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.

Soul Force

Bad vegetarian food at the boarding house sent Mohandas out into the streets of London in search of something better. The young law student found a vegetarian restaurant nearby, and it soon became a regular haunt. There he met a group of Theosophists, Yanks and Brits passionate about the world’s wisdom traditions. They invited him to join their study of the Bhagavad Gita. Even though he was born and raised in India, he had never really paid much attention the Gita. Mohandas K. Gandhi had to journey all the way to London to discover his own spiritual roots.

The Bhagavad Gita would become Gandhi’s most beloved book. He carried chapter two in his pocket and read it every morning, along with the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. The words of Krishna and Jesus formed Gandhi’s blueprint for how to bridge the gulf between the inner and outer life. Should spirituality be a refuge from the field of action, or a stance to take in it?

For Gandhi, a life-long commitment to social justice was born on the metaphorical battlefield of the Bhagavad Gita. In this 2,000 year old text, our hero Arjuna leads an army poised on the edge of battle. Across the field he sees the other army arrayed. He unburdens his heart to his friend and chariot driver Krishna. "Killing is a sin," he says. "I can’t do it." Arjuna collapses in moral paralysis.

Krishna spends the rest of the book encouraging Arjuna to take action, in the process revealing that he is no mere mortal, but an incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Krishna speaks with divine authority, and Arjuna has to listen.

On a literal level it seems that Krishna is authorizing violence. But Gandhi interprets the Bhagavad Gita metaphorically – the real battle is waged within each of us. Arjuna’s battlefield symbolizes the field of action in which all of us make the difficult decisions of our lives. If you take action, one set of consequences unfold. If you do not take action, another set of consequences unfold. There is no escape from action. The only freedom we have is the freedom to shape our actions consciously, compassionately, and without self-centeredness. It is not our enemies we must kill; it is our ignorance, ego-attachment, and delusion. We must slash our attachments to self-obsession with the willingness of a warrior.

As Krishna reminds Arjuna, we are at core imperishable spiritual beings, identical with the ground of being itself. Outer forms come and go, but our essence is timeless – it simply is. Therefore, why worry? As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Do not be anxious.” Is God in charge, or not?

Our role in this messy life is simply to show up and do the work that is ours to do, without attachment to outcomes or ego-expectations. When we perform our duty, Krishna says, Brahman works through us – we become instruments of the divine. When we renounce attachment and act in the consciousness of service, we are free. This, for Gandhi, is how we are to tackle the social justice work of our times: without rancor, without attachment to specific outcomes, and relaxed in the conviction that even a little spiritual progress is enough. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” Dr. King reminded us, “but it bends toward justice.” And as Gandhi taught, if our means are pure, the ends will take care of themselves. It is not body force or violence that accomplishes our goals, but soul force. When we show up as the consciousness of loving-kindness and cultivate the courage to speak truth to power, while harming no one but ourselves, we have the best shot at co-creating a world that works for everyone. As Thich Nhat Hanh said, “There is no way to peace – peace is the way.” Loving our enemies and turning the other cheek are not just inspiring ideals – Gandhi showed us that they are the foundation of pragmatic political action. Soul force knows no limitations, no barriers, and no bounds.

[This piece was originally published in my A to Zen column in the January/February 2017 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Beyond Conflict

It’s liberating to realize that you don’t have to have an opinion about everything. It’s okay not to know. It’s okay to withhold judgment, wait, and let things play out. It’s even okay to let the other guy be right once in a while.

            Wisdom is a fluid way of being in the world, not a rigid position paper. Conflict is fathered by certainty. Peace is mothered by patience.

            As the 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi wrote, “Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

            On one hand, it’s important to carefully discern between truth and falsehood. We gain little by leaving truth-claims unexamined. On the road to knowledge every step counts.

On the other hand, when we elevate our momentary assessment of the moving target of reality to the level of dogma, we distort reality to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable. We trade in the messiness of the real world for a conceptual cage of our own making. Lost in the rarefied air of our own self-serving thought-constructs we slip further and further away from the fact that reality is a vast, interdependent field of energy, matter, and consciousness too fluid and fast-moving to ever be reduced to a simple, fixed set of truth-claims.

We have become masters at accumulating information. We’ve mistaken information for knowledge. Not everything can be Googled. Just because you can provide a link or a YouTube clip does not mean you understand. In fact, there may even be an inverse relationship between information-accumulation and insight. Sometimes too much knowledge clogs up the works, clouding our natural, unadorned insight. As Laozi wrote in the Daodejing, “The more you know, the less you understand.” Clarity is the fruit of emptiness. A busy mind is barren ground.

When the Oracle at Delphi declared that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens it sent Socrates on a quest. He didn’t believe he was wise, so he set out to interview everyone with a reputation for wisdom to see how he measured up. He quickly realized that while these allegedly wise men had lots of opinions, they knew no more than he did. In fact, their endless opinions obscured their insight and impeded their ability to learn. The damage caused by their habit of mistaking unfounded beliefs for facts far outweighed whatever actual knowledge they may have possessed. This led Socrates to conclude that since he knew nothing, and admitted it, he was in fact wiser than all of these supposed wise men. From this ancient tale we get a clear message – humility and the admission of ignorance are a sign of real wisdom. As the Zen saying goes, “Don’t seek enlightenment. Just get rid of all your opinions.”

When we move past rigidity of thought we open up to infinite possibility. As the complex and fluid phenomenal realm unfolds before us, we stay in the present moment, keenly aware and awake to what is revealing itself. All energy, consciousness, and matter connects together into a single field of awareness of which we are an integral part. In the language of the mystic Meister Eckhart, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Individuality slips backstage while unity consciousness steps front and center. Or as St. Francis of Assisi put it, “What you are looking for is what is looking.” All of this is true, according to the Hassidic tradition of Judaism, because “The creator and the object of his creation are a unity inseparable.”

This is why reducing the whole of reality into tiny conceptual boxes is an act of violence. The fluidity of not-knowing allows everything in, while the arid rigidity of conceptual categorization blocks everything out – we never get at things-in-themselves, only our thoughts about those things. This is why Laozi wrote in the Daodejing, “In the pursuit of knowledge everyday something is added. In the practice of the Dao everyday something is dropped.”

In a famous Zen story, a learned professor of religion and philosophy went to visit a Zen master. When he arrived the master set the table and began to serve tea.

“Why have you come to see me?” the master asked.

“I have come to learn about Zen,” said the professor. “I have studied all the world’s religions and philosophies. I have learned the languages and read all the books. I am known as an expert the world over. There is very little I don’t know. But Zen eludes me.”

As he was speaking the master poured tea into the professor’s cup. When the cup was full he kept pouring. The tea brimmed over the rim, spilled onto the table and into the professor’s lap.

“What are you doing?” the professor cried as he leaped up.

“Your cup is already so full,” said the master. “There isn’t room for anything else.”

If, as these ancient sources show, emptiness is an essential quality of wisdom, then how do we attain it? By letting go of the illusion that we are in control, and renouncing the delusion that we have to solve every problem, iron every wrinkle, heal every wound, and right every wrong. Far from the philosophy of acquiescence or apathy, this open-hearted stance is a starting point for genuine growth and healing. Our actions are purer, stronger, and more effective when we work without attachment either to our own ideas or to a specific outcome. We should not work to see our own narrow ends met – we should work collaboratively with others and with the energies coursing around us intending simply to do good. Krishna calls this “working without attachment to the fruits of work.” In this consciousness of renunciation we become instruments through which the highest good manifests itself. The Daoists call this effortless-effort or wu-wei. You don’t have to know the final destination before taking the first step. You just have to move in the right direction and let the rest take care of itself.

Otherwise there’s a danger. If we instead seek to impose on the uncarved whole of the world our narrow, cookie-cutter conceptual framework, we give up any chance at genuine wisdom. When we build a limited and limiting worldview full of answers and inflexible doctrines, we have lowered ourselves into a well from which we can only see a tiny piece of the sky. And from our narrow view we see alternative perspectives as the enemy. We live in perpetual conflict with one another, and ultimately, with our own, truer self. This is no small thing. The whole world pays the price for this parochial narrow-mindedness. In his 1933 essay “The Triumph of Stupidity” Bertrand Russell wrote, “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” And I think we all know what happened to Europe, and to us all, in the dark years following 1933. It is a mark of wisdom to have doubts. It is a sign of danger to have none. Certainty is both the refuge of fools and the bludgeon of bullies.

Certainty is the seed of conflict. Unity is born from humility. As we learn to move beyond conflict into the consciousness of peace, we turn again to the words of Rumi, and this time include the next line: “Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’ doesn’t make any sense.”