The Upside Down Tree

 

We came down from the trees three million years ago. They bear us fruit, shade our days, and fuel our fires. It’s no surprise they show up so often in our sacred literature.

            In Norse mythology the world tree Yggdrasil forms the axis mundi, the hub around which the wheel of reality turns. Countless gods across traditions were either born from trees or died on them. The Norse god Odin hung himself on Yggdrasil for nine days, just as Jesus was hung from a cross, the symbolic tree of the executioner. Buddha attained enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, and the Na’vi of James Cameron’s Avatar held nothing more sacred than the Tree of Souls, the source of both the unity and multiplicity of divinity.

            Although the examples are many, one of the most beautiful is the upside-down tree of the Katha Upanishad, Hinduism’s most compelling wisdom tale.

            In the Katha Upanishad a young spiritual aspirant named Nachiketa goes on a mystical journey to visit Yama the Lord of Death—who better to answer his question, “What happens after we die?” Yama takes the boy under his wing and leads him (and us) through a landscape of metaphors, images, parables, and insights that have enraptured truth-seekers for two millennia.

Throughout Vedanta teaching, and in the Katha Upanishad in particular, we find a dizzying blend of dualism and non-dualism, and from the tension of this paradox springs the dynamic energy that propels the investigation forward. We are at once individual things, and aspects of one thing. The mind will of course resist this conundrum, but the heart feels its way through non-conceptual imagery and wordless awareness. This is where analogies like the upside-down tree wield the most power. In chapter 3, verse 1-2 Lord Yama says:

The Tree of Eternity has its roots above and its branches on earth below. Its pure root is Brahman the immortal, from whom all the worlds draw their life, and whom none can transcend. For this Self is supreme! The cosmos comes forth from Brahman and moves in him. With his power it reverberates like thunder crashing in the sky. Those who realize him pass beyond the sway of death.

            Brahman the formless, eternal, changeless sacred ground of being—ultimate reality beyond all thoughts and forms. Yet in this passage Brahman is also given a gender, and spoken of as though he were transcendent, or outside and above this world of forms. And we also see the term “Self” (Atman in Sanskrit)—the word for the presence of Brahman within all sentient beings. In the end, Brahman and Atman are two words for the same thing, at once transcendent and immanent. All matter, energy, and consciousness—in a word, all of this—is an expression of Brahman-Atman, appearing through the distorting refraction of maya as separate things, all the while maintaining its underlying unity and identity. The upside-down tree conveys this paradoxical unity and diversity at the core of Vedanta metaphysics, namely, that all is one, no matter what our perceptions say. And when we realize this, “we pass beyond the sway of death.”

            The task of every spiritual aspirant is to realize—to make real—this oneness. Intellectual, conceptual understanding falls short. Life, it turns out, is not a theological debate. It is a lived mystery, where words and concepts serve as vehicles whose value is to transport us to the realization beyond all of them.  

[This piece first appeared in my column A to Zen in the January/February 2024 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Synchronicity

I did not go looking for Petra, but Petra found me.

Four times last week it crossed my path, you know, the world heritage site made famous by the 1984 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. (It’s where Indy finds the Holy Grail). I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the ancient ruins of Petra, even if it is a remarkable place – a series of tombs and facades carved into the walls of a deep stone canyon in Jordan 2,300 years ago.

Then one night at a neighbor’s house someone I’d never met told me a spellbinding story about her recent visit to Petra. A few nights later another woman I’d never met told me stories about her visit to Petra. The next morning I opened my email to find a newsletter from a travel writer friend who’d recently visited – you guessed it – Petra. Then last night I turned on the TV and there was Indiana Jones standing at the façade of Petra. What are the odds? Why now? What did it mean?

            Was the universe trying to tell me something? Am I was supposed to visit Petra? Is this what Carl Jung meant by synchronicity?

            Jung used the term “synchronicity” to describe a series of random coincidences that seem somehow meaningful. My four Petra encounters had no direct link to one another – and they certainly didn’t cause each other. And yet, Jung suggests, something worth investigating is moving just beneath the surface. But before we dive into the depths of synchronicity we have to first understand Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious.

Jung learned the concept of the individual unconscious from his mentor Sigmund Freud – the idea that the bulk of our consciousness is hidden from our surface awareness and that deep, instinctual drives and early childhood conditioning compel much of our adult behavior. In neurotic individuals, Freud argued, talk therapy and dream analysis could help lay bare these hidden or unconscious drives, thereby freeing us of their powerful and destructive influence.

No doubt influenced by his study of Hinduism, specifically the idea of Atman or Universal Self, Jung took Freud’s idea of the individual unconscious and universalized it. For Jung, there is a single “collective unconscious” at work in the world, and all human beings regardless of culture or century of origin are tapped into it. In fact, it is from this collective unconscious that the archetypes arise, universal ideas that take diverse form as local religious narratives, mythological symbols, and sacred artifacts. By becoming fluent in the language of the archetypes we lay bare the deepest meanings of our wisdom traditions and honor our own sacred significance.

            For Jung then, synchronicities are encoded messages that arise from the collective unconscious, much like dreams, myths, or intuitions. As such, synchronicities are potent glimmers of metaphorical wisdom to be interpreted carefully and creatively. It is not the case that the universe wants me to go to Petra – that would be a far too literal or pedantic reading of the metaphor. Instead, something much richer and more profound is being prodded by the nameless sacred source beyond. In this sense, Jung believed, synchronicities might be signposts that point the way to our most authentic, most fully realized life. If we cultivate the simplicity and openness to understand them.

            So what exactly do my four encounters with Petra mean? I can’t say. But the less I think about it, the more I understand. 

[This piece originally appeared in my A to Zen column in the March/April 2019 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

What's Me and What's Maya?

[This piece first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the September/October 2014 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.] 
      
       Most of the time, the illusion holds.

But once in a while, we catch a glimpse of our face in the mirror and honestly wonder, Who is that person looking back at me? Sure, we generally know who we are. We know our names. We remember our addresses. At work, we kind of know what to do. But on those dark nights of the soul when our very existence is called into question, the center around which all of the disparate elements of our lives orbit loses its gravitational pull. We see the parts, but can’t find the whole. The lights are on, but no one’s home.

The great 20th-century Indian spiritual teacher Ramana Maharshi used to ask his students to meditate on the question, “Who are you?” But the question often elicits a mere list of labels—a man, a woman, a husband, a wife, a parent, an athlete, an artist, an engineer. As spiritual archaeologists, we must somehow be able to dig down beneath these layers of social identity.

Knowing that real inquiry can begin only after removing all masks, Adyashanti and other contemporary teachers shift the question to “What are you?” Yet no matter how you word the query, the goal is the same—discernment. Learning to tell the difference between illusion and reality, between our myriad masks and our primal, authentic nature is the urgent task of every thinking man and woman. Without discernment, we remain forever trapped in an unexamined illusion.

When we are born, we fall immediately under the spell of the perceptual world and the inherent structures of consciousness. Our senses and our minds portray the boundless energy around us as discrete and solid objects, even though at the atomic level, so-called “solid matter” is 99.9999 percent empty space. Even our concept of self is haunted by this same vexing problem. We think we are separate. As a purely defensive move, our ego usurps control. Then fear puts us in competition with all of the other “separate” objects and entities that our addled mind concocts. Thinking itself, in other words, is the source of our confusion. The ancient Indians had a word for this shared communal delusion—maya.

Maya is the illusory nature of the perceptual field, including our surface consciousness, shaped as it is by this mistaken reading of the energy field around us. Caught in the dream of maya, we don’t see an essential truth—that we are at our core divine. Hinduism refers to this divine nature within us as Atman, or Self. The purpose of the many paths of yoga, in fact, is to see through this fog of maya that hangs between us and reality so that we can discover and realize our inner divinity. The process may seem impossible, yet there’s hope. There is a way across the ocean of this dreamworld. Discernment is our raft to the other shore.

When Unity cofounder Charles Fillmore and other New Thought leaders went looking for a way to transform the fire-and-brimstone Christianity of 19th-century America into an affirmative spiritual practice, they turned to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the sacred literature of Hinduism for a new vocabulary with which to render the spiritual truths of their own experience. In an essay of the same name, Emerson renders the Atman as “Over-Soul,” the one, universal consciousness. When Fillmore writes of the Christ within, he is referring to this same spiritual principle.

Discernment then, it turns out, is the most important of all spiritual work. The pervasive, relentless tenacity of the illusion of ego-separation is the source of all our powerlessness, conflict, and suffering. Realizing the Christ within, our Buddha nature, our God consciousness, our Over-Soul, is a prize won only through an arduous and disciplined process of discerning truth from illusion. We are not our bodies. We are not our genes. We are not our cultural and environmental conditioning. We are shaped by those things, but not bound by them. We are more. We are one with the divine.