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Puncturing the Cynicism of Our Age

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The motivations of any professional include supporting themselves and their family. In being drawn to a new career in hypnotherapy, I am somewhat unique at HMI in that I have no dependents, and no expectations that I will have a comfortable retirement. In contrast, many of my peers-in-training are openly concerned about financial success, and some among the instructors project aspirations of personal wealth.

The conversation I walked into during workshop break went a little farther than that. Three students and the facilitator were agreeing that “you can talk about love, but ultimately everything is about money.” I guess that my reaction was incongruous, for they all turned to look at me. I tried to soften the pregnant silence with a jocular “Speak for yourself!”

The retort came from the man lazing in the recliner on the stage. I had to turn to see the subtle smirk on his face after he said “It’s all about money to you, too.” I tilted my head to the side in a manner that I am certain appeared calculating, and he reiterated his assertion. Stepping closer to him, I firmly asserted “You don’t tell me what I think.”

Turning back to the astonished triad, I explained:

“It’s all about power. There are two kinds of power: some power you can store – that’s what money is, in fact, a way of storing power. And there’s another kind – the kind that has to be about the world doing work. In my experience of life, there’s far more of the second kind of power than there is of the first.

“And that is why I love unconditionally: because I like to see power at work.”

The other students opened their mouths, but the facilitator closed the conversation with “Very well put, Brian.”

Separation of Church and State III

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My response to the Freedom From Religion Foundation turned their position on its head. Rather than keeping religious leaders out of politics, we need to keep political leaders out of religion. The tendency for leaders to cross lines is one of the greatest dangers to religious practice.

Steve Matichuk offers a summary of the absolutist Christian position. Essentially, as Christ seeks a universal brotherhood, any celebration of national identity dilutes his message. Steve holds out for some accommodation. My response below:

This is very close to my mind at this point, as I am just working through a video teaching on Revelation 13. In Revelation 12 the dragon (or Satan) is expelled from heaven, and in 13 he plots his dominance of earth by raising up tyrannical governments that are supported by hypocritical religious practices.

On the other hand, in Christian terms some governments are better than others. We should celebrate actions that manifest Christian ideals, while avoiding at all cost the use of government to enforce Christian morality.

As I emphasize in the video, the real battle is in the human mind, which continues to evolve after birth. Beginning with the collaborative experience of nursing, the brain actually develops centers that support socialization, culminating in adulthood with the center responsible for altruism – or what Christians would call “Unconditional Love.”

The holidays that you list are manifestations of many of the virtues listed in 2 Peter 1:5-8. But it is those virtues that should be celebrated – not some abstract ideal like our “freedom.” We are all yoked to God’s purpose, and so none of us should consider ourselves to be privileged with absolute freedom.

Recidivism

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When contemplating the selection from among the disciples of the Apostles, Luke records [6:12]:

Now during those days Jesus went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God.

Now this is an interesting proposition for prayer: the junior partner in the triune turning to himself for wisdom. Illogical, even bizarre? I can understand it only by assuming that Jesus was a pseudopod emitted from the Holy presence, not in possession of all his spiritual faculties.

Of course, as a demonstration it is instructive to read  of the devotion and trust that Jesus invested in the Father. If he was moved to pray, how should not we as well? And conceiving of him as a man, I would not rue Jesus that comfort.

A common elaboration of the Crucifixion is that it was not just physically agonizing, but also spiritually devastating. We have the great heart-rending cry:

Eloi! Eloi! Lama sabachthani?

[Mark 15:34]

There was no answer, because there could be none. God took on flesh because it was only through flesh that evil could be healed. Once Jesus assumed that burden, it was his and his alone.

The angels cannot change their nature – it is the grace and curse of humanity to possess that capacity. Thus God testified to Cain:

Sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.

[Gen. 4:7]

Jesus was the culmination of this seeking after strength. He arose out of a culture devoted to the seeking after purity, and chose to allow sin into his heart so that its consequences could be healed.

The bulk of the BIble demonstrates the difficulty of this accomplishment. The men raised to greatness always struggle with their frailty. Jacob’s lust makes him little more than a seed dispenser to two competing sisters and their handmaids, and his favorite Joseph leads monotheism into subjection to a polytheistic culture. David succumbs to desire, clearing the way for marriage by sending his friend into battle to die, and Solomon again opens the door to polytheistic practices.

This recidivism illuminates the challenge of loving unconditionally: to be merciful is to grant power to those lacking the ability to discipline their behavior. Every parent confronts this in the two-year-old and adolescent, but somehow we believe that grace given by God is proof against this corruption. To the wise, though, the recidivism of the Bible is the greatest possible proof of God’s compassion for us. He pursues the loving embrace even against the evidence of our unfaithfulness.

Of course, in demonstrating the infinite depths of divine compassion, the heroes of the Old Testament are problematical role models. This came to a head in Islam, which largely sanitizes the evidence of personal frailty. A Muslim scholar disputed with me over David’s betrayal of friendship, explaining that the sanitized history was enforced by Muhammed’s (pbuh) son-in-law, Ali, and justified in that opportunists used David’s behavior to justify their own lecherous license.

The consequence of this idealization of Biblical heroes is that the program of monotheistic escalation (the only God worth worshipping is perfect and infinite) extends to the heroes of the Bible. They are no longer human but gods themselves, immune to temptation and error.

So what of Jesus, absorbing the burden of human sin on the cross? We know that he showed reluctance and despair in the event. This supports my sense that divine love comes at the first possible moment. In the New Testament as in the Old, the manifestation of grace is subjected to pressures almost certain to destroy it. Among those are the unfaithfulness of those to whom salvation is offered. Returning to Nazareth early in his ministry, Jesus is astonished by their cynicism, which makes him unable to offer power in any great measure.

So I conclude: as monotheism is the pursuit of a truly human god, in that pursuit Jesus is truly our god, struggling against our sinfulness while healing us so that we may sin again. Paradoxically, as we approach more nearly to his grace, that struggle intensifies. The assault on his virtues are more focused, the wounds more intimate. As God cried out again and again in the Old Testament, would we not expect Christ to be tried by anger and fear?

Even perhaps, at times, to be overcome by human impatience and frustration?

Inner Purge

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I apologize to those who find that this is “too much information.” I am more aware of my spiritual process than most, and part of the purpose of this blog is to help others understand the nature of personality. One of our biggest challenges is figuring out how to get our parts to work together, and encouraging discordant elements to seek opportunities elsewhere.

After the sudden departure of the embedded systems supervisor in November, after winter break the team arrived back at work to learn that the senior hardware designer had accepted a position elsewhere. The last two weeks have been a scramble, and I’ve been pretty brutal about testing others in assessing whether I believe that the company can survive.

Strangely, that process has been accompanied by a deep-rooted sense of joy. It has no specific source that I can identify.

So I had plenty to process last night, and found it hard to nod off. I had activated Microsoft Solitaire early this week, and got involved in trying to catch up on the daily challenges. I’m used to the Sudoku challenges which I often polish off in under ten minutes. Solitaire has an element of chance to it, and I found myself simply unable to complete some of the more difficult puzzles. I’m sure it’s possible, and I indulged myself in playing the same challenges again and again. Giving up around 11:30, I settled in to sleep.

As a man, I have found that the greatest temptation of unconditional love is (as I have alleged elsewhere) to have women offer you many opportunities to bind love to the world. Of course, it’s not that simple. Most of them want to bind that love to them personally, maybe extending to the children that will enter the world through them. I keep on sending out to them “Yes, thank-you, but what about all this?” I conclude with a projection of personality that makes them aware of just how deeply and broadly love is embedded in the world.

But we all dream, of course, and so I wake up in the middle of most nights to throbbing arousal. Until recently, a specific woman was always presented as the focus of desire. Early on they were media personalities linked to my deep past, but more recently there has been a kaleidoscope of ladies that I encounter at dance celebrations, yoga and in coffee shops, many of whom I haven’t even engaged in conversation.

I’ve been slowly boring through that facade, and recently encountered the admiration of a woman without form. She tried to hide from me, but I pinned her down and got a good look into her before turning my attention elsewhere.

Last night’s encounter was something similar. A powerful arousal without focus, just the sense of a feminine personality. I tried to pin it down to push it away, thinking about being able to function at work today, but it was too diffuse. Frustrated, I engaged in the mechanical process of release.

Then they began to arrive, woman after woman, as though the goal was to find someone to attach this passion to, a material manifestation that would be sympathetic to the goals of the originator. I simply pushed them all away, one by one.

As I laid in my bed afterwards, a powerful sense of unease entered me. I had a vision of another room, decorated with bright colors. I focused more and more intently, and then something emerged from the center of my chest – a sickening brown vapor that disappeared reluctantly into the ground.

The vision disappeared, and I was left with a powerful sense of energy along the parasympathetic nodes that line the spine. It was accompanied by a great warmth in the muscles lying over my shoulder blades. And I thought:

I’m getting my wings back.

A Matter of Character

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In his final State of the Union address, Barack Obama eschewed partisan politics and stretched for the heights of statesmanship. Frustrated in his most heart-felt passions by the institutions that foment mistrust of government, his program of political renewal is built around appeals to cherished notions of our national character. While composed of practical steps – among them redistricting and campaign finance reform, voting rights, and extension of public education by two years – its illustrations were drawn not from  isolated instances of specific lives transformed by those benefits, but from abstract descriptions of relationships transformed when we act from hope and trust.

Obama supported the authority of his prescription by outlining the results of seven years of quietly doing what was possible while his opponents trumpeted doom. This includes enhanced international cooperation to isolate and weaken the agents of violence, improved terms of trade to protect workers and the environment, enhancement of personal security with health care reform, and revitalization of America’s manufacturing and energy sectors.

His restrained rhetoric is set against a collection of voices that trumpet conflict. This is not limited to the field of Republican presidential nominees – the growing strength of the Sanders campaign is fueled by harsh rhetoric targeting the financial elite. I believe that the popularity of those voices reflects the sense that for the average American, security is precarious. This is supported by polling that reveals that as regards their condition, 49% of Americans have become more angry over the last year.

As wages stagnate and costs rise, inevitably every choice faced by a working family is fraught with consequence. Any single error can set us on the hard road to poverty. In that state, our natural desire is to make our choosing less difficult – in much popular political rhetoric, to remove the impediments imposed by the state. Unfortunately, this logic appeals to the interests of those that siphon financial energy from the system. One of the Koch brothers, after the federal investigation of climate science racketeering by Mobil-Exxon, appeared in public to state that in many ways he is a liberal – he believes that businesses are most successful when the individual worker is free to make his own choices. As “success” to Mr. Koch translates to “higher profits,” what history has shown is that a family man will accept lower wages when facing competition from a younger, unburdened candidate. “Freedom” as understood by Koch translates to a lack of security that eventually pits every man against his neighbor for the benefit of owners.

In his book The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment, Geoffrey Kabaservice argued that the American century was birthed on the battlefields of WWII. For the first time, the American elite went to war, and came back appreciating the strength of the brotherhood that leads men to sacrifice their lives in service. It was this brotherhood that motivated the Veterans’ Acts that opened college and home ownership to the lower classes. And it was the clawing back of those gifts by that generation’s children that steadily weakened the lower classes as we entered the 21st century.

The fragility of the post-war Golden Age must lead us to ask: is Obama right? Is our national character one of quiet service, or a narcissistic struggle for privilege that slowly grinds down the weak?

Against the cynicism of the realist, Obama marshaled the words of the man that prophesied his presidency. In his last public address, Martin Luther King, Jr. promised his audience that they as a people would see the Promised Land. Obama borrowed not from that speech but from King’s Nobel Peace Prize address, in which the prophet heralded the ultimate victory of “unarmed truth and unconditional love.”

That may sound like another flimsy basis for policy prescriptions, but it actually leads to an analysis that shows the inevitability of our exit from this era of untrammeled selfishness. Throughout history, when economic activity expands into a new scale (from the city to the state, from state to nation, from nation to globe), those managing the expansion are able to erode the rights of those that created the technologies and products that allow the expansion. They do that by transferring knowledge to impoverished labor markets (or by importing cheaper labor). By selling goods back into the originating society, owners are able to reap enormous profits.

What ultimately happens, however, is that as wages equalize, poor workers motivated by the hope that they, too, would achieve the rights of their richer cousins gain the courage to organize to secure those rights. Having played out the cheap trick of producing in cheaper labor markets, the elite is brought under ever increasing pressure to actually increase the value of labor through organizational strategy. They then confront the truth that a competent and creative worker is the best source of operational improvements, and that personal security is essential to avoid fear that distracts her attention.

This has been played out again and again through history, in each of the transitions listed above. We now face the last transition to the global stage, and growing economic instability in  China suggests that the cheap trick has just about played itself out.

So if the morality of Obama’s appeal doesn’t resonate in the pragmatic mind, I believe that it yet reflects the wisdom of historical experience. His prescriptions are the investments that we need to make now to ensure that when the burden of poverty is leveled, we as a nation are prepared to lead the charge into a future of common accomplishment safeguarded by international compacts of economic and environmental justice.

While the elite may create panic with rumors of “one world government” and “black helicopters,” the past proves that the lower classes will eventually recognize their common experience, and organize to ensure that the government that creates the rules by which power is allocated will do so in a way that ensures that power servers that greater good, rather than the whims of the elite. All the lower classes need do is to marshal the courage to believe in the commonality of their experience (which is the root of all truth) and recognize that when they invest in each others’ power (loving unconditionally), they strengthen themselves.

God and Human

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One of the more frustrating problems faith is trying to make sense of pronouncements that characterize realities that we cannot understand. In Christianity, a great deal of dialog, derision and good-old-fashioned blood-letting revolves around the concept that Jesus was at once both God and man. It is related to the problem of the Holy Trinity that was the most controversial issue in the Council of Nicea, and continues to divide the Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

To critical onlookers this probably appears to be ludicrous ado about nothing, merely an attempt to layer a veneer of respectability over a huckster’s mumbo-jumbo. But to those that take the program of Christianity seriously, the mystery is a real problem. Jesus clearly expected us to be more. That is hinted by his repeated pronouncement “Your faith has healed you.” It becomes more explicit when he tells the disciples “there is nothing I do that you cannot do yourselves” leading him to observe peevishly, when waken on a stormy sea, “Oh ye of little faith!” And of course, ultimately he avers to his students “Things even greater than these shall you do.”

Clearly, Jesus’s expectation was that he was only an existence proof, not a singular phenomenon.

So how do we become like him? What is this faith? What power does it allow to enter into us? And as Jesus demonstrated, how do we establish a permanent and continuous living with and through that power?

The key, I believe, is clear through Jesus’s teachings. He began with parables that characterize the unconditional and infinitely forgiving love of the Father. At the midpoint, he simplifies the Law as “Love your God, and love your neighbor as though he was yourself.” And finally, in the great struggle in Gethsemane, he conquers the fears of the flesh and surrenders himself fully to his love of the world. And in his resurrection, his glory testifies to the authority earned in his remaking of heaven and earth through the mechanism of his sacrifice.

So he is God and Human. But why God? Why the best, most powerful God? What is it about love that is so powerful?

To understand this, we have to turn to the realm of the Almighty, where the ethereal host evolves under different laws of physics. What we know is that angels do not have flesh. They are souls living in pure relation. What is common between their realm and ours is that some of those relationship are beneficial, and some harmful.

Two forms of relation are particularly potent. First is the relation of Death, which creates insuperable barriers between the angels, preventing them from entering in relation. Although there is a certain restfulness in death, by its very nature its grasp is difficult to escape. The second is Unconditional Love, which seeks restlessly to maximize the benefits of relation. It is a force that helps angels escape circumstances that suppress their expression, liberating them into mutually beneficial engagements that generate new and unexpected possibilities. As we are told, liberated spirits facilitate the spread of love by “singing” its praises.

In the Book of Revelation, John is brought into Heaven. While Heaven is not the Realm of the Almighty, but reflects its dynamic. Around a throne occupied by Unconditional Love, twenty-four principal angels are gathered wearing crowns. When the living creatures sing the praises of love, the angels are compelled to lay aside their crowns and bow in praise to the one on the throne.

Why is this so? If so powerful, why should love sit on a throne, isolated from us, guarded in fact by fearsome predators? That is not its desire, as revealed in the final Chapters, where no light and no temple is found in the city of God because love has been woven into its very fabric.

The problem is that when offered power, we think first of ourselves. Trapped here in this physical existence, full of pain and struggle, we use our strength to compel others to serve us. We violate the compact of unconditional love. We corrupt it with “sin.” To become as Jesus, we must surrender our self-concern. We must think only of others, and trust that they will concern themselves with us.

This was the compact that Adam and Eve sundered in the Garden of Eden. Given the task of tending God’s kingdom on earth, they thought of themselves. God tried for many generations to overcome that sin, but the gap was too great between his perfection and our fallen state. Jesus came down to experience that fallen state, to struggle with its frailty, to have his compassion sharpened on the point of our daily peril. It was only in the intimacy of the disease that healing could be given.

So this is how Jesus was both God and Human: he was a one-way street. Through him, only love came. Impervious to self-concern, no sin went back the other way. And through the humanity of his courage, love gave those he encountered the strength to turn aside from fear and accept the healing power of love.

And finally, in his encounter with death on the cross, love suffused that presence and turned it into the agent of peace. Death is no longer a final separation, but an agent that brings surcease when fear pushes us into violence. Having submitted death, the Prince of Peace is capable of cocooning us in love until we recall our better selves.

So this is the answer: in submitting to the teachings of Christ, we become gods in loving one another, and thus receive from each other the power to bring good into the world, and thus experience good to the limit of our capacity.

Why God Is Love

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As a man of faith, my greatest challenge is seeing selfish behavior validated in the world of things. In the extreme case, the perpetrator of psychological abuse secretly withholds resources from the victim, blames others, and then meters out sustenance while saying “You’re so worthless. Nobody will ever love you like I do.” As a result, many victims actually identify with their abusers and seek to protect them from the authorities.

How can the victim see past that trap? Typically, it’s by looking at the circumstances of their abuser. People that love us share their power with us. If we are truly loved, we should feel stronger every day.

So let’s now step back and take the long view of this process – the process of merging our souls into heaven. This is described in all of the great religious traditions. But should we seek that so eagerly? Heaven is described as a place of love, but why should it be that way?

We know that there is conflict there: Lucifer rebelled against God. So could heaven not be a place just like Earth, with different types of pain, the pain of angels struggling against each other?

Imagine the evolution of the angels. Did they have wars and battles before love ruled the heavens? If so, why did they choose, ultimately, to submit to Unconditional Love?

To understand this, we have to recognize the difference between angels and us. Angels are beings of pure spirit. They relate to each other not through the exchange of material objects, but through interpenetration of their spirits. It is impossible for an angel to destroy another angel, only for one to suborn another’s will to their own. So naturally, selfish angels would want to establish boundaries that kept their captives from having the opportunity to join another personality.

Then along comes Unconditional Love. Love says, as I explained above, “Let me create strength in you.” What an attractive proposition! Who could resist it? But unconditional love goes beyond that. It says “I love everything equally, and want nothing for myself.” So the selfish angel, in serving only itself, must push away unconditional love, thus losing the benefits of its power. The alternative is to be infected by Unconditional Love, and thus to submit to the re-organization and eventual liberation of its captives.

Is renouncing love that a big deal? Maybe not initially, but you see all those smaller angels now find a place of refuge inside unconditional love. It enters into them and says: “Look, if you join with this other angel, you’ll be more powerful.” Unconditional Love is a restless seeking to find strength in the other angels. As that occurs, the angels that submit to its tutelage become more and more powerful.

In the warring regions of heaven, parts are broken off from the combatants, and some turn to Unconditional Love as a refuge. The most aggressive angels, to penetrate that refuge, must allow themselves to be infected by unconditional love. If they manage to seize part of the community of Unconditional Love, the lost part immediately withers and loses its vitality. Fighting against Unconditional Love is a losing proposition all the way.

So in the realm of the angels, once Unconditional Love came into being, there was no sensible angel that would resist its ministrations, no selfish angel that would survive an assault on it, and no conflict between angels that would not liberate pieces to join Unconditional Love. In the end, the corporate personality of heaven had to be ruled by love.

As we will be here on Earth, at least once enough of us realize that the soul is what matters most.

A Christian Reaction to Buddhism

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Ethan Nichtern is one of my favorite people, and has an exceptionally clear and gracious understanding of the path he represents. As any wise teacher, he understands that wisdom is rooted in our personal life experience, and so that each of us arrives at wisdom in our own time.

As Nichtern presents in “The Road Home”, Buddhism is a technology for self-introspection and other-relation. Adherents are taught a method for analysis of the operation of their mind. Given Ethan’s lucid description of that method, we could advance a critique of Buddhism through categorical comparison with records of objective and subjective experience. I am hesitant to do this because I know from personal experience that Ethan is reticent, as many spiritual practitioners, to expose deeper truths to minds that have not attained a certain strength and discipline. I believe that he leaves much unsaid about spiritual experience.

I am absolutely convinced that Buddhism is a powerful technology for spiritual self-assessment. While it might seem like a matter of no lasting consequence, just learning to sit in stillness for ten minutes is an important manifestation of both mental strength and discipline. The concern that must be addressed of any spiritual teaching, however, is what guides the application of that strength. Nichtern asserts that most of us are conditioned with self-destructive perceptions, and that when we learn that the world does not actually behave according to those perceptions, we are released into a playful and compassionate exploration of life’s possibilities. However, I have experience with people that attain a certain power and enter into childish exploitation of others. Nichtern does not, by my assessment, advance a proof that exploitation is excluded by Buddhist practice.

But he does offer an experience, describing a night flight cross-country to an empty home. Overcome with sadness, he begins to weep, and does so without self-judgment. Nichtern does not describe his submission as leading to any catharsis, except a certain satisfaction that he was open to the experience of the moment. So why does he advance this as a moment of profound self-connection? What was he connecting to that made this experience stand out from any other?

Perhaps simply that at its deepest throes, he heard his father’s voice reiterating a wisdom believed fervently to be profound, “I live in the center of my awareness.” To me, this is the key: the love that others tender to us is not bound by time or space. It is delivered in the form that we have conditioned ourselves to receive it, in the moments of our greatest receptivity. Love alone has that power, the power to heal and strengthen our souls.

Those that practice exploitation do so at the cost of that great benefit.

I don’t know how Ethan would respond to this characterization. Buddhism is, at its core, a method for linearizing our reaction to experience with the goal of subjecting it to analysis. But we know that is not the way that the mind works. The mind is a parallel-processing device, with many threads of interpretation and analysis combining to produce a reaction. For this reason, Buddhism may be the province of rational thinkers capable of forcing reaction through the logical circuitry of the cortex. In Nichtern’s development, I certainly find support for that conclusion. Even as a Ph.D. physicist and having processed previously the wisdom of Thich Nhat Hahn, I can only read a chapter at a time before needing to rest.

From the Christian perspective, human intelligence is a key and essential capacity in bringing love into the world. Christianity holds, however, that while our lives appear to drown with sorrow, this reality is suffused with a divine love that will nurture us if we honor its constraints, foremost of which is that we not use its power willfully to cause pain. This gift and covenant is what Christians honor in their worship of “God.”

Now, as I have said, I find much in Nichtern’s writing that suggests that he has experienced the power of this love. So why the reticence? Perhaps it is found in his assertion that Buddhism is not a religion, in that it does not “tell people what to believe.” But it is exactly a connection with divine love that is needed by those that cannot draw upon mental discipline, but must rely upon the urgings of their hearts.

Nichtern characterizes the problem of karma, or negative conditioning, as a problem of self-trust. Through the development of that trust, he records that he eventually recognized the full depth of his father’s love, and perhaps thus freed himself from the negative conditioning of growing up in a broken home. Did he understand the experience that way? In other words, has he learned to trust in the love of others?

Buddhism strikes me as a tradition rooted in a failure of that trust. It asserts that we must first learn to love ourselves before learning to enter confidently into relation with others. Christianity takes the opposite approach. It teaches, “Abandon yourself to divine love. Surrender yourself to trust in that presence. Allow it to guide you, heal you, and use you to do great works of healing in the world, and thus to enjoy the admiration and gratitude of others.”

I find this to be compelling. The reason that we have to work so terribly hard to understand our reaction to our perceptions is because we are trapped in our viewpoint. It is so much easier for an outsider to see us in the context of our relationships. If that outsider is trust-worthy, they can offer us insights that would take us years to achieve on our own. So why not draw upon the strength of the only completely trustworthy guide, the presence of divine love that awaits our embrace?

I know that in human relationships, Nichtern would identify with this truth. When I met him at a Buddhist Geek’s conference, he stood out as the contrary voice that insisted that growth to maturity required the sangha, or spiritual community.

Considering that context, Nichtern does allude to the burdens of the role of the disciplined mind. I expressed them once to another Buddhist who complained that his meditative practice was regressing. He found himself struggling to prevent extraneous thoughts from entering his mind. I suggested that he simply send them metta, or an offering of acceptance and love. I then explained that in my experience those voices were not extraneous, but the thoughts of people reaching out for strength. I encouraged the gentleman to embrace this new and incredibly important stage of his practice.

The final stage of Buddhist discipline, the Vajrayana tradition of Tantric practices, organizes the collaborative generation of reservoirs of positive intention. At the workshop during which he warned me against the path of the “suicide bodhisattva”, Ethan introduced the practitioners to White Tara, the Buddhist manifestation of loving kindness. While many Christians might have considered this to be an invitation to demonic worship, I recognize it as just another engagement with the divine emissaries that Christians characterize as angels. Consequently I believe that Buddhism must come in contact with the power of the ultimate “suicide bodhisattva”, Jesus of Nazareth.

A truth that I am fairly certain Nichtern has not internalized, or reserved in his writing to this point, is that our bodies are wonderfully designed to channel love to create healing. Submitting to the action of tears, feeling deeply our sorrow: those are practices that inform love when and where it needs to do its work. Christ was the ultimate manifestation of this truth: after preaching that there was nothing we can do either to alienate God or to gain preferential claims on his love, Jesus surrendered body, mind and spirit to the purpose of healing humanity of the self-destructive consequences of the predatory programming that we brought forward from our Darwinian past. In his resurrection, he delivered compelling proof of the power of love for those that rely upon their hearts, and thus must trust in faith.

In the eventuality of their encounter with Christ, I am confident that the power of the Buddhist collective and its Tantric constructs will be a magnificent aid to those of simple faith. I am also confident that Nichtern, whether or not he understands it as such, already guides others to the love that secures their peace of mind.

Healing is a Messy Process

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I was heading to San Francisco Airport to catch a flight out to Washington D.C., and was glad that I had left early. Traffic down the 580 to the 238 was an absolute disaster. I could feel the tension and frustration in the air as traffic crawled forward. I put out the thought that we should try to give that energy to the emergency crew working to clear the accident. When I finally reached the scene, they were just loading the victim – a motorcyclist who had gone under a car at high speed – into the ambulance. I could feel his spirit swirling in the air, terrified of the prospect of re-entering the broken body. Firmly, I projected, “It’s time to put yourself back together.”

“Why,” we might ask ourselves, “why does God let things like this happen?” All the wasted time, the pain and frustration: can’t he do any better than that?

I can’t give a answer that is going to bring consolation. The only answer I have is of the “that’s just the way that things are” kind. Unconditional Love, which is the foundation of God, does not judge. Why? Because if it judged, it would justify the use of force, which would give authority to destructive spirits.

So what can Unconditional Love do? It can echo the “yes” of things that feel joy. It can enter into productive and healing relationships and support them with its presence. Jesus put it this way [NIV Matt. 18:20]:

For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.

Not with one alone, but in even the smallest group.

Simply, Unconditional Love supports things that work for us together, but it’s up to us to find those things. It doesn’t prescribe for us – it doesn’t want us to kneel and pray if that doesn’t work for us. It doesn’t want us to bear lashes if that doesn’t satisfy our sense of justice. But neither will it deny the martyr the grace of surrendering life to prove to the tormentors that love is stronger than fear, and thus to infect them with love.

Why do bad things happen to good people? Really, because their light is needed in the darkness. Yes, it’s painful, but if in those moments more of us took the attitude

Dear God, help me to shine brightly so that the captives can see freedom, and those that persecute me can see that their abuse only serves to liberate my spirit into knowledge of you.

Well, things might go a little bit faster. No, we won’t avoid pain, but we will have the security of knowing that our suffering has a purpose, just as did the suffering of Jesus. No, not every tormentor will chose healing, but when the light becomes bright enough, they will be forced to flee.