The Emptiness of God

Like every religion Hinduism evolved over many centuries, each successive wave
of conquest and migration adding new and often conflicting elements. Like a snowball rolling down hill, over time religions hide their internal contradictions beneath layers of apparent coherence. But closer inspection melts the façade revealing the depths.

            Beneath the brash polytheism of Hinduism lies a quiet philosophy of non-duality—the metaphysical claim that all is one. So which is it? Is divinity to be found in hundreds of diverse gods and goddesses, or is divinity a singularity, the very ground of being, a boundless, formless field in which all energy, consciousness, and matter takes form? The answer, I’m afraid, is yes.

            Nowhere is this contradiction more powerfully exposed than in the Kena Upanishad, composed around 3,000 years ago. In this playful parable the gods Agni, Vayu, and Indra have just defeated some demons and restored order. As they proudly pat each other on the back a mysterious being appears. It is Brahman, the formless One from whom all the gods draw their power. But they don’t recognize their visitor.

            Agni approached the being saying, “I am Agni, god of fire. I can burn anything.”

            “Burn this,” said the being, tossing down a piece of straw. Agni tried to burn it but it would not burn. He slunk back to Vayu and Indra defeated.

            Vayu approached the mysterious being.

            “Who are you?” the being asked.

            “I am Vayu, god of air. I can blow anything around.”

            “Let’s see if you can move this,” the being said, pointing to the piece of straw.

            Vayu tried and tried but could not move the straw an inch. He too slunk back to his friends defeated.

            Agni and Vayu turned to Indra, their leader, and said, “You have got to find out who this mysterious being is!”

            As Indra approached the being it vanished and in its place stood Uma, the Goddess of Wisdom.

            “Who was that being?” Indra asked.

            “That was Brahman,” she said, “from whom comes all your power and glory.”

            It was up to the Great Goddess to bring these proud boys back down to the ground by reminding them that they are not the source of ultimate power—they are merely its instruments. The deeper wisdom is clear. All of our powers and abilities come from a deeper source. Our consciousness is an aspect of the one consciousness. Our creativity is an aspect of the one creativity. Our loving is an expression of the one love coursing through all energy, matter, and manifestation. Each of us is the embodied presence of the formless sacred source of the universe. But it’s ok if we forget sometimes—even the gods forget.

            Now comes the final realization—that our idea of God is just that, an idea. What the idea re-presents is beyond concepts, forms, and words. All god-portraits are foregrounds of a depth that goes down and down and down. The idea of God is an empty chair—there’s no one or nothing sitting there. Our concepts are helpful until we forget that they are empty, and that the reality to which they refer forever eludes our conceptual grasp. But we experience this ultimate reality here and now in the gaps between our thoughts, in our loving kindness, and in the beauty of the field out of which our lives arise like poppies in the summer sun.

[This piece was originally published in my A to Zen column in the May/June 2023 edition of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

Love is the Mystery

There is a higher reality that words, concepts, and sermons can’t reach. We try to
point to this reality with carefully wrought language, theology, and doctrine, but the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The map is not the place. The menu is not the food.

For those of us who teach, preach, and write this news is somewhat deflating. We thought we were getting close to naming the mystery. But in the end, all we can do is cultivate in others a willingness to deepen into the mystery that wells up through the cracks of their own lives. This is why Buddha simply held up a flower and didn’t say a word. This is why Lao Tzu wrote that “Those who say don’t know, and those who know don’t say.” Even Jesus seemed exasperated as he chastised his disciples in chapter thirteen of the Gospel of Thomas. “I am not your teacher,” he said. “Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring I have tended.”

If the teacher is not the message, and if the message cannot be received second-hand, then why do we gather in spiritual community to hear sermons about how to better ourselves and draw closer to the sacred source? As a guy who often gives those sermons, this strikes me as a particularly urgent question. What, in the end, are spiritual teachings for? Why do we need any of this?

You might as well ask a tree why it leans toward the sun. We love language, talking, and teaching because concepts are what we know. They’re how we know. In a way, they feed us.

First we perceive the world, then shape those perceptions into thoughts. As Adam named the animals, we name the concepts taking up residency in our consciousness, even going so far as to order them into hierarchies, because with naming comes judgment, prejudice, and bias. There is no such thing as value-neutral thought. We fall asleep and forget that we do not know the world as it is—we know only our thoughts about the world. This dynamic leaves us vulnerable to self-aggrandizing narratives that lionize us while diminishing the other. Prejudice seems baked into cognition itself.

Our innate need to discriminate and ascribe hierarchies must be deliberately disrupted and discarded. The good news is that the deeper part of us already knows this. Beneath the conceptual realm there is a concept-free field of awareness unbound by the limitations of thought. The world’s wisdom traditions call it by many names—Atman, Buddha-mind, spirit, inner Christ—and it is our essential nature. We have our being there. The conceptual mind is ill-equipped to experience this deeper reality. Realizing one’s sacred nature is more a process of  unlearning, of getting out of our own way. No matter how Herculean the effort, how can you become what you already are?

One of the most notable hallmarks of awakening is humility. Less and less do you need to prove that you are right. You recognize that every religion is true—that they all work, like maps, to show the way home. You stop straining and start softening. Freedom replaces fear and anxiety. You no longer argue about the meanings of words. All of the names of God are fine. Or none at all. In the end, only one word—love—serves us best as the name of the nameless mystery that we are. 

[This piece was first published in my A to Zen column in the March/April 2023 issue of Unity Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission.]

The Wordless Sermon

Zen Buddhism traces its origin to a single afternoon in the life of the Buddha.
One day Buddha gathered his followers for a dharma talk as he had done many times before. But on this day he simply held up a flower and didn’t say a word. How would you feel if your minister tried that this Sunday in church? Awkward rustling sweeping through the congregation. Sideways glances turning to outright confusion. But on that long-ago afternoon, one man, Kashyapa, met eyes with Buddha and smiled.

When the Indian Buddhist teacher Bodhidharma brought Zen Buddhism to China in the fifth century CE he penned the famous mission statement of this nascent movement: “A special tradition outside the scriptures, not dependent on words or letters, directly pointing to the mind, and seeing into one’s true nature and attaining Buddhahood.”

As a movement, Zen Buddhism replaced all of the normal trappings of religion—scriptures and beliefs, devotion to deities, dependence on authorities—with the direct experience of life as it is, pulled into sharper focus through the practice of meditation. In fact, the Japanese word Zen is a rendering of the Chinese word Chan, which is a rendering of the Sanskrit word dhyana meaning “meditation.” At the heart of the entire Zen project is the claim that we already are what we seek. We just have to empty out enough to realize it.

Another hallmark of Zen is its refreshing dearth of boundaries. “Your entire life is Zen,” said Bodhidharma. Our natural proclivity for compartmentalization is gently (and sometimes not so gently) shaken loose in the practice of Zen.

After a recent talk on Zen Buddhism, a woman raised her hand and said, “I came here looking for something tangible, but this was all very abstract.” She was right. I felt her disappointment. She was looking for guidance. An old Zen story popped into my mind. Maybe this will help I thought.

A young man went to stay in a Zen monastery. They graciously took him in and he was invited to participate in all the activities of the community, primarily meditation and chores—lots and lots of chores. One week passed, then another, then another. But nobody was talking to him about Zen. His frustration grew. Finally, he worked up the courage to go see the master. 

“I came here to learn about Zen,” he exclaimed. “I have been here a whole month now and no one has said one word to me about Zen!”

“Have you eaten?” asked the master.

“Yes.”

“The go wash your bowl.”

Stories like this drive us into the immediacy of this moment, reminding us that true religion is not in books, beliefs, ministers, or rituals. All of those things are the plates we eat off of—they are not the food. Lived experience is the food. Every lunch is as sacred as a Eucharist. Washing your bowl sanctifies this moment as powerfully as any prayer. The mind asks for answers and explanations. But when the Buddha held up that flower, he was gently rebuking our tendency to build conceptual barriers between us and the here and now. 

Kashyapa understood what the congregation did not—that something sacred passes between us in every moment as if there are no barriers at all. Because there aren’t. Kashyapa passed the test, becoming the second patriarch after the Buddha. He understood the wordless sermon.

[This piece was originally published in my A to Zen column in the January/February 2023 issue 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.