Surrendering from surrendering.

Before

After

Years ago when I first began to practice yoga, I heard a story of a revered yogi who arose one morning, before dawn, and went to meditate on the banks of the Ganges. The heat of the day was beginning to rise. To be more comfortable, he removed his robe. Not wanting it to blow away while he meditated, he folded it carefully, laid in on the river bank, covered it over with a mound of sand, and then proceeded with his practice. Time passed and when he opened his eyes he saw he’d been joined by many young aspirants all with mounds of sand shaped neatly in front of them.

“Immature beings with but a twig of awareness

Are incited by the demon of death.

Where they’ll be in the future depends on the karma they gathered in the past.

Doing evil deeds is meaningless.”

Young seekers all aspire to achievement and many times adopt meaningless rituals believing they contain some magical properties that will transport them to Nirvana. The following is excerpted from Mokchokpa’s Song of Advice in Nicole Riggs’ book on the Shangpa Lineage, Like An Illusion: Lives of the Shangpa Kagyu Masters.

Look at the two images above. The comparison is shocking! Both images are of The Buddha at different stages of enlightenment. On the left is the figure of a person determined to the point of death. At that stage, he had surrendered a life of luxury and everything else except the one thing that mattered most. He was austere and relying purely on the unreal part of himself. In contemporary vernacular, he was pulling himself up by his bootstraps. That road nearly killed him and he was “… incited by the demon of death.”

In his dying breath, he broke the chain of death, dropped body and mind, and gave up the final vestige of which he was holding. In a flash he suddenly became Self-aware. At that precise instant, he realized that to which every seeker aspires and had nothing more to surrender. He then shed the baggage of fear and turned into a person of serenity and love (the image on the right).

The process of Self-realization is like this. We move from reliance on illusions to surrendering to all illusions, even the illusion of God. It was Meister Eckhart who said this was the final frontier: giving up the idea of god to fuse with God. Whatever we can imagine is a barrier. When all images and ideas are gone, we dwell in the silence of the mind, and the only thing left is Pure awareness/The true Self: the source of all ideas and none.

Many times, in our desire for spiritual achievement, we replace the work of Self-realization with the surrogate of enhancing our self-image, thinking that if we look the part and reach down deeper into our limited reservoir to try-try-again, it will be enough to impress those upon whom we rely for the transparency of self-worth. The truth is that while the treasure of our True Self always lies buried beneath our feet, it takes much digging to rid ourselves of the impediments that block access to who we are truly. And once we complete the mining, there is nothing more to surrender. Then we are in the home we have never left and realize, like the ancient “stupid men,” there was never anything to surrender.

“When we renounce learning we have no troubles. 

The (ready) ‘yes,’ and (flattering) ‘yea;’⎯

Small is the difference they display

But mark their issues, good and ill;⎯

What space the gulf between shall fill?

What all men fear is indeed to be feared;

but how wide and without end

is the range of questions (asking to be discussed)!

The multitude of men look satisfied and pleased;

as if enjoying a full banquet,

as if mounted on a tower in spring.

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. I look 

dejected and forlorn, as if I had no home to go.

The multitude of men all have enough and to spare.

I alone seem to have lost everything.

My mind is that of a stupid man; I am in a state of chaos.

Ordinary men look bright and intelligent,

while I alone seem to be benighted.

They look full of discrimination,

while I alone am dull and confused.

I seem to be carried about as on the sea,

drifting as if I had nowhere to rest.

All men have their spheres of action,

while I alone seem dull and incapable, 

like a rude borderer. (Thus) I alone am different from other men, but I value the nursing-mother (the Tao).”⎯Chapter 20: Tao Te Ching

It was the great Rabindranath Tagore who wrote in his poem: Journey Home:

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

What none of us realize until we awaken, is that we are always at home in that innermost shrine. We have always been there and so long as that innermost shrine exists it is there we always will remain. It is impossible to make a journey to where you already exist.

Getting saved??

Where to throw the lifeline?

Let me state the obvious: Being saved requires someone to save. An extension of this thought concerns the apparent need to be saved. Only someone who believes they are lost need to worry him or herself with finding their way. 

A fool is someone who is not lost, isn’t yet remains convinced they are. Consequently, if someone is persuaded they need to be saved, only then does a savior make any sense. And this brings us to that central of all issues: duality and separation.

Where does the idea come from that “people of the book” (e.g., Jews, Christians, and Muslims) need saving? Those three religions hold a common understanding based on a shared segment of the Old Testament. The first five books—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, the book of Numbers, and Deuteronomy—comprise the Torah, the story of Israel from the Genesis creation narrative to the death of Moses. Genesis is common to all three religions. Jews, Christians, and Muslims share the story of creation involving Adam and Eve, who allegedly disobeyed God by eating an apple and were cast out of paradise and thus in need of being saved. 

But (and this is a big “but”) since Adam and Eve were stained with sin (as well as their progeny), they were incapable of saving themselves and thus needed a savior. And here is where the story begins to divide amongst the Jews, Christians, and Muslims. All three accepted the inherent nature of mankind as fallen, being condemned by God due to original sin, but how they were reconciled significantly varied.

The Christian answer to this dilemma is that God took pity on mankind because he loved them so much that he “sent his only begotten son” to take the sins of the world upon himself and offer himself as a sacrifice to appease God (who demanded justice as recompense). By being crucified on a cross, died, was buried, overcame death by rising from the dead, and bringing the Holy Spirit to abide in the hearts of those who confessed their sinful nature and accepted Jesus as Lord and Savior. 

Only if that confession took place would God grant reconciliation, forgiveness and give believers a new heart filled with the Holy Spirit to replace an old heart that was filled with sin. In essence, that was, and is, the story that continues to inspire those who consider themselves as “born again.” Everyone else who chose to not accept this story was regarded as heretics and damned to Hell.

So the essence of this proposition boils down to believing in the original sin of Adam and Eve. If that part of the story breaks down, then the entire story of needing a savior likewise falls apart. I have written a commentary on this story, which speaks to some serious flaws in the story. It will convince no one who considers this creation story as historical fact and has closed his or her mind to alternate interpretations. Nevertheless, it is a reasonable commentary of a metaphor with a deeper meaning that comes very close to the Buddhist understanding. 

The significant difference between the two is the notion of duality, separation, and where to find the kingdom of Heaven. Here is what Jesus is recorded as having said about Heaven and finding your true self: 

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

Others have suggested that we are not lost but instead consider ourselves to be. To a person of Zen, words are a mixed blessing. They can lead you astray or open your mind to the music of the muses. One of the greatest mystical poets of all time was RabindranathTagore.  Sadly, while he lived, he was little known outside of the Calcutta area, and not known at all outside of India. The Nobel Prize in Literature 1913 was awarded to Tagore, “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West.”

One of Tagor’s resonate themes is opening doors. Here is one facet from his poetic jewel Journey Home. 

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

Similarly, one of the great Zen Masters (Hakuin Zenji) wrote a famous poem called The Song of Zazen, which opens like this, 

“From the beginning all beings are Buddha. Like water and ice, without water no ice, outside us no Buddhas. How near the truth, yet how far we seek. Like one in water crying, ‘I thirst!’ Like the son of a rich man wand’ring poor on this earth, we endlessly circle the six worlds. The cause of our sorrow is ego delusion.” 

Jesus likewise wrote the parable of the Prodigal Son, which in essence expresses the same truth of a man who has the blessing from the beginning but wanders far and wide before realizing that all along, he must return home to find what he had lost.

The principle treasure of Buddhist understanding is that we are not lost or in need of saving. We have never been separated from our source (our inherent and eternally indwelling, indiscriminate true self), which remains obscure due to ego delusion. We are all in essence Buddha’s awaiting awakening, and once that true nature is revealed, your entire self-understanding and the universal view are transformed for all time. You then know in the depth of your core that we are all united, one and the same—none better and none lesser and fundamentally indiscriminate. There is profound liberty that comes with the realization that we can never be anywhere that God is not, and in God’s eyes, we are all equal and loved without conditions.

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing, and perfect will.” The Apostle Paul—Romans12:2

“First awaken the mind that reads, and then you’ll understand.”—Zen Master Bassui Tokushō

Journey thru Hell to Heaven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

The Impossible Dream

I admire intelligent people and try to profit from their words of wisdom. Shakespeare is one of my favorites, and one of his quotes is a “go-to” for me: “A rose by any other name smells as sweet.” 

Now for the topic of the day: The perfect is the enemy of the good. Many wise and famous people have said as much…

• Voltaire: “The best is the enemy of the good.”

• Confucius: “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”

• Shakespeare: “Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.”

I know; I’m repeating myself and thus beating a dead horse, but I can’t escape my past (e.g., education and experience in the advertising business). While working within that industry, I learned an important and fundamental principle of persuasion: Frequency. 

The more a person hears the same message, the better the odds of breaking through barriers and making a difference. And this issue is important with significant barriers. And yes, I am aware of the psychology of the “Backfire Effect,”—The tendency for us all to dig in and defend an opinion that appears to be at odds with, and contradicts, opinion of our own. 

It is really tough to break through the barrier of tightly held dogmas for a simple reason: Egotism. It is an unfortunate aspect of human nature to resist admitting error since it seems to threaten our egos. That barrier is what keeps us all locked in, hunkered down, and ready to defend to the death (sometimes literally) our ideologies, preconceived notions, and biases. 

Those matters constitute adornments that define our egos: We become our ideas (or so it seems), and one of the most destructive, and instructive, ideas is this business of The perfect is the enemy of the good. That idea, without exception, leads to a lack of progress unless we can be persuaded that our pursuit is a Don Quixote quest of jousting with windmills and singing The Impossible Dream of perfection, or nothing at all.

“May the flawed prevail over the wicked.”

It may very well be that I’m writing this post for nobody but myself. Previously I participated in various social media sites that helped to spread my words until I learned my personal information had been hacked, and I withdrew. 

Undoubtedly this vastly reduced my readership, but the price just became too high. Consequently, here I sit writing concerning a matter that is important to me, and hopefully, others who may never read these words.

So what’s the burning issue that draws me this morning? The headline gives you a clue, and a part of my message came from columnist Kathleen Parker, writing for the Washington Post—a publication I admire, to which I subscribe—most recently about this issue of something that’s been on my mind for quite some time. Obama expressed the idea more eloquently than I in his speech following Katrina. He said, “Nobody gets to hold the American economy hostage over their own ideological demands.” My rendition of that idea is one of balance: We ought not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. If that seems obscure, I’ll put it in different terms: Who amongst us meets the criteria of absolute perfection (except, of course, the hypocrite who lies not only to others but most importantly him or her self)?

Far too often in today’s world, we ignore the majority of good a person does and paint them with a brush of minority flaws. Maybe that’s what sells newspapers: The sensational and lurid, but it ought not to be what defines a person. What lies in a person’s heart and soul should count for more than their errors of execution. What leads us down this path to Hell is the flawed ideology of dogmatic inflexibility and self-righteous denial of our own flaws and the eager rush to judge others with a yardstick that measures only the impossible. When we toss aside the major good and dwell on the minor exceptions, we establish a standard that we will one day regret.

“May the flawed prevail over the wicked.”

Bringing it home.

Initial dawning and ripple effects.

For those who may think Zen has no practical impact on their lives, guess again. 

How so? In spite of ignorance concerning this amazing practice, Zen is not a religion. Instead, it is, perhaps, the only means available for unveiling our deepest nature and becoming aware that nobody is who they think they are; good, bad, or in-between.

The Buddha’s “diagnosis” for unveiling this true nature was/is like a stone dropped into the water. Initially, there is only the penetration but then the ripple effects just keep on expanding like waves rolling outward from the source. His Four Noble Truths lay out the sickness and his Eight Fold Path reveals the remedy. And central to that remedy is what we now call Zen, but was then known as Dhyāna—absorption, so deep and intense that the imagined “you” simply (well not so simply) vanishes and the real “you” emerges, which in naked-relief is not a “you.” Instead, it is seen for what it is as “unity” with the rest of humanity (not to mention other sentient forms).

Why is this so critical and eternally important to all sentient beings? Because it eradicates that imagined self-image and replaces it with who/what we all are, and that removes all human conflicts. So, as in my own case, that self-image was one of hatred of myself. Importantly any image (the self included) is not real. It is only imagined, as all images are. We would never delude ourselves that moving images we see on our TV are real, but we make that error all of the time with ourselves. Living with a sense of self-hatred is poisonous and nearly led me to commit suicide. 

At the other end of this ego spectrum lies the delusion of superiority. It was Eckhart who said that humanity in the poorest state is considered by God equal to an emperor or Pope.  Any and all aspects of self-delusion (e.g., good, bad or in between) hides our genuine connection with the rest of humanity.

Attachment of every kind leaves one vulnerable to suffering when the object of attachment dies, which all conditional phenomena eventually do. That part of attachment is clearer than when the object of attachment is ourselves. You’d think that wouldn’t be a problem since when we die we won’t experience anything, suffering included. How could we? We’re already dead and imagine we don’t suffer at all. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I can’t say for sure what we experience when we die (although there is an explanation) but I can say for sure how I suffered, thinking all the while I was a terrible person who deserved only one thing: To die. Until that bubble broke I was moving toward the brink of suicide. I am not aware of any other method for accomplishing this eradication of the unreal and unveiling the real at the same time. I certainly don’t know everything and maybe there is another method but if so such a method is “the best-kept secret” of all space/time. If that isn’t practical I can’t imagine what is.

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.

Traveling theatre

The masks we wear.

When I was much younger there was no television, only radio and it was referred to as a “theatre of the mind.” Unlike television, where we see visual performances on screens across the room, we saw performances in the imaginary theatre of the mind. 

In some ways, the imagination was more vivid and pictorial than watching images on a TV screen. Ours was an internal screen (actually our screen was the primary visual cortex located at the back of our brain). What none of us realized then with radio, or now with television, was that the ultimate screen remained, located in our brains rather than across the room.

We all look out upon our moving, conditional, changing world and see what we all take to be real. In fact what we are seeing remain images being projected upon that internal screen—our primary visual cortex. Images are all just shadows of what’s real. And out of that projection, we form an idea of who we are; one self-image built upon other images and none of it real. 

Nevertheless, we take it (our egos/self-images) as real and become persuaded, guarded and protective of that fabricated image, feeling insulted and inflamed when the role requires a different sort of performance. Some are fabricated out of harsh experiences and formed into negative self-images (hateful and hated) while others fabricate theirs out of more genteel material and fabricate loving self-images, with every step in between. 

Regardless of harshness, genteel, or anywhere in between, all of the end results are unreal simply because the material is unreal. The base material determines the end result. As the saying goes, “You can’t make filet mignon out of hamburger.” The fundamental point here is that we all take our ideas of whom and what we are far too seriously, never realizing how conditionally unreal we are actually. 

How much better, for everyone if we all recognized this fact and lightened our emotional/mental load and became what we truly are—performers, acting out changing roles. And as performers, we adapt to changing circumstances with changing roles and play the part as circumstances dictate.

And a part of this traveling theatre is the recognition that we are also real observers. So we play the roles, with a chuckle in our hearts, knowing full well that we can perform as the role dictates and at the end of the day leave the roles behind and go home to ourselves. It is important to us all to see conditional life as just a show. We are the players; all different. Conditional life is the stage, and the real us—all the same, are the observers: as different and distinct as snowflakes yet fundamentally just indiscriminate snow. Distinctive snowflakes melt into indistinct snow and that becomes the water of unity.

Reality and perfection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Road Less Traveled to Tipperary.

The mortal Tipperary.

“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.” Henry James “Harry” Williams wrote that song (heard at this link) back in 1912 and it became popular during the “War to end all wars”—WWI. 

As we know it didn’t end all wars but instead set the stage for the next World War, as all wars do. They never end, the carnage continues, unabated, and we never seem to learn the needed lessons of why wars exist at all.

The greatest war—the one that will end all wars, is an internal war (the ultimate battle) and involves identity and mis-identity: the battle between the ego (the great impostor) and our real, hidden nature that lies dormant awaiting discovery. Many great pieces of literature have been written about this internal battle, not the least of which is The Bhagavad Gita. But we, in the West, remain mostly unaware of such wisdom and thus continue fighting the wrong wars—the mortal ones—that continue forever.

I went through that internal war (as well as an external one—The Vietnam War that damaged me for the rest of my mortal life) and experienced the battle that awakened me to the real, hidden me, but it was a Long Way to Tipperary—that stretched from my ordinary road of seeking fleeting mortal success, hitting the road-bump that brought into question that pursuit, arrived at the critical juncture of choosing to stay on that road to nowhere (with utter familiarity) or going down that other road to fear, trembling, ego confrontation, THE battle, and final victory. 

It wasn’t fun and honestly, there were many times when I asked myself “what the hell have I gotten myself into?” Tipperary, in this case, was finding that internal, hidden treasure. After that, I reached another crossroads and had to choose again, which road I would follow, and which I would thus leave behind. What I never considered when I made the first choice to travel that road less traveled was there were some really bad demons waiting to ambush me down that path,  and facing and regurgitating all of the misery I had buried within. 

But to get to the hidden treasure, by necessity, entailed reaching further, down into the deepest mud of consciousness, where both the demons and the angels co-existed. I had no other choice than the one that led to the ever-increasing internal space of darkness. Consequently, it was a dice-roll with both demons and angels coming along as a package deal, at the same time. And eventually, these splitting paths came out onto a meadow: a point of union, that was bathed in pure, vibrant light. But when that battle first began, I didn't know convergence would ever occur.  Thus the lid on Pandora’s Box was thrown open and the demons attacked with a vengeance.

I came to know, gradually, that the previous pursuit—the ordinary mortal one—was leading me step by step to complete despair and the inescapable conclusion that I had invested 40 years of my life building a castle in the sky. I had a lot of skin in that game and it was extraordinarily hard to fess up to making wrong choices. My ego hated that confession (it never wants to acknowledge error and doubles down with the mantra of “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again”) and if I had been willing to see clearly earlier I would have come to that juncture sooner. 

But I didn’t but bought into that programmed mantra. After all, a Marine never quits, and sadly most never know when to quit. Sometimes it is better to retreat and fight another day. The question is not to fight (or not) but rather the question is choosing the right war to fight. It’s the same for us all. Which one do we choose? The one that never ends? Or the war that will end all wars and does lead to Tipperary. But, the road to that meadow of light had to go through darkness and into a new world!