Love is the Mystery

There is a higher reality that words, concepts, and sermons can’t reach. We try to
point to this reality with carefully wrought language, theology, and doctrine, but the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The map is not the place. The menu is not the food.

For those of us who teach, preach, and write this news is somewhat deflating. We thought we were getting close to naming the mystery. But in the end, all we can do is cultivate in others a willingness to deepen into the mystery that wells up through the cracks of their own lives. This is why Buddha simply held up a flower and didn’t say a word. This is why Lao Tzu wrote that “Those who say don’t know, and those who know don’t say.” Even Jesus seemed exasperated as he chastised his disciples in chapter thirteen of the Gospel of Thomas. “I am not your teacher,” he said. “Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring I have tended.”

If the teacher is not the message, and if the message cannot be received second-hand, then why do we gather in spiritual community to hear sermons about how to better ourselves and draw closer to the sacred source? As a guy who often gives those sermons, this strikes me as a particularly urgent question. What, in the end, are spiritual teachings for? Why do we need any of this?

You might as well ask a tree why it leans toward the sun. We love language, talking, and teaching because concepts are what we know. They’re how we know. In a way, they feed us.

First we perceive the world, then shape those perceptions into thoughts. As Adam named the animals, we name the concepts taking up residency in our consciousness, even going so far as to order them into hierarchies, because with naming comes judgment, prejudice, and bias. There is no such thing as value-neutral thought. We fall asleep and forget that we do not know the world as it is—we know only our thoughts about the world. This dynamic leaves us vulnerable to self-aggrandizing narratives that lionize us while diminishing the other. Prejudice seems baked into cognition itself.

Our innate need to discriminate and ascribe hierarchies must be deliberately disrupted and discarded. The good news is that the deeper part of us already knows this. Beneath the conceptual realm there is a concept-free field of awareness unbound by the limitations of thought. The world’s wisdom traditions call it by many names—Atman, Buddha-mind, spirit, inner Christ—and it is our essential nature. We have our being there. The conceptual mind is ill-equipped to experience this deeper reality. Realizing one’s sacred nature is more a process of  unlearning, of getting out of our own way. No matter how Herculean the effort, how can you become what you already are?

One of the most notable hallmarks of awakening is humility. Less and less do you need to prove that you are right. You recognize that every religion is true—that they all work, like maps, to show the way home. You stop straining and start softening. Freedom replaces fear and anxiety. You no longer argue about the meanings of words. All of the names of God are fine. Or none at all. In the end, only one word—love—serves us best as the name of the nameless mystery that we are. 

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the March/April 2023 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Drunk on Teachings

A version of this article first appeared in the A to Zen column in the March/April 2013 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.

“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise.   Instead, seek what they sought.”

                                                                                    – Matsuo Basho

In a famous scene in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus challenges his disciples with a pop quiz. “Compare me to something and tell me what I am like,” he said.

Simon Peter said to him, “You are like a just messenger.”

Matthew said to him, “You are like a wise philosopher.”

Thomas said to him, “Teacher, my mouth is utterly unable to say what you are like.”

“I am not your teacher,” said Jesus.  “Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring I have tended.”

Then Jesus pulled Thomas aside and whispered three sayings to him in secret.  When Thomas returned to the other disciples they asked him, “What did Jesus say to you?”

“If I tell you one of the sayings he spoke to me, you will pick up rocks and stone me, and fire will come from the rocks and consume you.”

Not a pretty picture.  But an important one.

With one simple question, Zen Master Jesus was able to discern something vitally important about his students.  Simon Peter and Matthew were all too willing to label Jesus and reduce him to a definition.  Only Thomas’s agnosticism articulated the deeper truth of Jesus’ ineffability. 

We will never know the three sayings that Jesus spoke to his star pupil.  But that’s not the point.  The point is Thomas’s readiness to receive them.  In fact, our hunger to know those three sayings plainly demonstrates our attachment to crude definitions and pat answers.  We say we don’t like dogma, but we really do – when it’s our dogma.

To go one step further, is Jesus suggesting that our slavish attachment to concepts and doctrines, no matter how sacred, is a barrier to our experience of God?  Although we risk the wrath of those who hold more traditional Christian notions of the unique divinity of Christ, our willingness to engage with this question is ultimately a sign of hope.  Jesus himself, in no uncertain terms, openly ridicules his disciple’s devotional attachment to Jesus the person.  Simon Peter and Matthew (and many among us) are suspended at the level of personality-worship and fail to see through the façade.  As Joseph Campbell points out, every image of God is a mask.  The masks of God serve a dual purpose.  Initially they draw our attention toward God, but in the end they hide God from us.  The final barrier between us and God is the mask that we have created.  If you want to know God, you must forget everything you know about God.  Our cherished idea of God is the last mask that must be ripped away.

By his own words, Jesus is not the source of the “bubbling spring”, he is simply tending it.  We drink a little truth and like drunks we get loud and proud and want to tell everyone we know all of our beautiful theories.  As usual, Jesus hits on just the right metaphor.

In psychotherapy this phenomenon is known as transference.  As we experience increasing well-being under the expert guidance of a skilled therapist, we mistakenly transfer those good feelings onto the person helping us.  Every therapist, guru, minister, mentor and teacher has had to thwart the loving but misguided devotions of grateful disciples.  We fall in love with the messenger and miss the message.  This mistake blinds us to the reality that the joy and freedom we feel is welling up from within us.  The teacher is merely “tending the spring” of which each of us is a channel.  In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s image, we are each a fountain in a beautiful garden, unaware that we are all drawing from the same well.  In the cold, sober light of morning, in this beautiful garden, let us realize our oneness with the divine beyond the limitations of all teachings.