God is the Ground

In the 14^th century, Norwich was the second largest city in England, after London. The Bubonic Plague, a pestilence of Biblical proportions, had killed half its residents. Surviving the Plague, and shaped by unimaginable loss, a woman known to us only as Julian of Norwich lived a quiet life as an anchoress to a convent—a lay contemplative committed to solitude, liturgy, and prayer. This life apart from traditional societal demands afforded her the opportunity to write, a rare occupation for any woman at that time. Her writings, eventually released a few centuries later, made her the first published female writer in English history.

            Today the mystical writings of Julian of Norwich are known the world over, especially to anyone interested in the startling intersections between Christian mysticism and the nondual wisdom traditions of the East. And they constitute a grand departure from the more punitive and male-centric theology of her Christian contemporaries.

            In mainstream 14^th century Christianity, God was seen as a cosmic judge and punisher, dividing the damned from the saved. Sin was the great failing that separated us forever from God’s love. But in Julian hands, this paradigm is subverted. Our essential human nature, she argues, exists completely within God. Separation is impossible. Sure, sin is still a problem, and it causes most of our pain, but it’s a problem God has already solved. God’s delight is our liberation. And for Julian, God is simply another word for all that is. “Everything that is, has its being through the love of God,” she wrote. In her mystical visions or “showings,” she experienced Jesus saying, “All will be well and all will be well and every kind of thing shall be well.” No matter how bad things seem, we are already past the place where our problems have power. We just have to realize it.

            For Julian, God is more a presence than a person, a metaphysical reality in which we are already enfolded. When the apostle Paul said that God is where “we live and move and have our being,” (Acts 17:28), he was prefiguring a stance Julian would often express. “God is nearer to us than our soul,” she wrote, “for He is the ground in which it stands.” Like Christian mystics before and since, Julian sees God not as a transcendent being above and outside us, but as the very fabric of reality itself. God then is not to be sought, but simply allowed.

            The extent to which this perspective aligns with the Eastern wisdom traditions cannot be overstated. In the non-duality of the Vedanta school of Hinduism, and in Buddhism, the spiritual path is framed not as a process of becoming something we’re not, but a process of awakening to what we already are. And what we are is part and parcel of the oneness that encompasses all energy, matter, and consciousness. Realization is more a process of subtraction than addition, of removing hindrances rather than adding ornamentation. Our spiritual practices work best when they don’t clutter us up with more information, but dissolve our old ways of thinking.

            And it is from the intersections of Western and Eastern mysticism that New Thought was born in 19^th century America. Across the spectrum of expression in the Unity Movement, Religious Science, and the rest, we see again and again this ancient impulse, that we already are what we seek, and that our longing for God is God’s longing for Itself.

[This piece first appeared in my column "A to Zen" in the May/June 2024 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission. This is my final column for Unity Magazine.]

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.]

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.]

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.]