Seeing clearly.

Today is Sunday, the day in the week when Christians around the world go to church, hoping to hear a sermon of inspiration and goodwill. Therefore, I am offering this post as a sermon that will accomplish those two things: Inspiration and goodwill.

To begin, I would like to address sight and vision. Macular degeneration is a condition that results in a loss of sight in the center of your eye due to damage to the retina. Some sight remains peripherally but is mostly lost looking straight on. There is no known cure for macular degeneration, but there is for degenerative vision.

There are parallels to this physical condition that we know of as such things as bias, preconceived notions, fixed opinions, denial, and unfounded belief systems, all of which emerge from a self-understanding centered on the ego. All of these conditions serve the function of filters blinding us to unfettered clarity; true vision—seeing things as they are, without distortion. These impediments lock us into inflexible ideologies, opposed to, and at odds with, other similarly embedded ideologies. The impediments are clouded windows through which we see and understand the world and ourselves. It’s like being in a cave with two openings: One looking outward and the other looking inward, both of which are clouded and contaminated, obscuring clear vision. One gives us ideas concerning ourselves and the other, ideas concerning the world, and both are shrouded.

The undeniable correction is to remove the impediments and see without filters of distortion (call it spiritual surgery). Within Christian mysticism, the term that captures the principle of this unfettered clarity is “thusness,” which means things as they are. This “thus” means an unveiling of what is present, and thereby also an elementary confirmation, an original principle of truth prior to conceptual differentiation.  

Meister Eckhart, (the 13th-century German Theologian and mystic), used this expression to signify unattached oneness or unity. Such a view of unification, when intuitively experienced, removes the impediments and allows clear seeing.

One of the most misunderstood passages in the Bible is John 15:13, which looks like this in Koine Greek (the ancient form of Greek used to write The New Testament): “μείζονα ταύτης ἀγάπην οὐδεὶς ἔχει, ἵνα τις τὴν ψυχὴν αὐτοῦ θῇ ὑπὲρ τῶν φίλων αὐτοῦ,” and is ordinarily translated into English as, “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.” I’m not employing Greek here to impress you but rather to prove a point. The two highlighted words provide insight into the true meaning of this passage. 

The first highlighted word (ἀγάπην) means universal, unconditional love that transcends and persists regardless of circumstance. There is only one kind of love that is unconditional (e.g., no strings attached), and that kind of love can come only from God. All other forms of love are conditional and contingent upon changing circumstances.

The second highlighted word (ψυχὴν) is the life of a particular form: Life of the psyche, in other words, ideas, thoughts, ideologies, biases—any and all manifestations of the mind. In Koine Greek, there were three different forms of life that depicted the Greek’s different views of life. This form of life (“ψυχὴν”) is the form used here and is the root word of our present understanding of “psychology” or “psychiatry.” The second form of life was “ζοε” (pronounced Zoe—long A sound at the end—and meant the unified, ultimate source of everything. The third life form was “βιος,” the root word underscoring biology—our physical being.  To grasp the significance (as it relates to seeing clearly) it’s necessary to understand John 15:13 in the original language, not the English translation.

Thus, to come up with the correct translation of John 15:13, it is necessary to understand the words first in Koine Greek. Rendered in that way, the passage should be: “Greater love (e.g., unconditional) has no one than this, that one lay down his ‘mind manifestations’ for his friends.” And why might understanding be the highest act of love? Simple: It’s impacted ideologies (dug-in biases) that separate us all from one another and drives us into camps of close-minded hostility: The same quality, that at present, lies at the core of polar oppositions, dividing people everywhere and leading to the political gridlock that paralyzes our current government (and those around the world) where compromise becomes an impossibility. 

Often times, spirituality and contemporary living appear to be at odds. Nothing could be more incorrect. Seeing clearly is essential to human progress, and at the present time, we seem to be stuck in ruts of ideologies of irreconcilable opposition, believing all the while in the flawed principle of “I’m right, and you’re wrong.”

Being special.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The isness of IS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staying Present and non-discrimination.

The past is dead, the future is yet to come.

I know I made a formal, online pledge to begin speaking my own words and begin to cease speaking other people’s words. 

That remains my goal but the path of mortal life moves forward full of flaws. The keyword of my committed vector toward immortality is “begin.”

That said, I have feasted on the wisdom of spiritual giants, and from time to time I am drawn to their words for a simple reason: They are considered giants because of their wisdom and means of expression. 

Such is the case today and my sharing comes from maybe the greatest of all was Huangbo Xiyun (or simply Huang Po)—the teacher of Chan (Zen) Master Rinzai Gigen; the founder of one of two remaining strands of Zen. And the strand I studied, began, continued with and within that strand found my inner truth, which saved my life.

Huángbò’s most significant contribution, to the treasure chest of human wisdom, was his teaching centered on the concept of “mind.” If it were possible, to sum up (a profound dis-service) his teaching it would be, “It is as it is. It was as it was. It will be what it will be.”—with nothing added (perfection personified). Closely aligned with “things as they are” is what in technical terms equates with Suchness (or thusness). 

To adequately unpack that summary would be an entire dissertation. So I will leave that aside and get to the core, which is that our thoughts are the engine of karma-producing actions, for the good; the bad or the in-between. Huángbò’s, and my, grasp of how this works in ordinary life is when we think, anything at all, we leave reality behind and substitute for it an abstraction, tempting the demons (metaphorically) toward judgments, biases and dogmatic, dug-in life. 

When we do that we get caught up in the whirlwind of attachments, not realizing that we already have the treasure we seek. And when that happens we are lost in the hurricane of samsara, (living hell) we move further and further away from the greatest of all treasures: The source of never-ending fulfillment, which is always with us, never leaves us, and becomes hidden beneath the soil of ever-deepening bad stuff, with some really nasty behavior and feedback.

Aha, you might say, but The Buddha said, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”  True enough but what if we just saw life “as it is truly?” A central question is, to which world was he referencing? Or the flip side—which world was he not referencing? For sure he was not referring to the unconditional/ultimate realm since that realm has no defining properties and can’t be defined or thought of, so it must have been this conditional world that is made with our thoughts, for the good or the bad. 

I hesitate to say more since more words on top of other words leads us further and further away down the primrose path. However, I will justify my addition be employing another fundamental principle—that of Nāgārjuna’s Two Truth Doctrine, which in essence says we must use the vehicle of the artificial to expose the genuine article. One of these truths is our ordinary, conventional one, which we take to be the ultimate, but in fact is the exact opposite. Conventionally our perception is conditional where everything is contingent upon other conditional matters, which are also in constant motion. Without awareness, we are engaged in a never-ending tennis match of delusion. Ultimate truth, however, never changes, is always present, and is dependent upon nothing. And these two truths are inseparably bonded together.

So I can only point to the mind with words, but never find it since it is impossible to use the mind to find the mind. All things arise from the ground of all being (e.g., mind); stable as the rock lying hidden beneath the sands of the shore which are swept away by the surf. The notion here is quite similar to the parable told by Jesus in Luke 6:48-49—building our house upon the bedrock instead of the moving sands.

But alas I drift from the initial matter of “things as they are,” sans the addition of thinking (the abstraction of the real). I’ve said enough of my own words and will thus end with two quotes of Huangbo Xiyun: “Here it is—right now. Start thinking about it and you miss it.” and “The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see.” Think about that. Better yet don’t think, then you too will accept “things as they are,” and remain in the ever-present moment with no discrimination.

Becoming Self Aware.

All of us eventually become creatures of habit and after the passage of time are lulled asleep into a state of blindness based on an assumption that what we think we know is true. 

Mark Twain said it best: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Someone who never knows the truth believes they do nevertheless.

Faith, by design, is a precarious state of being that asks us to accept particular aspects of the inaccessible, the imperceptible, the ineffable, and the immeasurable without challenge. And being given over to easy persuasion by those we trust, as being more astute and capable than ourselves, we come to a state of confidence in their esteemed judgments, and at long last embrace and take to be our very own, the ideas expressed by “the experts.”

What breaks this chain of presumption? Ought it not be success or failure? The measure of life as what works or doesn’t for one and all? Unfortunately this is rarely the case. What we believe, is held in higher regard than such concrete measures and we shape our lives, not so much by the good of all than we do by what supports our fanciful wishes: The hope for things being different than they truly are. 

Try, try again is the mantra. If at first we don’t succeed then try harder to shape what is not so into illusions of what we prefer. Be more perseverant, more tenacious, and resilient. And after such relentless assaults, even with the experience of not reaching the goal of the common good, we are remiss to let go and try a different path. Instead we hold fast to dogmas and reject the obvious, clinging forever to standards set by those in whom we have placed our trust. In psychological terms, this strange behavior is known as “confirmation bias,” a state of ignorance wherein we reject the truth and favor what confirms our preconceived beliefs. To do otherwise, we reason, will cause a loss of face and force us to admit error, neither of which our egos desire.

It is an exceedingly sad aspect of being human that leads us all into those habitual states of continuing ignorance, and it is not an aspect adopted only by the common man. Surrendering from our cherished ideas, valued though they are, seems risky work. Yet to reach the depths of our souls where the light of truth prevails, requires letting go of little to get all. Meister Eckhart, one of the greatest mystics of all time put the highest release like this:

“I will put into plain words what St. Paul means by wishing to depart from God. Man’s last and highest leave-taking is leaving god for God. St. Paul left god for God: he left everything he could give or take of God, every concept of God. In leaving these, he left god for God since God remained to him in his essential self, not as a concept of himself, or as an acquired thing, but God in his essential actuality.”

Even those who adopt open minds and are moving toward enlightenment fall prey to the trap, sometimes to the edge of death. The Buddha came to the final point of surrender before letting go of the greatest natural fear of all: The fear of death. When he reached the edge of the abyss, his choice was clear: Let go or die. Only then did he awaken to the essence of his True Self. Only then did he become genuinely Self Aware. 

Only when any of us faces the grim reaper and accepts what seems like our ultimate demise will we be ready to cast off the chains of illusion and meet, at long last, our true nature and know that, as Eckhart said: “God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being made and let God be God in you.” 

And on the way to this exalted place of pure awareness, where do we place our faith? In the orthodoxy? Holy Scriptures? The experts? What shall we consider the anchor that binds us firmly to eternal life?

• “Do not believe anything on mere hearsay.

• Do not believe in traditions merely because they are old and have been handed down for many generations and in many places.

• Do not believe anything on account of rumors or because people talk a great deal about it.

• Do not believe anything because you are shown the written testimony of some ancient sage.

• Do not believe in what you have fancied, thinking that, because it is extraordinary, it must have been inspired by a god or other wonderful being.

• Do not believe anything merely because the presumption is in its favor, or because the custom of many years inclines you to take it as true.

• Do not believe anything merely on the authority of your teachers and priests.

• But, whatever, 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.

The same text, said the Buddha, must be applied to his own teachings.

• Do not accept any doctrine from reverence, but first, try it as gold is tried by fire.”⎯The Buddha: The Kalama Sutra

It is the fires by trial in life that burn away ignorance, but only when we are open to letting go of the unreal and ready for the real. And when once we meet our Self for the first time we are still left with a residue of the old, that lingers like unwanted dust and was previously considered to be gold, when all the while it was fools gold. Then we must learn a new way, no longer clinging to chains of the past but rather accepting wings of The Spirit, just as any baby learns to crawl before walking. And until our spiritual legs grow strong, we will wobble and fall again and again, until at last, we rest in the assurance that the core of our being is firm and immovable. Along the way to maturity we will be unaccustomed to the new way and think for a time as Lao Tzu:

“I alone seem listless and still, my desires having as yet given no indication of their presence. I am like an infant which has not yet smiled.”

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.

A Bird in hand.

Here or There?

Permeate. Interpenetrate. Assimilation: all mean essentially the same thing—To infuse one thing completely into another thing, so the distinction between the two no longer exists. 

Mix the color red with the color blue and purple results. Now there is no more red or blue. Combine liquid water with extreme cold and ice results. Now there is the result of interpenetration. Mix spirit with matter, and what do you get? A sentient being with no more boundary lines between matter and spirit. Now mix two or more sentient beings, and what do you get? Chaos. 

Red is different from blue, and they don’t fight. Water and cold are different, and they don’t fight. Spirit and matter are different, and they do fight. Isn’t that odd? How can it be explained?  The problem is consciousness and perception. Red, blue, water, and cold are not conscious, but suddenly, there is fighting over differences when you add consciousness. And the reason is simple: Consciousness produces the capacity to perceive, and what a sentient being perceives are differences. 

Nobody can perceive a spirit, just what a spirit produces—sentient matter. There are both benefits and consequences of being human. We are a mixture of matter and spirit. We are sentient beings. We perceive only differences. We don’t perceive our true spiritual nature because it can’t be perceived through our ordinary senses. We would rather have what we imagine is a couple of birds in the bush instead of the one in our hands. The one in our hands is no longer either spirit or matter. Now it is simply One whole sentient being: the infusion of Spirit and non-spirit. We are the Middle Way.

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.