The Perennial Philosophy

What if beneath the bewildering variety of the world’s religions there lay a small set of
common, universal ideas? What if behind the cacophony of competing truth-claims their lay a unifying silence in which all tensions resolve in mellifluous harmony?

The search for a perennial philosophy is an ancient search. The Rig Veda of ancient India proclaims that “The truth is one – the sages call it by many names.” In the Hellenistic world ancient Greeks and Romans were agog at the bewildering array of spiritual and philosophical systems their conquests revealed to them. Surely, they pondered, these must be a foreground of a deeper universality.

In the European Renaissance of the 15^th century the dream of a unified theory of wisdom found new currency in Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Academy in Florence, and in the exalted humanism of Pico della Mirandola’s bestselling Oration on the Dignity of Man. The longing for wisdom is universal, Mirandola wrote, “because it can be retraced in every tradition.”

           Twentieth-century British author Aldous Huxley brought the subject into the mainstream with his 1945 book The Perennial Philosophy which the New York Times in its glowing review called, “the most needed book in the world.” Borrowing the phrase Philosophia Perennis from 17^th-century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, Huxley deftly curated passages from Eastern and Western theologies and wove them together with his own connective commentary. 

           Here are the five core ideas Huxley expressed throughout his writing career:

That there is a Godhead or Ground, which is the unmanifested principle of all manifestation. Here Huxley articulates the Supreme Being archetype, the universal notion of an ultimate reality or “Ground,” behind all of the names of God – Brahman, Dao, Father, Jesus, Allah, Shakti, Amitabha Buddha, and so on. Whatever it is, it lies beyond the multifarious forms that emanate from it.

The Ground is transcendent and immanent. With this Huxley affirms a key paradox – that ultimate reality is at once beyond and within us. Whether it’s the panentheism of Vedanta, the universal incarnation (and salvation) of progressive Christianity, the Buddhist concept of Dharmakaya, or the Sefirot of Kabbalah, this idea finds expression in theologies everywhere.

That it is possible for human beings to love, know, and become identified with the Ground. Here Huxley illuminates the upward spiral taught in all wisdom traditions – a journey from lower consciousness to enlightenment and oneness.

That to achieve this unitive knowledge, to realize this supreme identity, is the final end and purpose of human existence. Our hunger for wisdom is not a personal choice but an innate imperative. Like salmon swimming upriver to spawn at the place of their birth, we long to return to the source from which we and all things come and not only understand it, but become it.

That there is a Law or Dharma, which must be obeyed, a Dao or Way, which must be followed, if humanity is to achieve its ultimate purpose. Ancient sages left behind maps, books, and practices which, if followed, would facilitate our awakening. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The perennial philosophy is in all the books we already own.

If Huxley’s right, and I think he is, then all religions are true – as metaphors or maps. At their best, any of them will work. Or as 18^th century Hindu saint Ramakrishna put it, “Many paths to the summit.” But a map is only as good as the traveler. It is we who must do the walking.

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

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

[A version of this article was originally published in the July/August 2013 edition of Unity Magazine in the "A to Zen" column, and is reprinted here with permission.]

“Truth is One, the sages call it by many names.” – Rig Veda

Religion is the ugliest thing in the world.

Religion is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Now what?

Even a cursory glance at human history reveals a long parade of pain, often driven by the drumbeat of religious arrogance and ideological fanaticism. From prehistory to today’s headlines, drop the needle anywhere on the sad record of human affairs and a mournful noise threatens to drown out the fragile beauty of the world. Again and again the spiritual insights of brilliant teachers were pounded into oppressive ideologies by fearful overlords. The alloys of our compassionate wisdom were forged into swords by the fires of hatred. Crusades, conquests, tribal genocides and ethnic cleansings have always been with us. It’s easy to sympathize with John Lennon in his immortal classic Imagine as he wonders if the human race would be better off without religion. But even in the midst of the Holocaust, Anne Frank saw something bright and everlasting through the vale of tears. “In spite of everything,” she wrote, “I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Incalculable human suffering is rooted in religious and ideological acrimony, but a contrary fact is also true: the cure for the disease of hatred and violence is found within the principles and practices of the world’s religions. People with deep religious and spiritual convictions do enormous good in the world. Because of their experiential knowing that something sacred and profoundly real is at work in the world (some call it God), religious and spiritual people are willing to emerge from their comfortable cocoons and join together with others in communities defined by purpose, sacred service and right action. They are willing, often at great risk to themselves, to help others. As an antidote is crafted from poison, religion is both the disease and the cure.

As both a blessing and curse, the paradoxical nature of religion has caused great confusion and, in some, debilitating apathy. No matter how you slice it, religion is a many-headed Hydra that defies simple classification. You’ll find whatever you’re looking for. Horrors and beauties abound. It all depends on what you’re looking for.

What we intend to search for in this column is evidence that religion and spirituality in all its many forms offers the best and brightest hope for spurring humankind toward an awakening – an awakening that draws us toward the manifestation of our highest good both as individuals and as a whole. We will comb the world’s wisdom traditions from the Vedas to the Qu’ran, from the Gita to the Torah, from Patanjali to Pythagoras, from the Tao te Ching to the Dhamapada, from the Gospels to the Simpsons – in short, everything from A to Zen. We know, as the Vedas proclaimed three thousand years ago, that “Truth is One – the sages call it by many names,” and no matter where we look, we will find gold.

Truth may be One, but religions are not all the same. They emphasize different facets of the human dilemma, they are founded on often wildly conflicting assertions about human nature and the nature of the universe, they are crafted from different levels of consciousness, they seek specific solutions to specific cultural, social and historical contexts that may no longer exist. But despite the differing surface inflections, there is an underlying unity beneath the waves. It is our goal to look below the surface and find that underlying unity. Despite the apparent cacophony, the great religions of the world are echoes of one ancient song, a song best sung in the here and now by all of us raising our beautiful, disparate voices together as one.

The New Atheism

This article was originally published in the January/February 2012 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.

Atheism isn’t really new. It’s as old as the idea of God itself. At the dawn of history the first time someone said “there is a God” the guy standing next to him said “no there isn’t.” And we’ve been arguing about it ever since.

In the ten years since 9/11 a raft of writers have published best-selling books championing the well-worn idea that God is an invention of our over-active collective imagination, an invention humanity would be a lot better off without.

At the head of the pack of the so-called New Atheists is Richard Dawkins whose book The God Delusion, published in 2006, spent 51 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and has since sold over 2 million copies worldwide. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and has little patience for any truth-claim that cannot be supported by empirical evidence. For him, belief in the virgin birth, Creationism and the existence of an invisible cosmic overlord is utterly groundless and worse – “Religion,” said Dawkins in a recent New York Times interview, “teaches you to be satisfied with non-answers.” In other words, religion makes us stupid.

Dawkins is not alone in his critique of the traditional Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. He joins a brilliant and esteemed list of philosophers including Hume, Sartre, Camus, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Nagarjuna, Mill, Chomsky, Santayana and Foucault.

Other famous atheists range from the not at all surprising (Joseph Stalin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud) to the unexpected (Bill Gates, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller). Thoughtful, inventive, creative and courageous people throughout history have, at sometimes great personal and professional risk, dared to question the central paradigm of western civilization – that the God of Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad is real.

But atheism doesn’t just ask questions – it asserts answers. By making a specific truth claim, namely that there is no God, atheism is vulnerable to the same criticism it levies against theism. Whether you claim there is a God or not you still have to supply evidence to support your claim and present that evidence in a framework we can all accept. The devil is always in the details.

Where Dawkins’s brand of atheism falls short is in its misestimation of the human capacity to know. For Dawkins, religion is a failed science – a science utterly without evidence or sound hypotheses. What Dawkins is unwilling to consider is the possibility that religion and science do not share a common epistemology. The process by which one establishes knowledge or certainty in science is utterly different from the process by which one establishes knowledge or certainty in religion. Scientific certainty is founded solely on empirical, that is, sensory evidence whereas religious conviction is founded on externally unverifiable inner experience. Religious claims are therefore prone to a host of criticisms from an empirical epistemological stance. To scientists like Dawkins religion is nothing more than a long list of misunderstandings amplified through time and concretized by tradition. Gone from even the realm of consideration is the possibility that there are ways of apprehending reality other than through sensory data and conceptual thought. What if non-sensory awareness or direct, unmediated experience carries its own epistemological weight? As Native American philosopher Vine Deloria puts it, “We may misunderstand, but we do not misexperience.” Learning to humbly trust the authority of our own inner-awareness gives birth to an epistemology unbound by mere intellect and the limiting mechanics of logic.

Ironically, atheism does religion a great favor by laying bare the absurdities inherent in any attempt to conceptualize the ground of being. If the formless ground of being that we commonly personify as God is the source of all reality, (including our conceptual minds), then of course any mere concept of God falls woefully short of the reality it purports to describe, leaving all such concepts susceptible to ridicule.

Whether we like Dawkins’s conclusion or not, any thinking person understands and appreciates the urgent importance of his inquiry. Throughout history, the God idea has done as much harm as good. Religious wars, oppression, conquests and crusades have left us battered and bloodied. Given the rise in popularity of atheism in the post 9/11 world it is clear that a great number of people are frustrated by religion, especially fundamentalism in all its many forms. Atheists like Dawkins capture a wide audience because they deftly skewer outdated and outmoded God-concepts that never really worked anyway. In other words, the God-concept attacked by atheism is a God-concept many of us have already left behind – the angry, judgmental, anthropomorphic God (think Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel) who commands unquestioning obedience to an endless list of confusing and often conflicting dictates administered by an authoritarian church. It’s a shame, however, that in their haste to abandon religion so many people have cut ties with their innate spirituality as well.

A genuinely scientific and open minded approach to the God question would allow for the possibility that while the existence of God cannot be proven within the narrow bounds of empirical science, God may still exist. In this sense Dawkins does not disappoint. Dawkins believes that evolution is progressive and inherently leads to increasingly complex forms. The emergence of conscious beings from the primordial ooze strongly suggests the possibility of significant future evolutionary development. If there was no God “in the beginning”, could there be one now or in the future? “Yes,” says Dawkins, “it is highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like creatures,” and if there aren’t, there could be someday. Such is the power and potential of evolution. Admittedly, these are not the sort of gods that populate creation myths the world over but are rather the result of a long, unguided process of mutation and natural selection of desirable traits – the culmination of evolution, not its genesis.

What Dawkins is unwilling to concede, despite eons of experiential evidence, is that God-consciousness is not just a future possibility, the end-point of eons of evolutionary progress, but the starting point of it all. If God-consciousness is the source of everything, and even more to the point the essential nature of everything, then it is impossible to turn God into a mere concept let alone a logically sound one. Trying to define God is like trying to see your own eyes. “The source of consciousness cannot be an object in consciousness,” said Nisargadatta Maharaj in his classic of Vedanta philosophy I Am That. “To know the source is to be the source.” In other words, we cannot turn God into a thought because God is the very act of thinking itself. Asking us to explain God is like asking a fish to explain water. We cannot point to a disembodied thing called God because God is what everything is. This brand of religious philosophy, dismissively and misleadingly called pantheism by mainstream theologians, offers a third alternative to the tired theism/atheism debate.

By challenging an outmoded concept of God and the crippling propensity of mainstream religious doctrine to jettison rational thought Dawson is performing an invaluable service. Arguably, he is helping us all move forward out of millennia of dogmatic authoritarian hearsay and toward a spirituality grounded firmly in experiential knowing. As Jung famously remarked, “Religion is a defense against the experience of God,” and as such ought to be critically examined by all who wish to deepen their authentic spiritual practice. Dawkins’s well-reasoned attack on traditional religious belief is pushing us away from the shallow end of the pool and into deeper waters. From here we can see the other side.

In any debate, theological and other wise, the goal is not to eliminate dissention and compress the baffling complexity of reality down to a single, simplistic proposition. No matter how deep our longing, humanity’s search for meaning cannot be reduced to an up or down vote on the existence of God. The object of thoughtful discourse is to allow conflicting truth claims to polish each other to a shining luster in the rough and tumble give and take of rigorous yet mutually beneficial dialogue. And in the great sorting, the chaff is left on the granary floor, laying bare the wheat that nourishes us all on the long road to wisdom. Moving past simple scenarios of this or that, we finally begin to appreciate the need to grow beyond slavish attachment to rigid opinions or positions. Maybe the question of God’s existence can never be answered to everyone’s satisfaction. “The great and most important problems in life are utterly unsolvable,” said Carl Jung, “they can never be solved, but only outgrown.” Instead of childishly regarding the new atheism as either true or false, it is more likely that it is yet another facet of the unfolding of evolutionary consciousness, a welcome corrective to our natural tendency to cling to old narratives and conceptual frameworks that no longer serve our highest good.

Are All Religions the Same?

Mystics of all traditions have long held that the doors of the world’s numerous religions open into one room. “The Truth is one,” says the ancient Rig Veda, “though the sages call it by many names.” For Joseph Campbell, the endless masks of God hide the one face. And today, a thriving interfaith movement seeks new ways to embolden this ancient dream of unity. What if we are moving into a post-religious age, where our theologies and doctrines dissolve into one? When asked about his religion the Dalai Lama famously replied, “I don’t have a ‘religion’. My religion is kindness.” What if it’s just that simple?

But it’s not that simple. It’s one thing to imagine and intend a bright ecumenical future where all religious disputes are laid to rest. Creating such a world, on the other hand, is a tall order. Mystics, with their dreams of oneness and universal love are invariably heretics within their own traditions. There is considerable push-back from the mainstream which sees mysticism as a threat to its autonomy – a threat it is often willing to meet with force. Jesus wasn’t the only one killed for claiming God-consciousness.

Sometimes in our zeal to find the underlying unity beneath all faiths we overlook important differences – differences that deeply impact the lives of billions of people and shape civilizations. Religion does as much to divide us as it does to unify us. Without first confronting the fundamental differences between the world’s religions we cannot move past them. Denial and ignorance never solved anything.

Let’s look at three central questions and explore how the world’s religions have traditionally answered them. But before we do, a word of caution is in order: sweeping generalizations are dangerously misleading because they obscure the natural diversity of thought found within every religion. Saying “all Catholics belief this” or “all Muslims believe that” distorts the truth by rubbing smooth the complex and multifaceted array of positions found within any faith community. Nevertheless, generalizations, if used lightly and provisionally, help us begin the process of deepening and clarifying our thinking about the world’s religions.

Who or what is God?

Joseph Campbell made a useful distinction. In the religions that originated east of Iran, ultimate reality is generally understood as an immanent, impersonal energy within everything whereas west of Iran, ultimate reality is understood as a transcendent being, a personified entity above and outside the created world. This fundamental distinction would have far-reaching effects.

In Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism this immanent source is known as Brahman, Buddha-consciousness and Dao, a reality beyond all concepts and definitions – the mystery behind the masks. All existence, including the gods, flows from this ultimately nameless source. In Hinduism this is particularly apparent. The many gods of the Indian pantheon are part of the created world, not its ultimate cause.

West of Iran a very different understanding of God or ultimate reality emerged out of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Here, God attained personhood and stands above and outside the created world. We are not manifestations of God-consciousness; He is the creator and we are merely creatures. This fundamental dualism shapes all of the other elements of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic worldview.

In the fundamentally non-dualistic eastern worldview the spiritual path is comprised of realizing one’s unity with this divine source, a realization covered over by ignorance. God-discovery is, in a very real sense, self-discovery. The purpose of religion and spirituality in the east is to awaken us to who and what we really are.

In the western traditions the spiritual path is one of obedience to a set of divinely revealed doctrines, beliefs and practices designed to bridge the chasm between us and a distant God, a God who cares, but a God who we have exiled through disobedience.

Another important difference between east and west involves the issue of inclusion and exclusion. If all is one as the eastern view claims, then we can realize Oneness through any number of means just as a summit can be reached from many different directions. No paths are excluded. If, however, there is only one tribe or creed the transcendent God favors, then joining the right religion becomes a matter of eternal life or death.

Understanding God as the divine Ground of Being within us and all things leads to one particular vision of human nature and human purpose. Understanding God as a personified deity outside the created world and ourselves as profane, disconnected products of that God leads to another.

What is a human being and what is our purpose?

In the western view, a human being is a mixed bag – made in God’s image yet terribly limited at the same time. Higher than the animals, lower than the angels, we are here to live as best we can in accord with God’s love and fulfill our divine appointment with as much dignity as we can muster given the mixed qualities of our nature. Jewish law, Islamic law and the guidelines of Christianity set the boundaries of authorized behavior. Obedience is rewarded and defiance punished. All three western faiths share the notion that we are called to be co-creators with God, working diligently for the good including practicing wise stewardship of the earth and its resources. Sacred service – giving our time, talent and energy for the good of others – is our highest purpose. When we participate in the healing of the world we are the hands of God.

Traditional, mainstream Christianity holds that because of our sinful nature we are adrift in self-imposed exile from God. All of the descendents of Adam and Eve carry within them an internal, irreparable flaw. We can’t think our way out of it, will our way out of it or wish it away. The only thing that can restore our severed connection to God is God’s grace. For Catholics this grace is accessed through membership in the Church and willing participation in its sacraments. For Protestants this grace is accessed through faith, belief and adherence to the word of God as recorded in the Bible. In Christian thought, thinking that you can “save yourself” is a grievous sin: pride. Without a relationship with the Christian God and adherence to Christianity’s codes, all is lost.

On the other hand, there is no doctrine of original sin in Judaism or Islam (or in Mormonism for that matter). In these faiths sin is understood as an event, not a condition; a lapse in judgment resulting in a violation of God’s law, not a genetic inevitability. This view of sin was also found in the early Christian church and advocated by some bishops like Pelagius, a British contemporary of Augustine who today is known mostly as the namesake of the Pelagian heresy. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin won the day and became Christian dogma. Pelagius and his followers were condemned and drummed out of the Church.

In the eastern view the nature and purpose of humanity is understood quite differently. If all is one, then every aspect of creation is an expression of the Divine, especially human beings with their capacity for reflection and self-awareness. The fact that most human beings are utterly unconscious or asleep to this fact in no way diminishes its veracity. Closing one’s eyes does not make the sky go away.

The tension in eastern religion is between ignorance and wisdom, not sin and salvation. We do not need to be “saved”, we need to be awakened. Buddha devoted his life to teaching a very effective awakening process, and countless gurus in the Hindu tradition did the same. In the great classic of Indian spirituality the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna a variety of methods for seeing past the illusory separateness of surface perception to the underlying unity of divine reality. We can attain this unitive wisdom through selfless action, through devotion and love, through study and through meditation, depending on one’s individual proclivities and preferences. The point is to awaken to who and what we really are and live authentically from our inner being, leaving behind the ignorance of our former lives, bound as they were by karma and the repetitive cycles of conditioned thinking. Shifting our identity from the surface ego in perpetual conflict with everyone and everything to the divine inner Self frees us from ignorance and opens us up to a life of compassion and joy.

What happens when we die?

Just as distinctly different philosophies of life emerge from the world’s religions, so too distinctly different philosophies of death chip away at our lazy assumption that all religions are the same.

While the Hebrew Bible is nearly silent on the issue of life after death, later Judaism arguably absorbed the powerful influences of Christianity and Islam on this issue so that today, all three western faiths share a similar understanding of the life and death process. God created our souls at a certain point in time (we have not always existed as the Hindus claim), then He put us into a human body where we live one life. At death our souls are judged and a determination is made regarding our eternal residency – cut off from God forever in hell, or basking forever in the beatific vision of God in heaven.

The eastern traditions are considerably more complex. In the Bhagavad Gita Arjuna learns from his teacher that death is not real. “There never was a time when you did not exist,” said Krishna, “nor will there ever be a time when you cease to exist.” The divine Self exists beyond time and space, beyond the duality of life and death, taking on many bodies in a lengthy succession of reincarnations. In the field of time everything flowers and fades, but beyond the temporal veil lay a vast changelessness. And that is where our true Self resides, whether we know it or not. Just as we cast off worn out clothes and put on new ones, so too we cast off these bodies and take on new bodies. The wise, said Krishna, see beyond the suffering of the physical realm to the implacable peace beneath all of these tumultuous processes. “All forms arise and all forms fade,” said the Buddha, and shifting our identity from the ephemeral flux characterized by craving and suffering to the underlying wisdom of Buddha-consciousness is the work all of sentient beings.

The urgency of the west, with its one life scenario and imminent divine judgment is entirely absent in the east. You have a long time to work out your wisdom. And no one needs to save anyone else.

These and many other differences between the world’s religions point out the difficulty in upholding a simplistic “all religions are the same” perspective. But what if beneath the cacophony of these very real and problematic conflicts a deeper stillness awaits? What if beneath these doctrinal variations a trans-rational, experiential reality stands ready to burn away all of our oh-so-interesting intellectual distinctions? Perhaps the Dalai Lama was right. Maybe it is simple.

Mystics of all traditions agree. Like white light through a prism, Truth splits into many colors when run through the prism of human understanding. A fundamental characteristic of wisdom then is the ability to see that behind all the conflicting truth claims lays a deep and unspeakable unity.

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This article was previously published in the March/April edition of Unity Magazine under the title "Religion: A to Zen", and is reproduced here by permission.

A Light Sense of Self

Is the ego our enemy, our friend, or just another tool in the box?

Even the most casual student of the world’s spiritual and philosophical traditions knows that self-centeredness is the blade that cuts us off from wisdom and well-being. We must relinquish selfishness the sages tell us. Egotism is the enemy. And yet a nagging cluster of questions remain: Is my innate desire to learn, grow and create egotistical? Is my sense of identity such a bad thing? Don’t I need personal ambition to get anything done?

These questions arise in any walk of life, but they seem particularly acute in the arts, especially the performing arts. If you’re going to get on stage and demand people’s time and money, you’ve got to believe that what you’re offering has value. You need a strong, clear sense of self. Nothing is more important on stage than confidence, which, by the way, is very different from arrogance.

What is the ego? It is that thing we refer to when we use words like I, me and mine. It is a concept of self, an identity that is separate from everything else. It is one of the truths about us. But there are other truths.

In the spiritual and philosophical wisdom traditions of the world a few recurring principles arise again and again. Aldous Huxley called these recurring principles “the perennial philosophy”. Foremost among these universal ideas is the concept of Oneness, the notion that behind the veil of differentiation there is an underlying unity. All separate things, then, are expressions of the One. Whether you personify and deify the One or think of it as an impersonal force is purely a matter of preference. Some call it God, others call it Dao or Brahman or Spirit or Source or Divine Mind. “The Truth is One,” says the Rig Veda, “the sages call it by many names.”

Why the One became the Many is the great mystery of existence. We don’t know why. But it did. As humans evolved, spiritual traditions emerged, girded by philosophy and clothed in mythology. Imbedded in these traditions are maps left for us by those who went before, maps that make clear that realizing our unity with Oneness is the highest form of wisdom; to rise up out of the consciousness of separateness characterized by agitation, fear, competition, scarcity and craving and into the consciousness of unity characterized by serenity, clarity, kindness, community, abundance, compassion and gratitude. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism and countless other truth-traditions all lead by different paths to the same summit.

In this context then the ego is neither good nor bad – it is simply one aspect of a complex array of energies and faculties nested within the phenomenon of consciousness. The ego, that sense of separateness, is a necessary construct. The ego serves us well. It encourages us to invest considerable time and energy into the maintenance of our own lives, materially and spiritually. I enjoy being me. Initially, I may think that I’m doing all this for myself. But it’s equally true that as I get stronger, smarter, more creative and more skillful I’m equipping myself for greater acts of service. Maybe the ego with its love of achievement, accomplishment, competition and attention is all part of a larger plan. By cultivating our own excellence we are adding to the wealth of the world. As I expand my capacity for self-expression, I am simultaneously deepening my connection to the Source and becoming a widening channel for Source to express Itself through me. In this way the false dichotomy between my individuality and the One begins to dissolve.

All one hundred trillion cells in your body emerged from a single cell, the egg. After fertilization, it quickly divided into two, then four and so on. The rapidly multiplying and expanding cells began to specialize – some becoming bone, others becoming skin, still others becoming brain tissue with the capacity for self-awareness. Deepak Chopra asks an excellent question. Are the heart and the brain different? Yes. Are they separate? No. They are differentiated expressions of one, unified organism. Differentiation is not separation. In this same way then all of reality is One, despite appearances to the contrary.

The problem arises when we mistake the ego for our entire being. We may fault the ego somewhat for playing along with this self-serving delusion, but it is certainly not the ego’s fault. It’s just doing the job for which it was designed – leading the parade. But thinking that one lousy drum major makes a parade is a big mistake.

“Person” and “personality” come from “persona”, the Latin word for mask, specifically the masks actors wore on stage in Classical plays. Our personality is the mask we show to the world, behind which lurks all the immeasurable mystery of our little slice of the One consciousness. Our identity, the way we are known to the world, is a cluster of associations made up of a complex and interwoven tapestry of threads – race, age, ethnicity, profession, looks, skills, mannerisms, voice, preferences, opinions and so on. This cluster of elements we call a “person” is led by an ego, an organizing principle that ties together all of these otherwise disparate elements. In this sense then the ego is our friend. We would be hopelessly fragmented without it. Before we demonize the ego it is probably wise to remember that the ego is, after all, yet another manifestation of the One.

Still, the dangers of egoic attachment are very real. Mistaking the ego for the entire depth and breadth of our being is the source of all our suffering. Putting the ego in charge of our lives is like letting a flea rule the world. In the end, neither the flea nor the world prospers.

What if we re-conceptualized our ambition as emergence, our hunger for more as sacred expansion, our yearning to be heard and understood as holy communion? “You have the right to work,” Krishna tells Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward.” The Buddha also counsels non-attachment in the midst of deep engagement. And Confucius says, “The inferior person asks ‘what’s in it for me?’ The superior asks, ‘what is the right thing to do?’” The highest form of action is selfless action rooted in the ground of Being. When the ego recedes its as if the clouds fall away from the sun – the whole world is enlightened.

Cultivate your excellence. Revel in your expansion. Don’t hide your light for fear of appearing egotistical. What matters most are your intentions. Are you working for egoic glory born in the consciousness of fear, or are you working in the consciousness of service, joyfully allowing Transcendence to express itself in you, through you, as you? Make something happen. Be a channel of the creative manifestation of the sacred energy of the universe. Participate in the healing of the world. Co-create your own best life out of the raw materials within and without you. Do it with a bold sense of Oneness. Do it with a light sense of self.

The Consciousness of Gratitude

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.” -- Cicero

I was standing at the kitchen sink washing the pots that wouldn’t fit in the dishwasher. My hands were deep in the soapy water, my head in a warm cloud of tea tree and lavender. Dinner was done and the kitchen was clean – as clean as it was going to be tonight.

Then it happened.

It began in my toes, moved up my legs and settled in my chest. It was not a thought, not an idea. It was a knowing.

I was suddenly and inexplicably happy.

Outside the window the last light of day was draining from the sky. The shadows were spreading out from under the trees and joining together in darkness. In the distance the dock lights flickered on the surface of the lake like floating flames.

Dinner was good, but then again, it always is. The view from the window was nice, just like it is every night. So why was this moment special? Why was I suddenly awash in gratitude and deeply in love with everything I saw? Why now did life seem utterly, ordinarily perfect?

The consciousness of gratitude – that deep and abiding feeling of aliveness, well-being, serenity and joy – is a singular pleasure that transcends thought and circumstance. It is not a philosophical tenet or a theological doctrine to be debated and honed by rational discourse. It is not just another good idea to set alongside all the others. It is an experience that wells up from the ground of Being beyond the reach of the mind and its conceptual field. The consciousness of gratitude is not so much a way of thinking as it is a way of being. It is not something we achieve as much as allow. One thing’s for sure. When you get one taste, you want more.

On Thanksgiving Day and throughout the holiday season a familiar ritual is repeated all over America. We go around the table and tell each other what we’re thankful for. Giving thanks for the things we have is a powerful starting point, but there is an even deeper dimension to gratitude our earnest pronouncements sometimes obscure. What if the consciousness of gratitude has nothing to do with what we have here in the outer world of forms? What if the consciousness of gratitude comes before, not after, we count our blessings?

Thanksgiving may be a uniquely American holiday, but its spiritual core, the consciousness of gratitude, is truly global. All of the world’s wisdom traditions share the notion that our consciousness is the field out of which the bounty of our lives emerge. And gratitude, as Cicero says, “is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.”

Underneath all the diversity and complexity of the Indian traditions, often lumped together and called Hinduism in the west, lays one simple claim: there is only one reality and it is God. Brahman, as it is known in Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Vedas and the Upanishads, is the ground of Being from which all thoughts and forms arise. But Brahman itself is beyond all thoughts and forms, beyond all personifications and qualities. While it might be tempting to say that Brahman is present in everything, it would be closer to the truth to say that everything is the presence of Brahman. The goal of Hinduism is the realization of this truth – our complete and utter unity with Brahman. And when we realize our unity with the ground of Being, we realize that we lack absolutely nothing. All thoughts of separation and lack are maya, or illusion.

If all is One then there is no duality, no this and that, no me and mine, no other thing to posses. None of us owns of any of this. You don’t own your children, you don’t own your garden, you don’t even own your possessions any more than you can own a piece of the sky or the air in your lungs. All of these things are expressions of the One, of which we are already an inextricable part. There is nothing to possess because we are already unified with the eternal field of consciousness and all its manifestations. In light of this reality, the only sane stance is profound and continual gratitude.

Like Hinduism, Buddhism also calls us to awaken from the dream of separateness. In unenlightened consciousness we live perpetually in the future and in the past – anywhere but here and now. Our habitual, conditioned thought-stream is characterized by fear and longing. Buddha taught that our attachment to these erroneous thought-forms is the cause of suffering. Our attachment to self-serving portraits of the past and the future imprison us in the consciousness of scarcity and lack – a far cry from gratitude. It is only by awakening to this now moment that we experience release from the cycle of egoic craving and inevitable dissatisfaction. When we practice acceptance of what is, when we awaken to the infinite formlessness of the now, gratitude seeps up through the gaps between our thoughts like groundwater.

We are reminded many times in the first pages of the Hebrew Bible that the world is enough. With each new element of creation, Genesis sounds the refrain, “and it was good.” Judaism forcefully affirms the fundamental goodness of the world. We already have everything we need, only we don’t know it, lost in the anguish of covetousness. As with Hinduism and Buddhism, the problem is never an absence of external possessions. Our unhappiness is always and only the fruit of our own mistaken thinking.

In the 23rd Psalm King David sings out from the depths of his God-consciousness, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside quiet waters, He restores my soul.” But behind David’s resounding manifesto of gratitude is a real-world pragmatism. Life is not a bowl of cherries. There are conflicts. There are challenges. Powerful people are working at cross-purposes with us and with those we love. David is undaunted. “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies,” he writes. “You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” David reminds us that we needn’t be free of all problems in order to experience gratitude. On the contrary, gratitude is the stance with which we must meet our “enemies”, and in that light begin to heal our lives with the balm of our common humanity.

Like David, Jesus speaks of an undaunted intimacy with God. From the depths of his fully realized God-consciousness he calls us to uncover our own, knowing that only from a lived experience of the inner divine presence can we properly order the details of our outer lives. Instead of obsessively worrying about our possessions and circumstances here in the dusty world, Jesus enjoins us to be “born from above.”

“Seek first the kingdom of God,” he tells us in the gospel of Matthew, “and all else will be given to you.” In other words, only in the light of God-consciousness do we experience true abundance and gratitude. The good news is that we don’t have to go anywhere or ask someone else for the kingdom of heaven. It is within us. It is to be realized through the depths of our own loving, and even through the agony of our mistakes. Not one of our steps leads away from it. For both Jesus and Buddha, awakening consciousness is born from the seeds of acceptance and comes to fruition in the consciousness of gratitude.

The consciousness of gratitude is the central element of Islamic belief and practice as well. In fact, according to the Qu’ran, Muslims have only two obligations: gratitude and surrender. Islam teaches that we live in a world of endless abundance and any form of consciousness other than gratitude would be a cognitive error. The consciousness of gratitude is logical and rational as well as devotional. And the only way to experience this depth of wisdom is by surrendering – surrendering the ego with its incessant worry, craving and attachment to its own cleverness. As in the recovery movement, only through the admission of powerlessness do we shift from the impotence of the ego to the omnipotence of Spirit. It’s time to resign from the debating society and let the mystery be.

The world’s religions teach us that if we really knew who and what we were, if we fully realized our essential, authentic selves, we would fall on our knees in amazement. The realization of God-consciousness and the consciousness of gratitude are one in the same thing. In other words, as we practice gratitude, we move closer toward awakening to the divine within us and all things. Only when we cease living in the past or the future, only when we live in the fullness of this now moment, only when we live as the lilies in the field are we in the kingdom of God. The consciousness of anxiety and fear are the mind’s delusional attachment to future scenarios that have no reality. The consciousness of shame and regret are the mind’s attachment to an irretrievable past that no longer has any reality except in our thoughts. In the eternal Present, beyond the mind, shame and fear fade away leaving only the bright light of gratitude, of forgiveness, of wellness, of surrender to what is, of the realization that the kingdom of heaven is lying all around us only we do not see it, not when our eyes are turned to the worrisome future or the mournful past.

Gandhi was asked by a journalist to sum up his philosophy in three words. “Renounce and enjoy,” he said, paraphrasing the Isha Upanishad. To renounce is to surrender all attachments and give up the ego’s need to control everything, allowing the present moment to be as it is. Only then can we truly enjoy the infinite bounty of our lives and be at play in the field of forms without attachment to any of them. We are already one with everything. There’s no need to grasp or cling to any of it. And when we let go, our eyes and our hands and our hearts are filled with an abundance beyond the wildest imaginings of our limited and limiting ego.

In an old Zen story, a young man traveled to a far off monastery to learn about Buddhism. The monks took him in and showed him to his room. One week went by, then two, then three. In frustration the young man finally went to the head monk and said, “I came here to learn about Zen but no one has taught me anything.”

“Have you eaten?” the master asked.

“Yes.”

“Then wash your bowl.”

I’m standing in the kitchen again, up to my elbows in soapy water, scrubbing pots that won’t fit in the dishwasher. My stomach is full. Our dog Boone is asleep in the corner by the fire. My wife Lori is paying bills, making sure that what we have keeps flowing in the right directions. Outside a light rain is falling.

I know how to do it now. I know how to let go of the worry, the fear, the regret, the frustration. I simply breathe deeply into the core of my being the realization that I am not my thought-stream, and beneath the waves of worry and fear lay an infinite sea of Being, and I Am That, and I don’t have to be worried or afraid anymore. Everything is as it must be in this moment. Of course I can work for change and cultivate new areas of growth in my life and in the world around me. But tonight, right here at the kitchen sink, I can slip into the peaceful stillness of the consciousness of gratitude.

This article first appeared in the November/December 2009 issue of Unity Magazine