The Masks of Eternity

According to a Gallup poll, the number of Americans who believe in God has
dropped to an all-time low of 81%. But what slips through the net of general questions like that are all the nuances that make religion interesting. Like what do you mean by God?

When we try to answer that question we find ourselves stumbling through the ruins of an ancient city whose long dead architects are unavailable to explain their designs, facades, and monuments. We mouth theological hearsay, second-hand creeds, and threadbare apologetics until we don’t even hear the sound of our own voices anymore.

In his own journey from altar boy to preeminent scholar of religion and mythology, Joseph Campbell brought lived experience and intellectual honesty to the journey so many of us are on—who, what, and where is God?

Campbell argued that all of our God-concepts are masks that we hang on the indefinable mystery beyond conceptual thought. Some cultures personify the mystery as a conscious entity with specific qualities and characteristics, including gender. Other cultures conceive of the mystery as a pantheon of thousands of gods and goddesses. Still others prefer to leave the mystery as it is—ineffable, beyond all names and forms, and impersonal, like Brahman, Dao, or the Force.

What matters most is not which of those conceptual masks is correct but  realizing that we are the ones who make these masks of eternity. So powerful is our longing to reconnect with the divine source from which and we and all things come that our indefatigable creativity builds a bridge across a chasm our minds cannot cross--a bridge made of myths, images, and poetic narratives.

Three factors determine the shape of our masks of eternity: our environment, our sociology, and our needs. The gods of Pacific Islanders are sea turtles and dolphins. The gods of the Navajo and Hopi of the American Southwest are coyotes, ravens, and spiders. We model our masks after the familiar things in our immediate environment.

In addition, we shape our God concepts around models of power we find in our own societies. In patriarchal cultures gods tend to be male. In matriarchal societies the Great Goddess prevails. We project our limited and local sense of power onto the heavens.

And finally, our masks of eternity are born from our unmet needs. Constantly under siege from warring enemies? You need a warrior god. Wounded and suffering? You need a healing god. Struggling to find sustenance? You need a god of abundance and prosperity. The mystery behind the masks eludes our conceptual grasp, but we never tire of creating out of the womb of our environment, sociology, and needs an infinite variety of God-concepts to protect, serve, and preserve us.

In the end, the masks become the final obstacle to be overcome. If you really want to know God, you have to forget everything you know about God. As Meister Eckhart put it, "God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction." Maybe it's best not to think about God as a separate entity at all, but the space within which we move. The apostle Paul said it best: "All can seek the Deity, feeling their way toward God and succeeding in finding God. For God is not far from any of us, since it is in God that we live and move and have our being." (Act 17:27-28)

 

[This piece was first published in my "A to Zen" column in the November/December edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

 

The Learning God

In the Mayan creation myth the Popul Vuh God very much wanted to create human beings.
He was lonely. The animals – jaguars, pumas, and brightly feathered birds – were delightful to behold, but they could not say any of God’s names, or love him the way he needed to be loved.

So he tried his hand at making human beings. He made some men out of mud. They could talk, but none of the things they said made any sense. They were soft, could not stand, and melted in the rain.  He tried again, this time out of wood. They were much better than the mud men. They built nice houses, had many children, and didn’t dissolve in wet weather. But something was wrong. They were dull and expressionless because they had no minds, souls, or hearts. They beat their dogs and burned the bottoms of their cooking pots. Worst of all, they could not remember any of God’s names. God sent a great flood to destroy them.

Then God tried a third time to make humanity. He shaped corn meal into four men, and infused them with strengths and energies made from nine kinds of corn liquor. The men were very strong and handsome. While they slept, God made four women. When the men awoke and saw their beautiful wives lying beside them they were very happy.

“How does it feel to be alive?” God asked. “What do you see?”

“We see and know everything!” And they sang songs of praise and gratitude to their Creator for having made them.

But God was troubled. They saw and knew too much. God needed humans, not gods. So he blew mist into their eyes. Now they only saw what was right in front of them.

As mythology scholar Joseph Campbell reminds us, the primary function of creation stories is not to answer questions like, “Who made the world and how?” but “Who are we, and what is the nature of the cosmos?” It’s self-knowledge we’re after. If we knew where we came from, we might understand our essence and purpose, and how we fit into this mysterious universe.

The Popul Vuh teaches us that we were made to live in loving relationship with the sacred source – that both we and God are defined by love.

But we also learn that God isn’t perfect, that he’s learning on the job, and that frankly, the universe is an ongoing experiment littered with wreckage. This stands in stark contrast to traditional Western theology where is God understood as changeless, perfect, and all-knowing. But is he? In the book of Genesis God made Adam and Eve only to, five chapters later, kill everyone on earth for their irreparable wickedness. Does that sound like the work of a perfect, all-knowing creator to you? And if God is growing, learning, and evolving into higher consciousness, maybe we should too.

And that it’s o.k. to make mistakes.

The study of world mythology makes clear that creation myths tell us much more about the people who wrote them than they do about the origin and nature of the cosmos. When we read the Popul Vuh, or Genesis for that matter, we hold a mirror up to our own longing for love, meaning, and the hope that someday we might understand this long, rough road of being human. Until then, with full voice, we will sing songs of gratitude that we were ever born at all. 

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the January/February 2021 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.