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.

True Identity

[This piece first appeared in my "A to Zen" column in the June/July 2015 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Sometimes spiritual work is simple. We just make it complicated.

When we look at our hands we realize they are a part of us, that they accomplish remarkably deft tasks, but that we are so much more than just our hands. We use our hands, but we are not our hands.

So too when we examine our thoughts, we realize that we use them to accomplish remarkably deft things, but we are so much more than just our thoughts. We use our thoughts, but we are not our thoughts.

Once you realize that you are not your thoughts, you have begun to awaken.

As you witness yourself having a desire, a memory, or an emotion, you also realize that your ability to witness thoughts proves that you are something more than thoughts – you are their witness. This deep and abiding awareness beyond the thought stream goes by many names. In Zen Buddhism it is called your Original Self. In the Bhagavad Gita Krisha calls it the Inner Witness. Revealing and realizing our identity with this primary consciousness is the work of the world’s great spiritual traditions.

The twentieth century Vedanta teacher Ramana Maharshi used to lead his students into meditation around the question, “Who are you?” Contemporary teacher Adyashanti shifts the question slightly – “What are you?” Either way, meditation teachers in every tradition urge us past the surface definitions of self, clouded as they are by empty associations with tribe, ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic class. We all wear many labels. But when you remove all the labels, what remains?

The first century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna refers to the thought realm as “ordinary knowledge.” Ordinary knowledge is comprised of thoughts, concepts, rational sequences, and logical processes. The deeper realm of awareness he calls prajna, or “transcendent knowledge.”  Prajna is non-conceptual, intuitive, mystical awareness beyond the reach of conceptual thinking. Ordinary knowledge is of course highly useful and profoundly powerful. The entire realm of human accomplishment has its roots here. But prajna or transcendent knowledge is that vast boundlessness beneath the thought stream. When we consciously practice witnessing our thoughts, we move deeper and deeper into prajna.

This is why meditation is such an essential practice. Meditation is nothing more than allowing yourself to sink beneath the waves of the thought stream and enter the vast field of awareness of your authentic being – your true identity.

And as we move deeper into prajna, we are increasingly liberated from the limited and limiting thoughts, judgments, concepts, and opinions of ordinary knowledge. As the Zen saying goes, “Don’t seek enlightenment. Just get rid of all your opinions.”

 The ego is a concept like any other – useful but ultimately limited and provisional. Concepts like I, me, and mine are place holders, sign posts, or directional arrows. Like words on a theater marquis, they are not the movie, just its name. From the perspective of prajna, we are boundless awareness existing in a deep state of interconnectedness with all things. From the perspective of ordinary knowledge, we are a separate entity in conflict with everything else. The problem is this – most of us remain stuck in the realm of ordinary knowledge. We fall under the spell of the conceptual realm. Instead of seeing oneness we see multiplicity. We come to believe that concepts are real things. We forget that they are just shadows cast by cloud-thoughts flying through the sky of our endless awareness.

This is what makes transcending the ego so challenging – the ego fights for its existence with the tenacity of a honey badger. And its favorite weapon is its own perceived woundedness. In his book Grace and Grit philosopher Ken Wilber writes, “The ego…is kept in existence by a collection of emotional insults; it carries its personal bruises as the fabric of its very existence. It actively collects hurts and insults, even while resenting them, because without its bruises, it would be, literally, nothing.”

Notice how we use our perceived woundedness and victim status as glue to hold our fictional ego together. What if we let go our tired grievances? Who would we be without our resentments and self-righteousness? For many people, these questions are simply too frightening to consider. But the answer is simple. We would be free.