The Tao of "What Is Real"

A good man is not aware of his goodness, 
And is therefore good. 
A foolish man tries to be good, 
And is therefore not good. 
A truly good man does nothing, 
Yet leaves nothing undone. 
A foolish man is always doing, 
Yet much remains to be done. 

When a truly kind man does something, he leaves nothing undone. 
When a just man does something, he leaves a great deal to be done. 
When a disciplinarian does something and no one responds, 
He rolls up his sleeves in an attempt to enforce order. 

Therefore when the Dao is lost, there is goodness. 
When goodness is lost, there is kindness. 
When kindness is lost, there is justice. 
When justice is lost, there is ritual. 
Ritual is the dead shell of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion. 
Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of the Dao. 
It is the beginning of folly. 

Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real and not what is on the surface, 
On the fruit and not the flower. 
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.

-- Lao Tzu, 'Tao Te Ching', Verse 38

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More so than most of the world's great religious or wisdom traditions, Taoism (or Daoism) as expressed in Lao Tzu's classic "Tao Te Ching" is unrelentingly paradoxical. ("A truly good man does nothing, yet leaves nothing undone.") Like quantum mechanics, it's "methods" are expressible but an ultimate "understanding" or "meaning" are beyond the rational capacity of our ordinary consciousness and language. Famously, Lao Tzu starts the "Tao Te Ching" by declaring: "The Dao that can be told is not the essential Dao."

Even the greatest of enlightened teachers - the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Jesus, Mohammed, Krishna, etc. - can only offer a flavorful "taste" of what the ultimate "essence" of "reality" is like. The essence of "what is" - the Universe, God or Allah, Buddha-nature or Nirvana, Brahma, the Dao, however one wishes to describe "It" - remains "ineffable" and beyond the power of pictures, poetry, or prose to fully describe.

The danger of such "ineffability" is that over time even the greatest religions and wisdom traditions, almost inevitably it seems, devolve and become to most of their adherents mere "dead shell(s) of faith and loyalty." The generation of religious belief, religious faith, religious knowledge, even religious adherence, are in most instances relatively good things for both individuals and society, but unless a religious or spiritual path generates transformational inner and holistic religious experiences it becomes "a dead shell" (above) in which "the salt loses its savour." (Matthew 5:13). This, Lao Tzu observes, "is the beginning of confusion."

The spiritual seeker who aspires to a truly transformational religious or spiritual experience will not be satisfied with the rote teachings and empty rituals offered in many a dormant religious community which seeks to promote merely outwardly-focused behaviour and moral conformity. He or she must, exercising great discrimination, first find and then dwell upon and in "what is real and not what is on the surface."

"Every object, every being," Rumi points out, "is a jar full of delight. Be a connoisseur," he advises, "and taste with caution."

"Any wine will get you high," the great Sufi poet notes. "Judge like a king and choose the purest, the ones unadulterated with fear, or some urgency of 'what's needed.'"

Just as the pollinated flower of an apple tree turns into the fruit, so the seemingly outer rituals, teachings and practices of a true wisdom tradition, when seeded by true experiential insight, will effect an inner transformation and the attainment of a new state of consciousness and being.

Therefore, advises the great Daoist master, one should dwell "on the fruit and not the flower . . . accept(ing) the one and reject(ing) the other."

Theodore Nottingham: On the Kindgdom of Heaven

“The kingdom of heaven is like a grain
of mustard seed that a man took and
sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all
seeds,but when it has grown it is larger
than all the garden plants and becomes
a tree, so that the birds of the air come
and make nests in its branches.”

(Matthew 13:31-32)

The Kingdom of Heaven is not above, but is both within us and spread out upon the face of the earth. In a powerfully insightful sermon on the parables of Jesus, author and pastor, Rev. Theodore Nottingham, illustrates how a mustard seed of spiritual insight nourished by spiritual practice can blossom into a true flowering of the higher consciousness that is innate within each of us. It is this "Kingdom of Heaven" within us (Luke 17:21) that Nottingham rightly asserts is at the heart of all of Christ's teachings.

"I suggest to you," says Nottingham, "that the Kingdom of Heaven is nothing less than God's living presence known to you when you can enter that state of awareness, that state of consciousness, when you are not asleep to it. And so all of (Jesus') teachings are processes to get us there."

It will not be said, 'Look, here!'
or 'Look, there!' Rather, the
Father's kingdom is spread out
upon the earth, and people
don't see it." (Thomas, 113.)

"There is a method to this madness of spiritituality," Nottingham asserts. "Just that little bit of (spiritual) remembrance (and) application is so powerful that its ripple effect can change others and affect others, who (then) affect others, and (thus) have a powerful impact on your world today. . . . It is the power of God in action through you."

"He is," Nottingham points out, "giving us the clues (and) telling us in timeless imagery how to make these gifts of God manifest in your life, how to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and become one with that love which then pours out to the world, how to forget 'self' and let something more profound come forth."

"When that yearning to help another takes you beyond your 'self' and causes you to do good in the world," says Nottingham, "the Kingdom of God is at hand because you have taken that seed seriously, you have cared for it and you have let it come through in such a way that transformation occurs. Then you unite with something greater than yourself (and) you become a conduit for the love of God in this world."

The Philokalia: A Discourse on Abba Philimon

"It is said that Abba Philimon, the anchorite, lived for a long time enclosed in a certain cave not far from the Lavra of the Romans. There he engaged in the life of ascetic struggle, always asking himself the question which, it is reported, the great Arsenios used to put to himself: 'Philemon, why did you come here?'"

"He used to plait ropes and make baskets, giving them to the steward of the Lavra in exchange for a small ration of bread. He ate only bread and salt, and even that not every day. In this way he took no thought for the flesh (cf. Rom. 13:14) but, initiated into ineffable mysteries through the pursuit of contemplation, he was enveloped by divine light and established in a state of joyfulness."

"When he went to church on Saturdays and Sundays he walked alone in deep thought allowing no one to approach him lest his concentration should be interrupted. In church he stood in a corner, keeping his face turned to the ground and shedding streams of tears. For, like the holy fathers, and especially like his great model Arsenios, he was always full of contrition and kept the thought of death continually in his mind."

"When a heresy arose in Alexandria and the surrounding area, Philimon left his cave and went to the Lavra near that of Nikanor. There he was welcomed by the blessed Paulinos, who gave him his own retreat and allowed absolutely no one to approach him, and he himself disturbed him only when he had to give him bread."

"On the feast of the holy resurrection of Christ, Philimon and Paulinos were talking when the subject of the eremetical state came up. Philimon knew that Paulinos, too, aspired to this state; and with this in mind he implanted in him teachings taken from Scripture and the fathers that emphasized, as Moses had done, how impossible it is to conform to God without complete stillness; how stillness gives birth to ascetic effort, ascetic effort to tears, tears to awe, awe to humility, humility to foresight, foresight to love; and how love restores the soul to health and makes it dispassionate, so that one then knows that one is not far from God."

-- A Discourse on Abba Philimon --
(Palmer et al., "The Philokalia," Vol. Two, pp. 244-345.)

Circles, Horizons and Depths

"Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson --

"The eye is the first circle," Emerson observes, "the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens."

[Emerson, "The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson," p. 252]

In a classic series of sermons, the great 20th-century theologian, Paul Tillich, observed, like Emerson, that there is a fathomless depth to our being, a depth so great and infinite that it is the ultimate Ground of Being.

"The wisdom of all ages and of all continents speaks about the road to our depth," Tillich notes.  "It has been described in innumerably different ways. But all those who have been concerned - mystics and priests, poets and philosophers, simple people and educated - with that road through confession, lonely self-scrutiny, internal or external catastrophes, prayer, contemplation, have witnessed to the same experience. They have found they are not what what they  believed themselves to be, even after a deeper level had appeared to them below the vanishing surface. That deeper level itself became surface, when a still deeper level was discovered, this happening again and again, as long as their lives, as long as they kept on the road to their depth." 

"The name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being," he continues, "is God. That depth is what the word God means. . . . For if you know that God means depth, you know much about him. You cannot then call yourself an atheist or an unbeliever. For you cannot think or say: Life has no depth! Life itself is shallow. If you could say this in complete seriousness, you would be an atheist; but otherwise you are not. He who knows about depth knows about God."

[Paul Tillich, "The Shaking of the Foundations," Scribners, pp. 56-57.]

Thus, our lives are circumscribed by the orbits of the stars and the horizons of time and space, but beyond each such horizon we see there exists yet more distant horizons, including some we can never see. Similarly, there are depths within that delimit our knowledge of who and what we are; yet, they, too, are infinite and each depth yields to a further depth; and even underneath the depth which we must take to be the ultimate of all depths, a lower deep needs open. Such is the nature of the universe and our Being within it.

Reflections on Emptiness and the Void

Thomas Merton: On "Desert and Void"

"The uncreated is waste and emptiness to the creature - not even sand, not even stone, not even darkness and night. A burning wilderness would at least be something. It burns and is wild. But the uncreated is no something. Waste, emptiness, total poverty of the creator. Yet from this poverty springs everything. The waste is inexhaustible, infinite zero. Everything comes from this desert nothing. Everything wants to return to it and cannot. For who can return nowhere?"

"But for each of us there is a point of nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being - the incomparable point not to be discovered by insight. If you seek it you do not find it, if you stop seeking it is there. But you must not turn to it. Once you become aware of yourself as seeker, you are lost. But if you are content to be lost you will be found without knowing it, precisely because you are lost. For you are, at last, nowhere."

Thomas Merton: On 'Form and Nothingness'

"The perfect act is empty. Who can see it? He who forgets form. Out of the formed, the unformed. The empty act proceeds with its own form. Perfect form is momentary, its perfection vanishes at once. Perfection and emptiness work together, for they are the same - the coincidence of momentary form and eternal nothingness. Form, the flash of nothingness. Forget form and it suddenly appears, ringed and reverberating with its own light, which is nothing."

"Well then, stop seeking, let it all happen, let it come and go. What? Everything - i.e., nothing."

Contemplative Practice and Disciplining the Mind

"You tell me nothing new; you are not the only one that is troubled with wandering thoughts. Our mind is extremely roving; but, as the will is mistress of all our faculties, she must recall them, and carry them to GOD as their last end."

"When the mind, for want of being sufficiently reduced by recollection at our first engaging in devotion, has contracted certain bad habits of wandering and dissipation, they are difficult to overcome, and commonly draw us, even against our wills, to the things of the earth."

"I believe one remedy for this is to confess our faults, and to humble ourselves before GOD. I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer: many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering. Hold yourself in prayer before GOD, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate. Let it be your business to keep your mind in the presence of the LORD. If it sometimes wander and withdraw itself from Him, do not much disquiet yourself for that: trouble and disquiet serve rather to distract the mind than to re-collect it: the will must bring it back in tranquility. If you persevere in this manner, GOD will have pity on you."

"One way to re-collect the mind easily in the time of prayer, and preserve it more in tranquility, is not to let it wander too far at other times: you should keep it strictly in the presence of GOD; and being accustomed to think of Him often, you will find it easy to keep your mind calm in the time of prayer, or at least to recall it from its wanderings."

-- Brother Lawrence --
("The Practice of the Presence of God," VIII Letter)

That the undisciplined mind is restless, and goes where it will, is recognized in all religions. Indeed, disciplining the mind may be the central purpose of religion, as through disciplining the mind we attain to a higher and deeper consciousness in which we attain to the divine. "The mind is indeed restless, Arjuna," says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, "it is indeed hard to train. But by constant practice and by freedom from passions the mind in truth can be trained. When the mind is not in harmony, this divine communion is hard to attain; but the man whose mind is in harmony attains it, if he knows and strives for it."

"(E)very mind, no matter its present nature, can ultimately be disciplined and transformed" observes Swami Prabhavananda in his commentary on Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, "(and) can be, in Patanjali's phrase 'one-pointed' and fit to attain to the state of perfect yoga." However, as he later notes, disciplining the mind requires both practice and effort.

"(T)he thought-waves cannot all be controlled at once," Prabhavananda observes. "First we have to overcome the "painful" thought-waves by raising waves which are "not painful." To our thoughts of anger, desire and delusion we must oppose thoughts of love, generosity and truth. Only much later, when the "painful" thought-waves have been completely stilled, can we proceed to the second stage of discipline; the stilling of the "not painful" waves which we have deliberately created."

"The idea that we should ultimately have to overcome even those thought-waves which are "good," "pure" and "truthful" may at first seem shocking to a student who has been trained in the Western approach to morality," notes Prabhavananda, "but a little reflection will show him that this must be so."

"The external world, even in its most beautiful appearances and noblest manifestations, is still superficial and transient," he notes. "It is not the basic Reality. We must look through it not at it to see the Atman."

"Certainly," he concedes, "it is better to love than to hate, better to share than to hoard, better to tell the truth than to lie. But the thought-waves which motivate the practice of these virtues are nonetheless disturbances in the mind. We all know instances of admirable, earnest men who become so deeply involved in the cares of a great reform movement or social relief project that they cannot think of anything beyond the practical problems of their daily work. Their minds are not calm." 

"The mind of the truly illumined man is calm," Prabhavananda concludes, "not because he is selfishly indifferent to the needs of others, but because he knows the peace of the Atman within all things, even within the appearance of misery, disease, strife and want."

 [Prabhavananda and Isherwood, " How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali," pp. 23-24.]

Thomas Merton: Contemplation and the Contemplative Life

The aspiration for enlightenment - "direct awareness," as Trappist monk, Thomas Merton describes it, below - is, if anything, far stronger today, than it was in the early 1960s when Merton wrote his classic work of comparative contemplative traditions,"Mystics and Zen Masters." Merton's observations about the difficulty of attaining what Christianity would generally describe as "mystic union," and Zen Buddhists would describe as ""satori," points out the helpfulness of grounding one's practice on, if not in, one or another of the many varied religious or contemplative traditions. It also requires, Merton posits, a deep understanding of the world's anguish, a state that has manifestly increased in the past fifty years.

"(D)irect awareness," writes  Merton, "is a gift, but it also presupposes the knowledge and practice of certain traditional disciples. Thus, we can say that contemplation is both a "gift" (a "grace") and an "art." Unfortunately, we must also admit that it can almost be said to be a "lost art." And for this lost art there is certainly in the world today a definite nostalgia, not unmixed with vague hopes for the recovery of this awareness. But the nostalgia and the desire do not of themselves suffice to make the nostalgic one a contemplative."

"Needless to say, the contemplative" Merton points out, "is not simply a person who, by vocation, is juridically isolated and cloistered. The mere fact of breaking off communication with the world and of losing interest in it certainly does not make one ipso facto a "contemplative." On the contrary, it would seem that today a certain openness to the world and a genuine participation in its anguish would normally help to safeguard the sincerity of a commitment to contemplation."

[Thomas Merton, "Mystics and Zen Masters," pp. 203-204.]

* * * * * * * * * * * * 

In the attached video, highlighting Merton's writings, this most contemplative of writers has the following to say about contemplation, its source, and its importance to man's psyche:

"Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life. It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is the vivid realization that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant source. Contemplation is, above all, awareness of the reality of that source. It knows the source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond both reason and beyond simple faith.  For contemplation is a kind of spiritual vision to which both reason and faith aspire by their very nature, because without it they must always remain incomplete."

"Yet contemplation is not vision, because it sees without seeing, and knows without knowing. It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images and words, or even in clear concepts. It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows, the contemplative mind takes back what it has said and denies what it has affirmed. For in contemplation we know by unknowing, or, better, we know beyond all knowing or unknowing."

Gurdjieff and Heightened Consciousness

"It is only when we realize that life is taking us nowhere that it begins to have meaning."

-- P. D. Ouspensky --

In the attached video, the Rev. Theodore (Ted) Nottingham examines the "Fourth Way" teachings of G. I. Gurdjieff, an enigmatic yet enlightened teacher who burst onto the spiritual scene in the first half of the twentieth-century. Gurdjieff's teachings express the truths found in ancient religious and wisdom teachings relating to self-awareness in people's daily lives, and are as current and relevant today (if not more so) as they were when Gurdjieff and his many students (including P.D. Ouspensky) formed various wisdom schools to pass on his esoteric teachings.

"The idea that we are not awake but live in a partial dream state from which we can awaken opens on to radically new horizons," Nottingham observes. "The illusions we foster concerning ourselves melt in the light of increased consciousness, and we awaken to new dimensions of reality that set us free. We are then able to relate to the world around us without our usual defenses, and masks, and confusion, which constitute so much of human interaction. We also become capable of a new kind of compassion."

"Ultimately," he notes, "this third state of consciousness which is our birthright (i.e., heightened consciousness beyond sleep and ordinary wakefulness) frees us from the unnecessary agonies of a little ego always struggling for self-importance and gratification, and awakens us to new insight and understanding. The world becomes a different place and we become far more than our imaginary 'selves' ever dreamt of. The potential for happiness, fulfillment and genuine usefulness to humanity are now tangible realities."

"This use of attention," he points out, "is similar to the 'Watch of the Heart' of early Eastern Christian spirituality and the remembrance of God of the Sufi mystics. To be aware of a higher reality while dealing with ordinary reality requires an effort of awareness, detachment and concentration that is the result of long practice."

The Quality of Faith: Relgious Belief versus Religious Experience

There is a marked difference in the quality of faith dependent upon whether it is based on religious belief or if it is grounded in religious experience. The difference in this quality of faith is "the one great partition" that William James describes as dividing institutional from personal religion. ("The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 28.)

"In the true mystic," writes Evelyn Underhill, "we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If we accept his experience as genuine it involves an intercourse with the spiritual world, an awareness of it, which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs."

"The mystic," she notes, "speaks with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the Transcendent when, as he says, he was "in union with God." The certitude then gained - a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not usually diffused - governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even persists and upholds him in those terrible hours of darkness when all his sense of spiritual reality is taken away."

[Underhill, "The Essentials of Mysticism," pp. 25-26.]

Faith based on religious belief is thus, of necessity, only second-hand, while faith based on personal experience of a higher, religious consciousness is primary. The former is susceptible to wavering in tough times, while in the latter, or so it seems, there is "no variableness, nor shadow of turning."

"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others," James asserts, "in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God. In this state of mind what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety, and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away."

"This enchantment," James observes, "coming as a gift when it does come - a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say - is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," pp. 47-48.]

James goes on to describe the many different varieties of inner religious experience, each demonstrating that there is a higher state of religious consciousness above our ordinary, egoic self-consciousness; and he differentiates such experiences from intellectual or learned faith. Those who experience such inner relgious conversion are possessed thereafter with faith which is of a much different and enduring quality than a faith based solely on subjective, self-conscious belief.

"All the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy," philosopher and spiritual seeker, Aldous Huxley observes, "make, in one form or another, the affirmation that man is a kind of trinity composed of body, psyche and spirit. Selfness or personality is a product of the first two elements. The third element . . . is akin to, or even identical with, the divine Spirit that is the Ground of all being."

"Man's final end," he observes, "the purpose of his existence is to love, know and be united with the immanent and transcendent Godhead. And this identification of self with spiritual not-self can be achieved only by "dying to" selfness and living to spirit."

[Huxley, "The Perennial Philosophy," p. 38.]

While such religious experience - such "dying to self" and awakening to spirit - is available to all of us, it is only the rare individual who experiences the "immanent and transcendent Godhead" in reality. The rest of us, holding to a religious faith based only on our subjective and intellectual belief, may merely aspire to the experience of that higher consciousness which leads to the deepest, and most abiding faith possible.

"Sell all your cleverness," Rumi urges us, "and purchase bewilderment."

A Unitive, Inclusive View of God and Man

God, Allah, Ahura Mazda - the Ground of Being, whatever its name - knows no differences. It is only those who profess their singular and exclusive view of religion that separate themselves off from the eternal. Those who are consciously possessed of this Divine Ground within and without themselves make no such distinctions and place no restrictions on their vision of God, as they know it is distinction itself that separates them from Wholeness.

Thus, "the Shakespeare of Mystics," Rumi can say:

"Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu,
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the oceans or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next,
did not descend from Adam and Ever or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

"The biographies of the saints," writes Aldous Huxley, "testify unequivocally to the fact that spiritual training leads to a transcendence of personality, not merely in the special circumstances of battle, but in all circumstances and in relation to all creatures, so that the saint "loves his enemies' or, if he is a Buddhist, does not even recognized the existence of enemies, but treats all sentient beings, sub-human as well as human, with the same compassion and disinterested good."

"Those who win through to the unitive knowledge of God set out upon their course from the most diverse starting points," Huxley notes. "One is a man, another a woman; one a born active, another a born comtemplative. No two of them inherit the same temperament and physical constitution, and their lives are passed in material, moral and intellectual environments that are profoundly dissimilar."

"Nevertheless," he observes, "as far as they are saints, insofar as they possess the unitive knowledge that makes them "perfect as their Father which is in heaven is perfect," they are all astonishingly alike. Their actions are uniformly selfless and they are constantly recollected, so that at every moment they know who they are and what is their true relation to the universe and its spiritual ground."

Saints, mystics and sages, it seems, regardless of their formal path (or lack of a path), have an acceptive, unitive and inclusive view of God and man, for they have realized in the very essence of their Being that they are inseparably a part of the Ground of Being that encompasses all. It is the unsaintly, non-mystical, unsagacious common man who makes distinctions based on his or her God. And, in doing so, he or she falls short of realizing the essence of their Being.

Carl Jung: The Conflict Between Faith, Experience and Knowledge

Over fifty years ago, one of the twentieth-century's greatest thinkers, the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung made the observation that both science and our modern religious views in the West lack the experiential force that would make them effective vehicles for shaping a sustainable and viable worldview. His comments now, as then, continue to cut to the heart of what is humanity's greatest existential question - how to find deep meaning in a seemingly superficial and surface life that is increasingly defined by a purely scientific worldview in conflict with fanatical and fundamentalist 'religiosity'.

Writing in his classic work, "The Undiscovered Self," Jung observes:

"The West has unfortunately not yet awakened to the fact that our appeal to idealism and reason and other desirable virtues, delivered with so much enthusiasm, is mere sound and fury. It is a puff of wind swept away in the storm of religious faith, however twisted this faith may appear to us."

"We are faced," he observes, "not with a situation that can be overcome by rational or moral arguments, but with an unleashing of emotional forces and ideas engendered by the spirit of the times, and these, as we know from experience, are not much influenced by rational reflection and still less by moral exhortation. It has been correctly realized in many quarters that the alexipharmic, the antidote, should in this case be an equally potent faith of a different and nonmaterialistic kind, and that the religious attitude grounded upon it would be the only effective defense against the danger of psychic infection."

"Unhappily," Jung notes, "the little word 'should,' which never fails to appear in this connection, points to a certain weakness, if not the absence, of this desideratum. Not only does the West lack a uniform faith that could block the progress of a fanatical ideology, but, as the father of Marxist philosophy, it makes use of exactly the same spiritual assumptions, the same arguments and aims."

In a durable commentary that is at least as applicable in the non-Christian East as it is in the West, Jung points out that churches (and one might add mosques, temples and synagogues) "stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experience but on unreflecting belief which notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it." Then, he notes, "(t)he content of belief . . . comes into collision with knowledge, and it often turns out that the irrationality of the former is no match for the ratiocinations of the latter."

"Belief," Jung notes, "is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously."

"People call faith the true religious experience," he observes, "but they do not stop to think that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled 'nous' into us - that is, trust and loyalty."

"This experience has a definite content that can be interpreted in terms of one or other of the denominational creeds," he points out. "But the more this is so, the more the possibilities of these conflicts with knowledge mount up, which in themselves are quite pointless."

"That is to say," he concludes, "the standpoints of the creeds is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if taken literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge."

[Carl Jung, "The Undiscovered Self." pp. 46-48.]

What is apparent from Jung's analysis, it seems, is the need that both individuals and societies have for a meaningful and experiential belief system which is compatible, and not antithetical, to the collective knowledge that the world has garnered - both through science and through real religious insight. Such an insight, to be meaningful, must take into account what science has disclosed about the outer, material world and what experiential religious practice has disclosed about the inner, spiritual world of the individual and collective consciousness and psyche.

Emptiness and Dependent Origination: "Truth That Sets You Free"

"Emptiness," "insubstantiality" and "co-dependent origination" are fundamental concepts in Mahayana Buddhism, yet these concepts are also recognized realities in Daoist teachings, the teachings of many Indian philosophical and yoga schools, and - though not specifically referenced - most of the world's great wisdom traditions.

What we know of the origination and vast emptiness of the universe, as well as the mechanics and profound emptiness of the atom, makes these ancient philosophical realizations particularly relevant to all of us, although the Western worldview, to a large extent, still clings to its traditional materialist view of man, mind, the world and the cosmos.

In Chapter II of the Dao De Jing, we read:

"The thirty spokes converge at one hub,
But the utility of the cart is a function of the nothingness inside the hub.
We throw clay to shape a pot,
But the utility of the clay pot is a function of the nothingness inside it.
We bore out doors and windows to make a dwelling,
But the utility of the dwelling is a function of the nothingness inside it.
Thus, it might be something that provides the value,
But it is nothing that provides the utility."

[Ames and Hall, "Dao De Jin: A Philosophical Translation, page 91.]

"There is nothing," said Tzu-ch'i, "that is not a 'that' and nothing that is not a 'this.' One does not see from the standpoint of another knowing by oneself is knowing something. Therefore it is said: ''That' comes from 'this,' and 'this' is based on 'that.' This explains how 'that' and 'this' arise simultaneously."

"But when there is arising," he continued, "there is passing away; and when there is passing away, there is arising. When there is right, there is wrong; when there is wrong, there is right. By affirming we deny; by denying we affirm."

"Therefore," he notes, "sages do not go this way but perceive it in the context of nature. This is also based on an affirmation."

"A 'this' is also a 'that,' and a 'that' is also a 'this,' he concludes. "'That' is one judgment, and 'this' is also one judgment. Ultimately, are there in fact 'that' and 'this,' or are there no 'that' or 'this'? Nothing can be opposite to 'that and this' - we call this fact the pivot of the Way. When the pivot is centered in its hub, thereby responding infinitely, then affirmation is one infinity and negation is also one infinity."

[Clearey, "The Essential Tao," page 72.]

Vedantists, and other Indian philosophical and yoga schools, label this concept of "this and that,' or 'neither this nor that,' "sunyata" - a transcendental  state in which neither 'this' nor 'that' exists absolutely. In "The Spiritual Heritage of India," Vedantist scholar, Swami Prabhavananda, suggests that these concepts extend to all the world's great wisdom traditions, including Christianity, and that the transcendental reality in which this is experienced can be attained by all.

"The nirvana of Buddha," writes Prabhavananada, "is . . . not a state of annihilation but the attainment of the unchangeable reality, which can be positively described as the eternal peace. But what this peace really is, no words can define; all definition can be only symbol and can offer only a vague suggestion. Buddha employs negative terms for its description, such as freedom from misery and death, freedom from sensuality, from the ego, from delusion, from ignorance."

"This state of freedom is attainable by the 'noble kind of wisdom' - a phrase already quoted from the Buddhist scripture and signifying what the Vedanta calls transcendental knowledge. The wisdom meant is not a wisdom of the intellect, which implies a knower and an object, but rather a state, sunyata, in which no subject-object relation exists, and in which one transcends both intellect and mind - these two words representing, in Hindu psychology, separate entities."

"Christ refers directly to this transcendental wisdom when he says: 'And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.' It is identical with perfection, the same perfection that Christ has in mind when he says: 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.' It is, in brief, the direct, immediate knowledge of that which is timeless unconditional existence."

"The 'noble kind of wisdom' is attainable by 'the noble conduct of life' and 'the noble earnestness of meditation.'"

[Swami Prabhavananda, "The Spiritual Heritage of India," page 186.]

Thomas Merton: Searching the Soul

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

Thomas Merton was a man of solitude, as the attached videos demonstrate. He was also a man in an ever deeper search of the soul.

A prolific writer throughout his adult life, his autobiography, "The Seven Storey Mountain" is perhaps his most famous work. In the transition from Part One to Part Two, from civilian life as a student at Columbia University to a Trappist novice at the Abbey of Gesthemani in rural Kentucky, Merton shares his deepening search for solitude and an understanding of his inner being.

"If my nature had been more stubborn in clinging to the pleasures that disgusted me," he observes, "if I had refused to admit that I was beaten by this futile search for satisfaction where it could not be found, and if my moral and nervous constitution had not caved under the weight of my own emptiness, who can tell what would eventually have happened to me?  Who could tell where I would have ended?"

"I had come very far, to find myself in this blind alley: but the very anguish and helplessness of my position was something to which I rapidly succumbed. And," he concludes, "it was my defeat that was to be the occasion of my rescue."

Opening Part Two of his autobiography, which details his renunciation of outer life to the cloistered quietude of his beloved Gesthemani, Merton directly addresses the nature of man, and his ultimate affinity for a deeper understanding of his own being.

"There is a paradox that lies in the very heart of human existence," he writes. "It must be apprehended before any lasting happiness is possible in the soul of a man. The paradox is this: man's nature by itself, can do little or nothing to settle his most important problem.. If we follow nothing but our natures, our own philosophies, our own level of ethics, we will end up in hell."

"This would be a depressing thought," he observes, "if it were not purely abstract. Because in the concrete order of things God gave man a nture that was ordered to supernatural life. He created man with a soul that was made not to bring itself to perfection in its own order, but to be perfected by Him in an order infinitely beyond the reach of human powers. We were never destined to lead purely natural lives, and therefore we were never destined in God's plan for a purely natural beatitude. Our nature which is a free gift from God, was given to us to be perfected by another free gift that is not due it."

"This free gift is "sanctifying grace." It perfects our nature with the gift of a life, of an intellection, a love, a mode of existence infinitely above its own level. If a man were to arrive even at the abstract pinnacle of natural perfection, God's work would not even be half done: it would be only about to begin, for the real work is the work of grace and the infused gifts of the Holy Ghost."

Merton was headed for the Abbey of Gerthemani, where he would pass 26 years in a quest for an ever increasing quietist solitude, before leaving Gesthemani temporarily (or perhaps permanently), for Asia to pursue his study of Buddhist and Indian contemplative methods. He would die at age 53, electrocuted as a result of a poorly wired household fan in a Bangkok hotel room on the 27th anniversary of his entry into Gesthemani in 1941, leaving behind a treasure trove of some 70 books on the contemplative life.

Idries Shah: The Way of the Sufi Gardener

Agriculture, a practice that underlies and accounts for all of civilization, is a relatively recent acquirement in mankind's evolutionary journey, having only been acquired less than 10,000 years ago. Yet, how central it is to the stories we tell about ourselves. A person of high accomplishment is said to be 'cultivated,' while the raucous rebel who does what he or she pleases is said to be 'wild.' And where else but the 'Garden of Eden' are we famously said to be from?

In Sufi teachings - Sufism being the esoteric or mystical branch of Islam - the garden is often used as a symbol of the state of our collective and individual spiritual being, just as wine (the product of the most highly cultivated and intoxicating first fruit of the garden) is used as a symbol for true religious, spiritual and ecstatic experience.

Thus, in his masterful book of insight into the life and thoughts of the Sufi masters and the different Sufic schools or orders, "The Way of the Sufi," the late Idries Shah (himself a Sufi master) tells the following cryptic, multi-layered and not-so-fanciful story - as all Sufi stories are - of a master-gardener and his efforts to sow many gardens and teach others would-be gardeners the secret of his craft.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

"Once upon a time when the science and art of gardening was not yet well established among men, there was a master-gardener. In addition to knowing all the qualities of plants, their nutritious, medicinal and aesthetic values, he had been granted a knowledge of the Herb of Longevity, and he lived for many hundreds of years.

In successive generations, he visited gardens and cultivated places throughout the world. In one place he planted a wonderful garden and instructed the people in its upkeep and even in the theory of gardening. But becoming accustomed to seeing some of the plants come up and flower every year, they soon forgot that others had to have their seeds collected, that some were propagated from cuttings, that some needed extra watering, and so on. The result was that the garden eventually became wild, and people started to regard that as the best garden there could be.

After giving these people many chances to learn, the gardener expelled them and recruited another whole band of workers. He warned them if they did not keep the garden in order, and study his methods, they would suffer for it. They, in turn, forgot - and since they were lazy tended only those fruits and flowers which were easily reared, and allowed the others to die. Some of the first trainees came back to them from time to time, saying: 'You should do this and do that,' but they drove them away, shouting: 'You are the ones who are departing from truth in this matter.'

But the master-gardener persisted. He made other gardens, wherever he could, and yet none was ever perfect except the one he tended with his chief assistants. As it became known that there were many gardens and even many methods of gardening, people from one garden would visit those of another, to approve, to criticize or to argue. Books were written, assemblies of gardeners were held, gardeners arranged themselves in grades according to what they thought to be the right order of precedence.

As is the way of men, the difficulty of the gardeners remains that they are too easily attracted by the superficial. They say: 'I like this flower,' and they want everyone else to like it as well. It may, in spite of its attraction or abundance, be a weed which is choking other plants which could provide medicines or food which the people and the garden need for their sustenance and permanency.

Among these gardeners are those who prefer plants of one single colour. These they may describe as 'good'. There are others who will only tend the plants, while refusing to care about the paths or the gates or even the fences.

When, at length, the ancient gardener died, he left as his endowment the whole knowledge of gardening, distributing it among the people who would understand in accordance with their capacities. So the science as well as the art of gardening remained as a scattered heritage in many gardens and also in some records of them.

People who are brought up in one garden or another generally have been so powerfully instructed as to the merits or demerits of how the inhabitants see things that they are almost incapable - though they make the effort - of realizing that they have to return to the concept of 'garden'. At the best, they generally only accept, reject, suspend judgment or look for what they imagine are the common factors.

From time to time true gardeners do arise. Such is the abundance of semi-gardens that when they hear of real ones people say: 'Oh, yes. You are talking about a garden such as we already have, or we imagine.' What they have and what they imagine are both defective.

The real experts, who cannot reason with the quasi-gardeners, associate for the most part among themselves, putting into this or that garden something from the total stock which will enable it to maintain its vitality to some extent.

They are often forced to masquerade, because the people who want to learn from them seldom know about the fact of gardening as an art or science underlying everything that they have heard before. So they ask questions like: 'How can I get a more beautiful flower on these onions?'

The real gardeners may work with them because true gardens can sometimes be brought into being, for the benefit of all mankind. They do not last long, but it is only through them that the knowledge can be truly learnt and people can come to see what a real garden is.

["The Way of the Sufi," pages 117-119.]

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

Shah's story of the master-gardener leaves many questions hanging, as it is supposed to do. Who was the master-gardener? Who was the first group he trained, and who was the second? What is the "Herb of Longevity"? Who were the master-gardener's "chief assistants," where are the "real experts" and where do they associate? Etc., Etc., Etc.

Some of these questions can be answered, but not all of them, perhaps. While, for other questions, there are multiple answers, and those answers will vary by degree according to the reader. And even those answers will be temporary, changing with conditions as a real garden does.

"Sufism," like gardening, perhaps, Shah notes, "must be studied with a certain attitude, under certain conditions, in a certain manner." Or, as the great Sufi teacher, Ibn Arabi said: "The Sufi must act and speak in a manner which takes into consideration the understanding, limitations and dominant concealed prejudices of his audience."

["The Way of the Sufi," page 33.]

I leave to the reader, then, how to interpret Shah's story; but I leave it with the observation that the story must be understood, perhaps, within Shah's larger works, of which "The Way of the Sufi" is but an integral part.

Emerson's Harvard Divinity School Address: Reflections on the Sublime

The dean of the American Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was in many ways the forefather of the spiritual awakening that many people feel arising in our times. Heavily influenced by the first widespread introduction of Eastern wisdom teachings to the West, Emerson was a champion of the universality of religious teachings and a non-dualist, as the following excerpts from his renowned address to the Harvard Divinity School show.

The site of Ralph Waldo Emerson's
Harvard Divintiy School address.

His address, delivered in the inner sanctum of the Unitarian Church's highest seat of learning, the Harvard Divinity School address was in many ways an heroic stand that Emerson made for his then radical beliefs. Shortly thereafter, he resigned as a Unitarian minister, and although lecturing to receptive audiences worldwide, he was not invited to speak again at Harvard for another thirty years.

Some 175 years later, Emerson's observations on the nature of God and man remain as clear and relevant to our times as they were then. Indeed, they are perhaps more so today, given the current conflicts we see between and among fundamentalists of all faiths, and the spiritual awakening one nonetheless senses amongst both persons of all faiths, and of no one faith in particular. ("As we are, so we associate," Emerson observed. "The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven, into hell.")

Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882)

In addressing his audience at the Divinity School, Emerson observed:

"The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. . . . If a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. . . . The man who renounces himself, comes to himself by so doing."

"These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed, that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool, active; and whatever opposes that will, is everywhere baulked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise. "

In pointed and specific, yet beautiful and poetically transcendent language, Emerson observes that mankind's religious or spiritual sentiments are universal, arising in the East, yet giving truth to the 'Being' in each individual. Thus, he notes:

" . . . The perception of this law of laws always awakens in the mind a sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. . . . It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity. But the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures, and the worlds, time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy."

" . . . This thought dwelled always deepest in the minds of men in the devout and contemplative East; not alone in Palestine, where it reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always owed to oriental genius, its divine impulses. What these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable and true.

" . . . The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, of my intellect, of my strength. They admonish me, that the gleams which flash across my mind, are not mine, but God's; that they had the like and were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I love them. Noble provocations go out from them, inviting me also to emancipate myself; to resist evil to subdue the world; and to Be."

"Religion" vs. the "New Atheism"

Author, Sam Harris
("Letter to a Christian Nation")

Addressing the Enilghtenment 2.0 conference held in 2007, best selling author and religious critic, Sam Harris (author of "Letter to a Christian Nation"), observed:

"There is nothing about science that entails a criticism of religion, and there is nothing about science that entails a commitment to atheism. This, I think is to be misled by words. Words like religion and atheism. Science clearly does not entail that one identify one's self as an atheist, or even think of one's self as an atheist. But science does entail that one be skeptical of unsupported and unsupportable claims about miracles and about the divine origin of certain books. And when you dig into the details, this is all atheism is. Atheism is the failure to be convinced by other people's claims about miracles, and it is the conviction that they too should not be convinced."

"If there is something worth discussing in the experience of a Buddha or a Jesus . . . as I think there is, I think there is really a 'there' there . . . I think it is possible to have a rare and beautiful and transformative experience . .  and we can call that spirituality or mysticism . . . If there is something worthy of discussion there," says Harris, "it should be susceptible to rational inquiry, and we can hold mystics and contemplatives to the highest standards of empirical rigour and logical coherence. It's simply a myth to say that we can't."

But defining science as the best of our knowledge about the physical universe, Harris does not define what "religion" is to him, before veering off into a discussion of what roles religion and empirical science may have to play in morality and ethics . . . and then going completely off the rails.

Narrowly conflating religion with (i) miracles, (ii) divine origination of scripture, and (iii) ethics, Harris provocatively states that, "The truth is understanding a scriptural tradition is no more relevant to questions of ethics than it is to questions of astrology." And here he misses the point, as do so many leading voices of what Harris himself derides as "the New Atheism."

What Harris misses by leaving his definition of religion unexamined is that there is within religion a vast difference between inner religious experience and the outward dogmas and creeds that encompass Harris' unspoken narrow definition of what religion is.

Yet while, Harris acknowledges that there may be something worthy of discussion in the experiences of "a Buddha and a Jesus," he fails to do so. Buddhism, in particular, is strictly speaking already an 'atheistic religion,' in which its "founder," Gautama Buddha specifically urged his followers not to take his teachings on faith, but rather urged that they should try doing what he did and finding out the truths he talked of experientially, a far more scientific viewpoint (repeatability of 'experiments' and results being, along with the ability to falsify theoretical predictions, being the hallmarks of the scientific method), than perhaps Harris is aware of.

William James (1842-1910)

William James, an acknowledged founder of the modern study of psychology and the father of the 'pragmatic school' of American psychology, delivered perhaps his most famous addresses in the Gifford lectures, a series of talks he later published as "The Varieties of Religious Experience." In so doing, he clearly distinguished between inner religious experience of higher states of 'spiritual' consciousness and the outer religious forms of rites, rituals, creeds and dogmas. Yet this distinguishment is assiduously avoided by Harris, as it is by Christopher Hitchins, the biologist, Richard Dawkins, and other advocates of Harris' brand of "atheism."

There is a strong argument to be made that pro-science religious critics, like Harris, avoid talking about inner religious experience because it has everything to do with "consciousness," a subject area that science, particularly the mind sciences, are uncomfortable with and, thus, somewhat reluctant to approach.

However, with the increasing recognition of the work of leading scientists like the biologist Rupert Sheldrake, the neuroanatomists V.S. Ramachadran, David Chalmers and Dan Siegel, as well as that of synthesist physical/metaphysical theorists like Alan Wallace or the late David Bohm on consciousness, it can be hoped that the seemingly forever ongoing debate between science and religion may at some near point be conducted within mutually agreed upon terms.

After all, even the once most staid of religious institutions, the Catholic Church, has - if I can paraphrase a master metaphysicist - learned to "render unto Galileo what is Galileo's, and render unto God what is God's." It is high time, then, for religious critics to fully and honestly debate the questions of inner religious experience, instead of narrowly and dishonestly restricting their debate to matters solely of external religious beliefs, dogmas and ethics.