endangers our world.”

Fighting household gods

Around the world, different people have worshiped both “household gods” and God in another house called “The House of God.” Even today, many churches call themselves The House of God. There have been many ideas regarding where God lives. A popular thought is that God lives in heaven, located in the sky. 

When asked, Jesus said that God lives in each of us, but that idea didn’t get too far. I guess not many people could buy that notion, so they went back to the tried and true idea with which they were most familiar—God lives in the temple, or the church, or the synagogue or some other “holy place” but for sure not in our inner being. But this placement for his holiness didn’t stop the household god practice, and people still have both: the everyday god and the special God, who lives in the church, but never in us.

In ways this arrangement seems to work well since it keeps God/god conveniently located so that he/she doesn’t become pushy and intrusive. Shouldn’t everyone get some private time? Who wants a judge sitting on your shoulder watching your every move. Teens today have an Internet lingo worked out for that. It’s called “POS”—Parent Over Shoulder, which they can send via text messaging to their friends to signal, “What I’m going to send now is the cleaned up version since my parents are snooping.” So it looks like keeping God located away is a good thing. That way we can be two faced—One face we use normally and one face we dust off and use when someone is watching.

Unfortunately it is very tough to fool ourselves. We are always there, snooping and it won’t do much good to send POS to get away from our self. To reconfigure that dilemma, we have split ourselves into different compartments, which develop into split personalities. Apparently this becomes highly sophisticated with multiple personalities in the same body which gets very confusing when trying to relate to someone like that. “Is that you Jane? Mary? Lucy?...Who’s home today?”

All jesting aside, these are poor souls who can’t manage to integrate these conflicting aspects in a way that is acceptable to them (whoever “them” might be). It’s a sad situation but not so very far from the dilemma we all wrestle with by presenting the right face. This is a genuine problem when you don’t know who you are in the first place. In that case, you can be just about anyone you choose to and not be anyone at all.

Lots of people spend years in therapy trying to come to terms with this problem. It plagued me for a long time so I’m not making light of it. In this state of confusion we are simply imprisoned by delusions which are rooted in the phantom known as ego—The mythical monster that doesn’t exist but seems very real. That monster causes us to become wholly self-centered which creates a cascade of problems. 

In that state we think we are the center of the world. In effect we become the household gods and expect the world to bow down to us. It is very maddening (which makes us angry) when the world doesn’t respond well to our self-absorbing antics. And often times, after the fact, we think to ourselves: “Where did that come from? I can’t believe I was such a schmuck?” Then the guilt sets in, especially when we see ourselves repeating over and over the very behavior we just acknowledged about which we were embarrassed. That emotion fills us with self-doubt, self-hate and overwhelms us with thoughts of shame and inadequacy, all of which we experience as caustic and degrading.

In the midst of this all together nastiness what we fail to realize is that these emotions are like the warning light that switches on in our car when we need a change of oil. We should feel this way since these are signals to bring us up short and cause us to pay attention to what is fueling this causal chain. If we are really careful (usually takes years before we stop putting ourselves through this wringer) we’ll back-track these nasty emotions and come to see the phantom—our ego is the culprit. And after that, if we’re really careful (more years) we find that we are not any phantom. We are real boys and girls who share a common base of just your every day household variety, everywhere and nowhere, not special Buddha-Nature. Jesus was right.