God is the Ground

In the 14^th century, Norwich was the second largest city in England, after London. The Bubonic Plague, a pestilence of Biblical proportions, had killed half its residents. Surviving the Plague, and shaped by unimaginable loss, a woman known to us only as Julian of Norwich lived a quiet life as an anchoress to a convent—a lay contemplative committed to solitude, liturgy, and prayer. This life apart from traditional societal demands afforded her the opportunity to write, a rare occupation for any woman at that time. Her writings, eventually released a few centuries later, made her the first published female writer in English history.

            Today the mystical writings of Julian of Norwich are known the world over, especially to anyone interested in the startling intersections between Christian mysticism and the nondual wisdom traditions of the East. And they constitute a grand departure from the more punitive and male-centric theology of her Christian contemporaries.

            In mainstream 14^th century Christianity, God was seen as a cosmic judge and punisher, dividing the damned from the saved. Sin was the great failing that separated us forever from God’s love. But in Julian hands, this paradigm is subverted. Our essential human nature, she argues, exists completely within God. Separation is impossible. Sure, sin is still a problem, and it causes most of our pain, but it’s a problem God has already solved. God’s delight is our liberation. And for Julian, God is simply another word for all that is. “Everything that is, has its being through the love of God,” she wrote. In her mystical visions or “showings,” she experienced Jesus saying, “All will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well.” No matter how bad things seem, we are already past the place where our problems have power. We just have to realize it.

            For Julian, God is more a presence than a person, a metaphysical reality in which we are already enfolded. When the apostle Paul said that God is where “we live and move and have our being,” (Acts 17:28), he was prefiguring a stance Julian would often express. “God is nearer to us than our soul,” she wrote, “for He is the ground in which it stands.” Like Christian mystics before and since, Julian sees God not as a transcendent being above and outside us, but as the very fabric of reality itself. God then is not to be sought, but simply allowed.

            The extent to which this perspective aligns with the Eastern wisdom traditions cannot be overstated. In the non-duality of the Vedanta school of Hinduism, and in Buddhism, the spiritual path is framed not as a process of becoming something we’re not, but a process of awakening to what we already are. And what we are is part and parcel of the oneness that encompasses all energy, matter, and consciousness. Realization is more a process of subtraction than addition, of removing hindrances rather than adding ornamentation. Our spiritual practices work best when they don’t clutter us up with more information, but dissolve our old ways of thinking.

            And it is from the intersections of Western and Eastern mysticism that New Thought was born in 19^th century America. Across the spectrum of expression in the Unity Movement, Religious Science, and the rest, we see again and again this ancient impulse, that we already are what we seek, and that our longing for God is God’s longing for Itself.

[This piece first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the May/June 2024 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission. This is my final column for Unity Magazine.]

The Emptiness of God

Like every religion Hinduism evolved over many centuries, each successive wave
of conquest and migration adding new and often conflicting elements. Like a snowball rolling down hill, over time religions hide their internal contradictions beneath layers of apparent coherence. But closer inspection melts the façade revealing the depths.

            Beneath the brash polytheism of Hinduism lies a quiet philosophy of non-duality—the metaphysical claim that all is one. So which is it? Is divinity to be found in hundreds of diverse gods and goddesses, or is divinity a singularity, the very ground of being, a boundless, formless field in which all energy, consciousness, and matter takes form? The answer, I’m afraid, is yes.

            Nowhere is this contradiction more powerfully exposed than in the Kena Upanishad, composed around 3,000 years ago. In this playful parable the gods Agni, Vayu, and Indra have just defeated some demons and restored order. As they proudly pat each other on the back a mysterious being appears. It is Brahman, the formless One from whom all the gods draw their power. But they don’t recognize their visitor.

            Agni approached the being saying, “I am Agni, god of fire. I can burn anything.”

            “Burn this,” said the being, tossing down a piece of straw. Agni tried to burn it but it would not burn. He slunk back to Vayu and Indra defeated.

            Vayu approached the mysterious being.

            “Who are you?” the being asked.

            “I am Vayu, god of air. I can blow anything around.”

            “Let’s see if you can move this,” the being said, pointing to the piece of straw.

            Vayu tried and tried but could not move the straw an inch. He too slunk back to his friends defeated.

            Agni and Vayu turned to Indra, their leader, and said, “You have got to find out who this mysterious being is!”

            As Indra approached the being it vanished and in its place stood Uma, the Goddess of Wisdom.

            “Who was that being?” Indra asked.

            “That was Brahman,” she said, “from whom comes all your power and glory.”

            It was up to the Great Goddess to bring these proud boys back down to the ground by reminding them that they are not the source of ultimate power—they are merely its instruments. The deeper wisdom is clear. All of our powers and abilities come from a deeper source. Our consciousness is an aspect of the one consciousness. Our creativity is an aspect of the one creativity. Our loving is an expression of the one love coursing through all energy, matter, and manifestation. Each of us is the embodied presence of the formless sacred source of the universe. But it’s ok if we forget sometimes—even the gods forget.

            Now comes the final realization—that our idea of God is just that, an idea. What the idea re-presents is beyond concepts, forms, and words. All god-portraits are foregrounds of a depth that goes down and down and down. The idea of God is an empty chair—there’s no one or nothing sitting there. Our concepts are helpful until we forget that they are empty, and that the reality to which they refer forever eludes our conceptual grasp. But we experience this ultimate reality here and now in the gaps between our thoughts, in our loving kindness, and in the beauty of the field out of which our lives arise like poppies in the summer sun.

[This piece was originally published in my A to Zen column in the May/June 2023 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Innerstanding

We need a new word, a word for that indescribable awareness within – that dawning realization that did not come second hand from another, or from a book, or at the end of a long line of reasoning. It simply arrived – a lucidity, a clarity, a simple wordless opening through which to see the world. “Understanding” doesn’t quite describe it, because understanding is conceptual knowledge – the grasping of ideas. This kind of knowing isn’t conceptual. It’s not made of ideas. It could never be described, written down, or spoken. But there it is, as bright as the morning star, re-ordering everything you know, think, feel, and are.

            We were talking about this the other day in my Asian philosophy class at Southwestern College. It’s bread and butter epistemological stuff – discussions on the nature of knowledge. What is it? How do we get it? How is knowledge different from opinion? What role does language, conceptual thought, and empirical evidence play in its transmission, acquisition, and verification?

            We’d begun the semester with a lively discussion of this question: What is the difference between knowledge and wisdom? That took nearly a whole session. Then we dove into a study of Hinduism, Vedanta philosophy in particular, capping it off with a three and half week student-led seminar on the Bhagavad Gita, India’s most beloved wisdom text. Throughout this process we had to learn how to live every day with the fact that here, as in every other wisdom tradition, ultimate reality remains ineffable, that is, beyond words and concepts. And yet, as the Islamic prophet Muhammad said, it is nearer than the jugular vein.

            Then came Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths, the Noble Eightfold Path, the Three Marks of Existence, Nirvana, Shunyata, Interdependent Origination, and all the rest, again having to confront and somehow make peace with the fact that Nirvana or enlightenment is a state of consciousness beyond conceptual grasping. In enlightenment one does not awaken into more accurate or more sophisticated concepts – awakening takes us instead to a field of awareness beyond concepts. Wisdom isn’t something you know, it’s something you are.           

The famous Zen story of the Flower Sermon sums it up best. One day the Buddha gathered his company together to give a dharma talk, as he often did. But on this day he simply held up a flower and didn’t say a word. Only one man, Kasyapa, indicated with his eyes that he understood what was being said. For Zen Buddhists, this is their origin story, the beginning of the wordless transmission outside the teachings and scriptures. What Buddha conveyed that day was far too vast for concepts and language.

This is why in Hinduism and Buddhism the teacher-student relationship is so important. The teacher does not and in fact cannot bestow wisdom onto the student because wisdom is not something anyone owns. It is not a thing, it is an event. The best teachers don’t teach, they co-create the conditions in which students can move more intimately into their own authentic nature. Wisdom arises in the spacious flow outside of thoughts and concepts, including the concept of the separate ego-self. The ego knows nothing of wisdom – it happens beyond the boundaries of that limited albeit useful construct. Therefore wisdom is not something you possess, just as you cannot possess the sunrise, or music, or love. In the depths of wisdom the separate self dissolves, or is transcended. As contemporary teacher Adyashanti puts it, “There are no enlightened persons. When enlightenment happens there is no one there to claim it.”

            In the Katha Upanishad this wisdom-transmission process is metaphorically called “spiritual osmosis.” In cellular biology, osmosis describes the transmission of the liquid substance within one cell through its semi-permeable membrane and through the semi-permeable membrane of another cell. This is how the substance of one cell literally becomes the substance of another cell. So too, when we spend time in the presence of powerful others, something of their wordless essence gets into us and changes us. We become ever so slightly more like them, and they like us.

            Maya Angelou sums it up beautifully, and let this be a message for every teacher agonizing over the latest fads in pedagogy. Maybe none of that matters. Maybe your students are simply waiting for you, the real you – the vulnerable, courageous, and loving you – to finally show up. To paraphrase Angelou: “People won’t remember what you said. They won’t remember what you did. But they will never forget the way you made them feel.”

            The other day in my Asian philosophy class, in the last two weeks of the semester, we were studying Daoism, the Chinese wisdom tradition that first found expression in Laozi’s immortal classic the Dao De Jing. No other tradition places ineffability so front and center. The Dao De Jing begins with this line: “The Dao that can be told is not the eternal Dao.” Dao, the Ground of Being, is beyond all words and concepts. The concept of Dao taking shape in your mind is not the real Dao. That partial concept bears as much relationship to the real Dao as a map to a place, or a menu to food.

            But that does not mean that we can never experience it. In fact, we are it. And so is everything else. Our experience of Dao or Brahman or God is not achieved with cleverness or calculation. It is simply allowed.

            And this is when Julian Rios raised his hand. I could tell by the light in his eyes that he was getting this, all of this.

            “My friends and I were talking about this the other day,” he said. “We call it innerstanding.

            “Innerstanding?” I said.

            “Yes, innerstanding.”

            Julian grinned. The room shifted.

            “That is the greatest thing I have ever heard in my life,” I said. “I am so stealing that.”

            And we went on to have the most wonderful discussion about this mysterious mode of knowing that defies definition or categorization.

            The great Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi put it this way: “A fish trap is for catching fish. When the fish is caught, the trap is forgotten. A rabbit snare is for catching rabbits. When the rabbit is caught, the snare is forgotten. Words are for capturing ideas. When the idea is caught, the words are forgotten. Where can I find someone who teaches without words? That’s who I want to study with.”

            Language and conceptual thought are the rafts that carry us across the river from the shore of ignorance to the shore of wisdom. But they are merely vehicles, and can never contain wisdom themselves.

            To understand something is to stand outside of it and see it clearly. To innerstand is to embody a wordless knowing that defies description, a knowing that transforms us body, mind, and soul. Understanding changes your mind. Innerstanding changes everything.

Wielding the Sword

When you take a second look at Jesus, there are always a few surprises. Just when you think he’s the guru of peace and love along comes a passage like this: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34) “I have not come to bring peace.” Seriously? Just who is this sword-wielding Jesus? Now that would make a cool stained-glass window.

            Throughout the world’s wisdom traditions, spiritual teachers often resort to the image of the sword. In Vedanta philosophy, the “sword of discrimination” refers to our ability to discern reality from illusion, permanence from impermanence, and truth from lies. Wielding the sword of discrimination is an essential skill for anyone seeking liberation from the delusions of conditioned consciousness. If you have no capacity for discernment or discrimination, you remain forever trapped in an illusory realm far from the sanity, refuge, and beauty of the truth.

            The great Buddhist bodhisattva Manjurshri is depicted wielding a flaming sword, his eyes alight with the intensity of a warrior in battle. In his other hand he holds a lotus flower, the symbol of prajna, the fully-realized awareness of the enlightened state. Because you can’t have one without the other. If you want to awaken, you must cut away all that is not real.

Manjurshri, flaming sword and all, is not your soft, cuddly bodhisattva. He is not your mom. He did not come to comfort you with soft words, cookies, and cocoa. He is here to violently cut you free from the things that are holding your back – your egoic delusions of grandeur, your debilitating self-loathing, your cravings and attachments, and the lie that you have more time to waste. Sharp swords have a way of conveying urgency when gentle coddling and doe-eyed ministrations fail.

            It will hurt. You’re going to lose some things – things that you thought were important. But it turns out they weren’t. And since you were unwilling to let go of them, Manjursri came to slash them away with his sword. You made him do this. You could have let go. But you didn’t. You chose attachment. So he had to go to work.

Change is hard because we always focus on what we are losing, never on what is being born from the wreckage. As much as we say we want to be free the truth is this: we like our cages. We feel contained by them, protected even. Safe.

Safety is overrated. Looking back on our lives we realize that it was only when we took enormous risk or weathered great loss that we were rewarded with the sweetness and beauty we had been longing for.

In Daniel Ladinsky’s translation, the Sufi poet Hafiz explains it this way in his poem Looking for Trouble:

           I once had a student

Who would sit alone in his house at night

Shivering with worries and fears.

And come morning

He would often look as though

He had been raped by a ghost.

Then one day my pity

Crafted for him a knife

From my own divine sword

Since then

I have become very proud of this student.

For now, come night

Not only has he lost all his fear,

Now he goes out

Just looking for trouble.

We have all seen that “raped by a ghost” look in each other’s eyes, and even in our own. Haunted by a past we cannot change, afraid to step across the threshold of our own front doors to claim what is ours, convinced that who we really are is not what the world requires, we stay frozen in a thought-cage of limited and limiting ideas that hold us back from living our own best lives.

This is why spiritual teachers from Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and everywhere else talk so much about wielding swords. That’s how tenacious negative thinking is. That’s how powerful lies are. They don’t undo themselves – they must be undone with sharp, bold, decisive action.

What happens when you run and hide from the sword of discernment? In other words, what happens when you refuse to find the courage to relinquish all of your attachments? What happens when you fail to see past the surface of things and into their depths? What happens when you deny the soft and mysteriously paradoxical nature of reality and force the fluid world into hard categories and rigid dogma? In a word, suffering. Suffering, Buddha taught, is the inevitable product of self-centered expectations. In fact, expectations are just future resentments under construction. When you foolishly think that you are in charge, the universe always has a big surprise waiting for you – the flat tire, the sudden divorce, the devastating diagnosis. In those moments the sword of Manjurshri comes crashing down with heartrending finality and in an instant we realize our utter powerlessness. But on the other side of that powerlessness is the freedom of realization, the wordless knowing that as all the forms of the embodied world rise and fall without our consent or permission we, in the eye of the hurricane, are stillness and peace. That there is wisdom in letting go, in saying Thank you for even allowing me to experience any of this. Grief and despair give way to gratitude and reverence. Even rapture.

But why wait? As we learn to wield the sword of discrimination ourselves, before it is done for and to us, we claim our rightful responsibility as stewards of our own best lives. Never stop trying to awaken. It is not new ideas we need, but freedom from all ideas. Somewhere out past all ideologies and doctrines is the wordless wisdom of inter-being, to be touched in our meditation practice, in our sacred service, in our prayers, in our humble appreciation, in our careful study, and in our sweet and innocent loving. Wisdom is not something we know, it is something we do. In this sense, it is possible to be right without having all of the answers, without, in fact, having any answers at all. We relinquish even the need to understand. We face what is, and have on our lips only the holy word yes. This is what it means to wield the sword of discernment.