Suntne Angeli?

Our good luck is to be working in a world where there is no ultimate justice and God knows there is no justice in the world. —Orson Wells

I leave my examination of the intellectual proofs or arguments for the existence of God, not convinced that there is a God. If the Scholastic proofs alone are the only validation of my knowledge, I am tending toward an atheist position. However, because I say these arguments don’t hold water, it is not to say that God does not exist. In other words, logic is not personal—my remaining unconvinced cannot be used to support a non-theistic position.

Many religious people, not just believers in the Abrahamic tradition, look to the acknowledgment of Evil as moving them closer to believing in God. I will call this exploration “stories we tell ourselves about the origin of Evil.” Believers claim that this adds the power of deep emotion, even intuition, to our stories. Their persuasiveness and coherence also depend on the cultural setting that gives rise to them, but for the moment, we can set this aside and simply say that we have experienced evil in the world. If we are theists who believe in a benevolent God, this presents a problem, but might it also be an opportunity to prove the existence of God?

This relationship between evil and the existence of God is paradoxical. After the barbaric horrors of the Second World War, many people of my generation point to the evil of the holocaust and say that this disproves the existence of a benevolent deity. The pro-deity camp points to the Garden of Eden and traces the evil and humankind’s agency as well as to a huge falling out between YHWH and some of his angelic hosts. The existence of Evil should convince us that God exists, 

This is the story that I am going to examine. The story of the fall of Lucifer went through several rewrites before the nuns at Saint Charles taught me that the evil in the world is the fault of Satan and his rebellion against the all-powerful Jehovah. In the myth, I learned that before he fell, Satan was called Lucifer, or light bearer, a name that indicates great beauty. (Baltimore Catechism #3, Lesson 4 - On Creation).2

Neither Satan nor Lucifer appears much in the Hebrew Bible, with the significant exception of the Book of Job. It was not until the early Christians began to search for some depravity of humankind’s fall horrific enough to require the sacrifice of God’s son that the character of Satan/Lucifer was fleshed out. Although mentioned in many places in the synoptic gospels and Revelations, Augustine of Hippo (Civitas Dei) put Satan at the scene of the crime in the Garden of Eden. In the story we read in the Hebrew Bible, it was just a talking snake who beguiled Eve. 

The shadow lingering from the God-in-the-sky myth is that God creates an existential problem by allowing evil—à la Job—why do the bad prosper while good people suffer? For the pious, this is a test. There is an unwritten rule or assumption: God only wants to make us better, which requires a leap of faith into the unknown. But this also, on some very real level, entails a denial of the reality of suffering. To say that suffering as a test dulls the sting. Get stoic and get through it—a survival mechanism. But is this even close to reality as it presents itself?

Reworking this story or myth even takes us out of the Biblical era and into the third century. It also has traces of the Manichean gnostic cult that Augustine belonged to for almost a decade. It was not a minor flirtation with some New Age religion; however, it is key to the Christian understanding of evil in the world. It introduces the notion of “free will” and thus responsibility and accountability. Probably, I need to look no further for why Avery was insistent that the part of belief in God is the acknowledgment that God exists. 

Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan, talks about the role Satan plays in the zeitgeist of the early believers. There were people of God, the followers of Jesus, on the one hand, and those who were opposed on the other. This was problematic for Jews who were not followers of Jesus. Pagles says this myth contains the roots of the long, horrendous history of antisemitism. She says that in Mark’s gospel, Satan is identified with “the Jews.” It is no longer a myth. Real people were responsible for the execution of Jesus. The Church of James had names and addresses. It was about real issues right down here on earth. 

This also muddies the waters if I use the myth to trace some deep intuitive human intuition, some deeply felt belief in the unseen world. However, the creation of evil personified also has consequences and falls short as evidence of God’s existence. You can’t negotiate with evil. You have to kill.

My conclusion: Listen to your better angels, but that alone is not going to clear a certain path to the deity,

2 The LDS extends this odd belief to Lucifer, extending his rebellion to the Son of God himself ( Doctrine and Covenants 76:25–29).

Judge Judy and The Sanctification of Common Sense

You might have guessed that our heavenly version of the creation of evil has a more ordinary version, which I call “The Sanctification of Common Sense.” This also has its limits.

 

Do you remember that lovely Chanel cocktail dress that your friend Angelina borrowed without asking you and then ruined when she got wasted at a party that went from sedate to wild in a New York second? Then she compounded the injury by giving it to a dry cleaner who promised the world and returned an unwearable rag. That one? The one Angelina could not afford to replace? The one that carried so many precious memories of love and romance that you were going to treasure for as long as you lived? Yes, that one.

According to the Psalmist (8.5), Angelina is fashioned after the image of God, “a little less than the angels,” yet she managed to destroy Coco Chanel’s little black dress and probably a lot more. There is no justice in this world: one careless act destroyed both memories and friendship. You wanted to talk about it, but somehow, the messiness of the situation carried memory and friendship far beyond a simple conversation. 

You’ve watched Judge Judy on TV and imagined you, Angelina, and the dry cleaner standing before Her Honor, and you asked for redress. Indeed, the norms of friendship had been strained if not destroyed. Even though she's not Solomon, Judge Judy is Jewish and has a no-nonsense tone. She might set your world aright by crafting an equitable judgment. You felt personally violated by your friend Angelina. She knew how much it meant to you. You had a lot of investment in that little black dress. I will examine the story for evidence of an innate sense that Justice exists in the universe. It is perfect in so many ways.

The argument for the existence of the All-Knowing being able to right deeply-felt offenses.is designed precisely to satisfy this kind of personal vengeance. We know from experience that the verbal tongue-lashing delivered by Judge Judy, even if she assigns the maximum $5,000 fine and you can collect it, is not sufficient to satisfy the kind of deep grief and indignation that you feel, but it is something. You know that, given similar circumstances, almost everyone except the super-rich or deranged would feel the same and deserve equal justice.

What is also true is that you know that the feelings of vindication you might experience while watching TV are just that, an unraveling of feelings, and that’s just an illusion. There’s no guarantee that justice for all crimes will be satisfied, even at the tribunal of the All-Knowing at the Last Judgment. What is also true is that just by turning on the TV and watching Judge Judy, you are helping increase the sales of whoever has paid for the commercials and, let’s follow the money, help improve the wealth of conspicuous luxury brands so that the likelihood of universal justice is diminished.  

And here is what I think: There are bad people. Humans have devised the only justice in the human realm to order ourselves and create space for peaceful cooperation. It is not Divine. That we entertain divine justice is a result of assigning the governance of human affairs outside the world humans inhabit, or it could be whittling down our preconceived notions and beliefs to something very rudimentary and authentic, a fundamental and foundational understanding of the Golden Rule.

“Be Here Now” all over again.

Here is a story from my first year in India, along with a few facts about life in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains.

On our first trip to India, my former partner and I planned a weekend trip to meet his sister and her husband in Shimla. She wanted to visit because it was used as a setting in so many Bollywood movies. She was a devotee.

Early one morning, we began our journey on a treacherous mountain road, racing 225 km across northern India in a rinky-dink cab with a madcap driver — even by Indian standards. He careened and jammed, reducing the almost seven-hour trip from McLeod Ganj to under five. It was only my second long trip by car in India. This is not a myth: the roads and the driving are unlike anything in the West. Over 350 people a day die on Indian roads, which in a population of more than a billion plus seems minuscule until you figure into the calculation that fewer than 10% of the population use cars. It takes some getting used to.

The power brokers of the British Raj selected this idyllic spot for its summer headquarters when the heat of the plains became too much for their thin blood. A mile and a half above sea level, Shimla is now the capital of Himachal Pradesh. It’s a more picture-perfect hill station than our humble McLeod Ganj. There’s a pedestrian mall that you get up to via a crowded elevator, a substantial Anglican Church, a handsome stock of colonial buildings still in use as offices for the renowned Indian bureaucracy, lots of restaurants, and coffee shops. A few of the fine bungalows that the highly placed British civil officers demanded for their families and staff have been carefully preserved. 

One of the oldest small-gauge railroads in India shuttled the overlords, their families, and their extensive retinue up the steep mountain. Though still connected to the Indian Railway, it’s kept in service as a tourist attraction. You pay your fare, ride a couple of stops, get off, cross the track, and wait for an uphill train. We’re not talking about Six Flags. We’re stepping back at least 150 years into the remnants of the British Raj.

For Hindus, Shimla is also revered as one of the traditional holy sites of Lord Hanuman. Though this goes back to ancient times, a very recent addition to the landscape has been a colossal statue of the monkey god, 108 feet high up on Jakhu Hill (an anomaly in a land of the metric system, but probably something to do with the cost of concrete and getting to a mystic number. It’s very tall). 

Early in the afternoon, our little group took the toy train downhill. On the way back up, we were told about a small temple that might be worth a visit. We either walked or grabbed a quick cab from the train station to a very typical Indian temple. Inside the gate, one of the babas was chanting, breaking coconuts, and pouring their milk over the bonnet of a devotee’s car; I noticed that it was not brand new; perhaps the new owner was trying to wipe the karmic slate clean in anticipation of treacherous mountain roads. The only way I can describe it is “very Indian.” Even though I’d met several Indian teachers in California, including Swami Muktananda, who came with all the cultural guru trappings, I felt slightly uncomfortable. It was certainly not something that Father Halloran would be doing in the parking lot of Saint Catherine’s — breaking coconuts and pouring the milk over the hood of Mother's Ford station wagon, but I can hardly get that image out of my head now that it's planted.

We managed to squeeze past this elaborate ritual and came into a large hall where there was some intense chanting, surprisingly so. In most Indian temples, people line up, offer a few rupee notes, get a blessing, and leave. As a Hanuman shrine, it was overrun with hundreds of monkeys scarfing up tons of bananas set out as offerings. Monkeys are particularly nasty creatures, and living in a temple courtyard does not make them civilized, but on a Saturday outing at a temple, people were posing for selfies with the monkeys using their smartphones. The depth of the devotions was refreshing, but the whole scene still felt very foreign. There was a lot of family talk in Hindi, and after a few pictures for the folks back home, I wandered off.

The temple was built into the side of a hill. I descended to the level below the main hall, where there was another highly decorated temple in a small courtyard. I was the only person there. I wandered in and was greeted by a life-sized statue of a baba, sādhu, or monk, lots of fresh flowers, and food offerings. I’d stumbled into the samadhi shrine of the temple’s founder. I bowed, turned, and was about to leave when it hit me, really hit me! It was not that particular emotional feeling that Indians describe as bhakti. It was a deeper recognition: “I know that man.” The lifelike, life-sized, very colorful, idealized figure was definitely a person that I’d seen somewhere. I pulled out my phone and, within a few minutes, had solved the mystery. It was Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass’s guru. Neem Karoli was not from the plains of India. He’d spent his life wandering these hills of northern India. His main temple and ashram were further north in Uttarakhand, but perhaps we’d found a subtemple, or the temple of one of his disciples. The deity fit; his protector, not quite sure how to describe the relationship, was Lord Hanuman.

The pieces tumbled together. You’ve probably heard about Ram Das. Who hasn’t? He wrote the wildly popular New Age book called “Be Here Now” in the 70’s. It became one of the Bibles of the hippies. I met him on four or five occasions. He was always incredibly gracious and lively. Even in a large group, he seemed to be able to focus on you in a way that felt very personal. During my tenure as Director of Maitri, I asked him to come to Hartford Street to do a fundraiser. I remember that it was after Issan had died and Steve had resigned because Phil did the introduction. 

Even though the enormous death toll of HIV/AIDS had begun to decline by the mid-90s, there were still thousands of infected men facing an early death. An overflowing crowd sat zazen in our small zendo. Ram Das sat in the teacher’s seat and, as I remember clearly, his head seemed to be on a swivel, bouncing around, while all the zennies were stiff as boards, staring straight ahead.

He began his talk with a kind chuckle and said, “I am going to talk about the Self and dying. Oh, sorry, no-self, I have to remember that I am in a Buddhist crowd even if the notion entirely escapes me.” Then he began to talk about one of his visions after he first returned from India: to create a center for conscious dying. The idea was to establish a kind of ashram for people who were dying and interested in various conscious exercises, including meditation, during their dying process. He even said that he had a location picked out. Then he said that he, or the group that was working with him abandoned the idea because no one was interested. I wondered why he would throw this out into a group of gay men, the majority of whom were facing death. Was it a kind of challenge? How would they choose to spend their few precious last months, weeks, days?

Then he turned towards me and asked me about the hospice. I said that Issan had been committed to making life as normal as possible for the residents, but we had no requirement that residents had to be particularly conscious, spiritually or otherwise, during their last bit of this-life-alive time; that we were committed to allowing the individual's path to unfold. There were, however, a few residents who meditated as much as possible. He nodded and smiled. 

We collected a few hundred dollars that evening to help pay the bills, but we received a different kind of gift, not pouring coconut milk over a second hard car, but an invitation to examine what was really important about life, especially when the end is definitely in sight.

Politically correct Zen is not possible

In the early summer of 2018, there was an incident in the Zendo at Green Gulch Farm. Roshi Ed Brown, during a daylong meditation retreat, said something to offend a person who describes herself as a queer woman and a survivor of sexual violence. The incident appears to have been thoughtless, perhaps with a rough edge, but we mostly know about it through the backlash, which, frankly, seemed disproportionate. There are, or were, tapes of Ed’s talk, but I lack the patience to sift through them to hear precisely what was said. It is essential to remain impartial when assigning blame. Perhaps someone should take the blame (and apparently, Ed did try at some point), but that doesn’t interest me. 

As a person who was sexually assaulted, I was encouraged that another person had found meditation as a source of healing, but I am not surprised that Ed could not heal the wound. Zen has no silver bullet, and Ed is not a therapist. I am also saddened that the woman felt unsafe. I am sympathetic to both parties. What disappoints me is the decision of Zen worthies to ban Ed from teaching at any of the Zen Center’s Temples. He is among the oldest of Suzuki Roshi’s disciples, and his practice has demonstrated selfless dedication to the Way. 

All Zen Centers, like most religions, need to create a congregation, the crowd that will return. It is crucial. Zen is stealthy, and it may take some time to reveal itself, but most administrators of Zen Centers also have to keep an eye on the collection plate. I have been in that unenviable position. Hartford Street was set up as a neighborhood temple that shared the attitudes of its mostly gay neighbors. 

The richest, privileged liberal white clientele in California does not want to be subjected to bathroom gender brawls. The Zennist authorities felt that they had to take a stand. And thus the unenviable task of defining what is politically correct in Zen. I want to be clear. Zendos should be welcoming and safe for human beings facing any of life’s challenges. That has not always been the case, but the way that all the assembled roshis tried to smooth things over in Ed’s case destroyed the immediacy and the power of the moment. Not only did they throw the baby out with the bathwater, they murdered the helpless soul.

I can say with certainty that one of the keys to Zen practice is the student-teacher relationship. It is not an unequal relationship. In fact, the closer it is to equal, the closer to real friendship, and we touch the magic of Zen. It is a listening and response. It is not psychotherapy with the aim of getting better, better adjusted, or happier. Those things may happen, but it ain’t necessarily Zen. It has another overtone, a sacred one. It evades definition. It is not necessarily religious, even though it touches on the numinous. It also includes all of life. And that is where the danger lies.

If I were Ed, perhaps a solution might be to pass out a disclaimer to cover my ass when people entered the hall. (Of course, I have never been invited to speak at ZC, and at least one of the reasons might become clear if you make it to the end.)

“Friends, we have gathered to practice one of the most essential, perhaps the most crucial, even sacred pieces of our work together. We listen and respond, all the while realizing that the perfect dharma is imperfect in our hands. We chant occasionally and make seemingly impossible promises to dedicate our efforts to the liberation of all beings, but then comes a presentation of the dharma. Suppose the leader does his or her job; hopefully, you will be intrigued, inspired, puzzled, or even offended. If you come with a mindset that can only hear what you’d like to hear, it seems that a political rally is where you should be. I am no mind reader. I am not quite sure where my own mind will lead me, but occasionally, with any luck, it will be down a dark alley that needs light. If you’re at least willing to stay with me, sit still, and follow your own mind, you are welcome. If not, it might be appropriate to leave.

“If you are willing, your mind and mine can start to dance, like an introspective call-and-response in the Black Church, allowing us to see ourselves. I say something; you respond. There’s a mysterious formula here like treading the well-known words of "The Old Rugged Cross."

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,

the emblem of suffering and shame;

and I love that old cross where the dearest and best

for a world of lost sinners was slain.

Following the script of most Zen Center talks I’ve heard, I might open by telling a personal story and painting a picture of the inadvertent hero of my story, stumbling along through life. Despite my sincere intention, I got distracted; I stumbled, cracked my head, stepped in shit, mindlessly crushed a frog or even a snake, heard a madperson screaming incoherent truth in the center divide on Market Street, thoughtlessly dropped the fiver that was intended for Mother Theresa in the gutter, but I use the occasion to turn my attention inward, examine myself, realize that in this fleeting instant the dharmakaya opened with unmistakable brilliance. I resolve to dive in more deeply, to apply Buddhist principles more generously, plus any number of other worthwhile ways in which I might lessen my suffering and the suffering of others in the world. I am not disparaging any of these aims or outcomes. In a word, they are lovely; it’s very genial. We smile over cookies and tea.

But now we come to the part in my talk where you ask, Why is he saying that? How dare he go there? That tone. That language. We can talk about sex and drugs and rock and roll as long as we use the prescribed politically correct language and (at least pretend) that it’s all in the past. We left those experiences as we emerged from the Summer of Love with a drug hangover that lasted a few weeks, or years if we are honest. Thank god it cleared up. 

Most talks are, at least to some degree, commentary on Buddhist Scripture, sutra, or Koan. And if it gets real, it gets real, but the chances are 50/50 that it might go astray. I recall hearing a public talk by the Dalai Lama when he attempted to bring an esoteric distinction from a Gelugpa text into a bedroom fight between a husband and wife. He was not successful, but not because of the bedroom part. He turned it into an Ozzie and Harriet squabble and avoided a serious discussion about sexuality and the inequality of power and consent. He opened the door, but then didn't walk through. He played it for the laugh. Ed Brown’s accuser would have little to complain about. 

I promise that if I am lucky enough to open a door, I will try to walk in. I certainly will not shy away due to some prudery or elevated sense of myself. That is the attitude I try to bring to the conversations I have with my teacher. 

Now, just to be clear, my mother taught me well, and I reserve profanity for private moments. I will also try to frame what I say in a way that you are at least open to listening. I certainly will not encourage you to break the precepts even if I am commenting on the “Kill the Buddha” koan, but neither will I try to explain it away or give an answer I don’t have—certainly not one that you want to believe but is just a pack of lies.

The choir invokes the image of the old rugged cross. It is imaginary. It makes no sense. In our case, the only part that does make sense is that it is an emblem of suffering. Somehow, the hymnist manages to drag love into the picture of sin and shame. I’m sorry, that is the best I can do with it without wandering into a make-believe world of elevated, sacred lies. Sometimes the dharma is like that, rudely breaking into our world with no formal introduction, not making any sense.

It seems hit or miss. Sometimes a teaching will get you to first base, and sometimes the fly ball will be caught and you’re out. But we still honor the dharma. We cannot retreat. It is in the very nature of the dharma. If you can't hear that and are going to feel affronted, please leave. Zen is not politically correct.

A Zen reflection on Yom Kippur

 

For years, I had been hanging onto my resentment towards a person who really did abuse me mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and sexually. Something had to be done.

Then a Zen friend asked a good question: “Is forgiveness an act of will?”

Psychologists define forgiveness as a conscious decision to release feelings of resentment or vengeance toward a person or group who has harmed you, regardless of whether they actually deserve your forgiveness. It's a choice that allows a person to forgive another for an offense or act that was illegal or immoral. It is intentional. When a debt is forgiven, there is a release of any expectation or commitment to repay or compensate. When someone forgives someone, they let go of negative emotions. 

In terms of the law and psychotherapeutic practice, as well as perhaps even the Talmud, these definitions are helpful; however, as a Zen practitioner, I wondered if they went far enough. I’m going to posit forgiveness as a way to move beyond the past, in the sense that the trauma becomes a complete chapter of personal history without any lingering effects in one’s present, everyday life. I’ve set the bar quite high. But it is Yom Kippur today. Forgiveness is an act of God. It is a way to follow God. We all make mistakes. We all need forgiveness.

Some people define forgiveness as a command to forget the past and simply move on. I actually find that injunction extremely annoying. I’ve been told that I didn't have to condone the act, but I had to forgive to live fully and dispel the darkness, or something like that. My instinct tells me that if the past is not fully complete, part of being compassionate is to acknowledge what happened fully, rather than simply setting it aside. 

I also hate being told what’s in my best interest. Thanks for advice I didn’t request. But now that I’ve owned up to my off-the-shelf response, perhaps I can examine why I resist this blanket injunction to forgive. I want to decide when, what, and if to forgive. If the offense or event is not in the past because it’s not in the past, that’s a limit to simply declaring something ancient history. And suppose I’m being enjoined to dispel the darkness of past events that are blatantly evil and destructive. In that case, just dismissing them and their consequences under some command to “move on” is not particularly useful or helpful simply because it’s not honest. These are the sort of events that will inevitably repeat themselves.

My friend Susan Murphy, an insightful Australian Zen teacher, pointed to the story of Jesus at Capernaum when he healed a man whose friends lowered him through the roof of a house where Jesus was with some friends—the crowd so dense that this was the only way to get Jesus’s attention. Some version of the story appears in all three synoptic gospels.

The writers of the story clearly distinguish between two aspects of Jesus' healing. First off, Jesus says, “Your sins are forgiven.” That’s the most important one: the man’s faith and that of his friends have caught the attention of Jesus, and he does what he was sent to do, forgive sins. But it is, after all a teaching story, so there are objections: scribes and Pharisees, at least rhetorically present, ask, ‘How can you forgive? That power belongs only to God.’ And here are the words Jesus responded with in Mark’s gospel: "Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier: to say to the paralytic, 'Your sins are forgiven,' or to say, 'Get up, take your mat and walk'? “ The man stands and picks up his mat, demonstrating Jesus’s power, but it also says, compared to forgiving sins, that was the easy part. In the blink of an eye, the past becomes the past.

Why the deliberate separation of two events or two sides of the same event? Forgiveness is an act of grace and God. In the story, the disappearance of the physical impairment becomes the past. Jesus is neither a charlatan nor a soothsayer nor a fake miracle worker; the act of forgiveness belongs to God alone. However, in most cases, depending on factors we cannot fully understand, there may or may not be a sought-after, usually magical physical cure. However, this nuance is usually left for a commentator or preacher to address at a later date.

This is Susan’s observation: “When Jesus told the paralysed man who had been lowered through the roof for a miracle, ‘Pick up your bed and walk,’ effectively he was acting not in the name of supernatural power but in the name of the forgiveness he was asserting he had a right to bestow. ‘Justice is mine,’ says the Lord. What I see here is that the true miracle was not the performance of a nature-bending act. It was forgiveness. He veered away from performing miracles after that. They were cheapening his teaching. . . . Forgiveness is surely the actualising of love.”

I just let a Zen teacher provide the midrash for a Jesus story, so now I’ll spin a Zen tale from the threads of the Gospel..

A small band of Zen monks carries a paralyzed brother to meet Jesus in Capernaum and get his blessing. Like the throngs of people I see in India lining up for darshan, they’re seeking some relief for their sufferings, but following their training, our Zen monks don’t have too many expectations. There, I’ve set the stage for a Buddhist encounter with Jesus. 

Their Zen training actually adds a lot of work. They have to carry their brother a long way from a distant Eastern ashram. Then they find the materials and tools to fashion a ladder to get up to the roof. They certainly can’t steal one. After determining where Jesus was sitting, they carefully cut an opening in the ceiling, not hurting anyone in the room with falling debris. Each one of these actions is deliberate, requiring planning and effort. The work is performed as carefully and mindfully as possible. They’re monks after all. I didn’t mention that they might also have to learn Aramaic, but there’s already enough to do without that, so let’s throw in the magical appearance of a good interpreter.

Somehow they climb down into the presence of Jesus with the brother they’ve just lowered in a sling, and hear, “Your sins are forgiven.” 

They also hear the Pharisees' question: “Doesn’t forgiveness of sins belong to God?” "Good question," they say, and the dharma combat begins. The Pharisees are the fall guys in the Gospel stories, but not for our Zen monks: What is forgiveness of sins exactly? What is there to forgive? Are a misstep or an evil act the same? These monks live by the Law of dependent origination, Paticca-samuppada. Something in their brother’s past resulted in his paralysis. At least in that regard, on the surface, although Jesus does not talk about any cause for the man’s affliction, there seems to be a tacit acknowledgement that it was the result of something in his past, his sins. In Zen they were taught to chant: “All my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind. I now fully avow.” 

I promised therapy. Here is an examination of the mental results of past events.

I recognized my personal connection to this Jesus story, and I thank Susan for providing the context for me to work into. I am the paralytic lowered through the roof. Among my sins were sexual dysfunction and frustration; there was alcohol and substance abuse; there were the silly issues with partners that popped up—when I managed to find someone willing to put up with my defensiveness. I would have certainly preferred to exit the dead-end process earlier. I can imagine the possibility of having time and energy to explore other avenues, but daydreams are most often nothing more than dreams.

And yes, I regret those lost opportunities. It is not difficult to be truly forgiving and compassionate when you really comprehend the pain of your own life. But expanding the story just a bit, it also applies to another person’s life. It seems to actually spring up naturally without effort or responding to a command to move on. And, in my case, it happened in its own course after I was willing to do the work of unraveling the complex story of my abuse.

Why do intelligent people believe nonsense? Because when we’re vulnerable and in pain, we need to experience compassion. The real answer to the question about "moving on" is that the compassion and forgiveness had to be for myself. And because I’ve opted for the Zen route, it was not like just falling through a hole in the roof or being lowered into a Blessed Presence. I traveled from afar with the help of companions, and I remained angry long enough to get to the heart of the matter. That was my good luck, at least for me, that route could not be short-circuited.

The hip New Age coffee house sage will tell you that not forgiving only hurts you. There’s no one to break but yourself, so why not “Move On”? By contrast, in legendary Zen, a deceptively ordinary lady at the tea stand doesn’t order you around. Instead, she asks a simple, innocent-sounding, straightforward question: “Hey, Mr. Paralytic, is that ‘not-walking-mind’ past, present, or future?” A good answer might allow you to step into the radical present. The past is past because it’s past; the future might exist in hopes and dreams, perhaps sadly colored with regret; the only place to walk into is this moment.

If there was a tea stand in Capernaum, you can bet that there were crowds like the ones surrounding Jesus. Zen is oftentimes a lonely practice, but maybe a few stragglers found their way there after Jesus had performed enough miracles for one day. They might be lucky enough to come armed with some good questions. That might take some work, work that’s still to be done, like finding a path to forgiveness.

In Zen, forgiveness is an act of will if you refuse to settle for an easy way out. Then the Blessed Presence thing just happens. That cannot be willed.

For Jon Logan, John Piane, Eddie Logan, Lilly Logan, and their families. In deep gratitude.

It's More than a Taboo Against Knowing Ones Self

The world is not as it appears to be.

How much can we really know when it comes to the difficult task of knowing ourselves?

In most spiritual practices, there is a notion that the world we see and experience is an illusion. It is called māyā in both Hindu and Buddhist world views, a blindness that prevents humans from having a complete experience of life. The word māyā in Sanskrit points to a mental condition of pretense or deceit that’s a hindrance on the path to realization. Its Hindu roots also carry some notion of magic that the gods use to create illusion unless they are appeased. In Buddhist and Hindu theology, samsara indicates the perpetual cycle of enslavement to birth and death and the pain of being caught up in the grip of illusion. Samsara simply means “world” in Sanskrit, but has been extrapolated out to include an endless cycle of birth and rebirth, spelling out continuous suffering.

The monotheistic religious traditions attribute our alienation from God and ourselves as the result of sin. In Christianity, particularly after Augustine, Eve's sin in the Garden of Eden, and Adam’s complicity, cursed all mankind to Original Sin until the sacrifice of Jesus. While any broad statement is, of course, misleading, it is enough here to point to the role of sin and alienation from God that traps us in misfortune’s clutches.

Religious and spiritual teachings have proposed various ways of digging ourselves out of this hole. Christianity and other monotheistic traditions advocate “conversion,” repentance, prayer, and good works; Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism veer towards the meditation/introspection end of the spectrum, coupled with an analysis of the condition itself. 

Gurdjieff (I mention him because he is the subject of other posts on Buddha, S.J.), as well as various disciplines that have emerged more recently, attempt this analysis in the more neutral terms of being asleep. Gurdjieff said, "Man is immersed in dreams... He lives in sleep… He is a machine. He cannot stop the flow of his thoughts, he cannot control his imagination, his emotions, his attention... He does not see the real world. The real world is hidden from him by the wall of imagination." 

These characterizations are simplistic and miss a lot of nuance, a fault for which I will be criticized, including by my inner critic, but my purpose is to point out the predicament, not necessarily to argue the merits of any particular solution. 

A conundrum

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”― George Orwell

Why can’t we know the entire universe as it is? I will briefly outline three distinct ways that humans know (or imagine they know) the world: first, the gold standard, measurable data, and the instruments that humans have developed over time to explore, record and verify our knowledge; second, information that we “get” in conversation with other men and women about events in our lives, either in present time or from our history; and third, the information that comes to us from memoires, dreams and self-examination, as in therapy, and more broadly from what we might call the numinous sphere of our experience.

On December 25, 2021, the Webb Space Telescope was launched into space. Fourteen days, eight hours, eleven minutes, and three seconds later, after full deployment, when I logged into the NASA site, I was able to see the first images transmitted from the deep reaches of space. It required a 10 billion dollar, highly engineered instrument rotating at 1.5 million miles from Earth to expand the scope of our universe. My vision was extended by 13.5 billion light-years, allowing me to observe galaxies that formed only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. 

Closer to home, remove the scientific device, and I am limited by the range of my hearing — sound waves landing on my eardrums and my brain recognizing their origin and source. I had the experience of sitting in the same room with a friend when she began talking about a car coming up on the road, but I hadn’t even heard its tires on the stony path. I had to wait to experience their rumble, but I trusted my friend and, because the driver was a person we both loved, we also had a story that we could talk about in the future.

I don’t know all the dimensions of what I refer to as “myself.” As an adult at 81, I still don't realize how all the emotional, physical, and spiritual trauma (or joy, but trauma has a tricky way of hiding because we tend to avoid pain) of years past affects me now. If I were completely aware, I would not have been stunned last week by that “ah ha” moment that shed light on some personal behaviors that have been troubling me for years. I’m calling this knowledge domain subjective as it relies on information about our reactions to past events that we store in our brains, or more broadly, our somatic systems.

I have sketched out the concepts of observation, recognition, and remembering or retrieval, with an emphasis on their limitations. Again, I accuse myself of gross over-simplification, but for the purposes of describing our conundrum: When I acknowledge the extent of my blindness, do I simply feel frustrated or unfulfilled in some existential sense, or do I undertake the practice of observing myself? Let me explore some of the ramifications of the philosophical argument behind my dilemma to see what, if anything, holds water, makes sense by congruity, and where there are holes in the bucket.

 

The first part of this argument I would like to examine is that, as humans, our perception of the universe is limited; however, we believe that the information at our disposal provides a complete representation of the world as it is. Even if we admit that the world is not as it appears, we imagine that with investigation, we can discern more accurate information and, like a sleuth, uncover the culprit and save ourselves. This is simply hubris.

Self-observation is at least partially what the language points to: we investigate ourselves. But there are limits to any claims about the reliability of our human experience. What part of the “self” comes into play is not altogether clear, but this much is true: it is “subjective.” How do we examine the data? Is it real? Can it be verified? Is it useful for understanding past personal events as well as predicting the results of present and future actions?

Common sense demands — correctly, I think — that I can only believe what’s in front of my nose is indeed what’s in front of my nose if and only if I limit what I assert about the way I see my world to what’s actually under my nose. I know the immediate world I directly perceive. Unless I can verify it, all the rest is an assumption. Suppose I allow my mind to stray into the world of made-up stories, half-remembered or repressed memories, heavenly illusions, or sexual fantasy. In that case, I can no longer legitimately assert that I am seeing the world as it is. I want to believe that I can be as stone-cold sober as a hanging judge, whether or not I really can wield judgments best left to God. I will convince myself that I won’t stray into the forbidden territory of false opinions or prejudice by taking the moral high ground, but in fact, I am deluded into believing that the world I see is objectively real. A small portion of what I see can be reliably verified by measurable data, but in fact, most is almost entirely subjective, buttressed with the few agreements that I’ve managed to wrestle into my corner from family and lovers, political allies, or friends from church. Yet we claim that common sense provides a reliable indicator of the validity of our varied experience.

Some would argue more strongly that common sense doesn't just advise, as in “take aspirin if you’re feeling a bit woozy.” Normative logic prescribes limits for my world, drawing boundaries for the experiences I can assert are true and can reasonably trust. The process of expanding my world requires another level of investigation. I am obliged to account for the way I want to see the world. This demands that I undertake a careful, critical examination of subjective factors, from yearning and dissatisfaction to remembering with Proust the smell of my mother’s cookies, the elation of catching my first fly ball, or the humiliation of being punched in the nose by the class bully. 

This simple observation may point us in the right direction. We begin to see and understand the mechanisms of the apparatus of our perceptions, the thoughts, feelings, sensations, visual perceptions, and the registration of this experience in our memories. Our worldview is very limited unless we are willing to admit other factors, including, for example, our conversations with other people, our reading of history, and, most importantly, empirical scientific evidence, which, along with an understanding of the instruments of observation (including both physical science and psychology), allows us to test and verify our assumptions. This is also common sense.

However, I don’t want to let my argument devolve into complete solipsism. Surmising that what’s in front of my nose is also what’s in front of my friend’s nose is possible only if I have an agreement with my friend that he or she describes what’s in front of his or her nose with similar identifiable characteristics, mass, color, along with the collection of data from my other sensations, within a range of probable predictors. This will include an agreement to use a common descriptive language. Digging through this complex web of linguistic and psychological machinations tests the limits of human intelligence, but it does seem to be a worthwhile project. It can lead to freedom, but it can also verge on the preposterous.

I have drawn this picture as extensively as I could to describe a gap in our understanding. We neglect what we know empirically both in the way we conduct our lives and in what we allow ourselves to believe. We would like to believe that our understanding can get us out of trouble, and when it doesn’t, we look elsewhere to fill in the gap.

The Lacunae. The Unknown is simply unknown. The rest is just shit we make up. Enter the Guru!

There’s a natural lacuna in our experience where we don’t have reliable information. In my view, it is unknown because it is unknowable. We as humans do not have access to the data required, or our physical bodies and minds simply do not have the capacity to experience or know what remains hidden. There is no ontological reason; there are no secrets. 

It’s a normal human instinct to seek certainty. We all want peace of mind, but because we are afraid, or lazy, or greedy, or insecure, or arrogant, this creates an opening for the guru’s stealthy entrance. This ignorance becomes the playground for superstition, magic, wizards (sorry, Harry Potter), myth, and deception. Any appeal to a supernatural or unseen world that uses our inability to know creates a loophole and opens a vast playground for all kinds of mischief, from the taboo against walking under a ladder to believing your daily horoscope, supplied, of course, for a fee.

Even after we’ve observed and accepted that we as human beings have a limited range of perception due to physiological constraints, the limited capacity of our sense organs, as well as the neuro-physiology of our brains, our mind plays a trick; we tend to forget and set this aside, but we still experience dissatisfaction: we don’t get all the things we think we want or imagine we need. Plus, there are psychological consequences that come from the firing and misfiring of synapses that distribute endorphins to our pleasure centers. It makes no difference whether or not these actions and reactions are random or follow some predictable pattern; we experience an imbalance coupled with limited data to account for it. Voilá, from chemistry set to ontological predicament!

As a matter of fact, our suffering always seems to get the upper hand. When our unhappiness or dissatisfaction reaches a tipping point, we reach out for an answer, even if it means grasping for straws. Enter the person, book, practice, or belief system with an answer. It doesn't even have to be a good answer. Searching for answers to existential questions can require suspension of belief; perhaps the answer imposes an alternative set of beliefs and demands submission to its authority. In some sense, it operates like a narcotic or psychological addiction — the high it produces needs to be repeated for it to be effective. 

Over many centuries, our answers have taken the form of tribal ritual. In the small village where I live, when I’m in northern India, I rented the first floor of a lovely new building; my flat had been designed and built by a trained architect; the rent was relatively high. A good friend rented a smaller room on the ground floor, but there was a problem with the ventilation and the sewage. It really felt unsanitary. It had been built on the cheap by a local carpenter. Complaints got no results. Tempers flared. My friend left; there were bad feelings all around. The Nepali woman who owned the property called on a village priest to solve a problem. I saw with my own eyes the bloody sacrifice of a young goat to create favorable circumstances for increased guest house revenue ― and sanitary plumbing. My solution would have been to hire a competent plumber, but my owner opted to pay a witch doctor for the magic of animal sacrifice. 

At another end of the spectrum, Bob Hoffman, the psychic tailor and inventor of a process psychic therapy recommended by Claudio Naranjo, sits in a Berkeley coffee bar, gazes off into space; he delivers a prediction or confirmation about a life choice or personal problem, allegedly from his spiritual guide, Dr. Fisher. I can hear the certainty in the psychic’s tone of voice when he divines the root of your predicament and says, “Doors will open.” The door actually remains shut until we see for ourselves what is posing as an answer. Snake oil doesn’t even loosen the hinges.

I still haven’t really answered my own question about knowing ourselves. I’ve just pointed out some of the false claims. Knowing that there are limits to what we can know doesn’t invalidate what direct experience teaches us or weaken those experiences. It simply rejects their infallibility. I can be satisfied with my own experience. In the words of Jack Kerouac, “One day I will find the right words, ... then it sounds; you just can't fail when you get into the rhythm of the dance.” 

Note: I would like to acknowledge Geshe-la Kelsang Wangmo’s course on Dignaga, which was taught at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, McLeod Ganj, HP, India, during the Spring semester of 2014.