By C.J. Smith
BUDDHA FACED THREE TEMPTATIONS. First there were the beautiful dancing girls, but he resisted the urge to sensuality. Seeing that this man was not so easily perturbed, Mara attacked Siddhartha himself, threatening his separate ego-sense self, morphing into the fearsome form of death. Again the Buddha was not fazed. Recognizing that this man was indeed enlightened, Mara had but one choice, to tempt his very enlightened nature, telling him that the simpletons would never understand him, i.e. to reject re-embracing the manifest universe in a wise-compassionate way.
Jesus, too, faced three temptations. First the Devil told him to transform the stones into bread so he could eat, but he declined. Satan then told the Nazarene to bow down and worship him and he would give Jesus authority over all the earth. Imagine the good I could do—perhaps this thought quickly rambled through Jesus’ mind. Again, in perfect equanimity, he shook his head no. Like Buddha, he would not give in to the temptation to fear the death of his separate self. Lastly, Satan attempted to massage his enlightened being: “Throw yourself off the temple mount, for the angels will not let you fall.” But Jesus refused, understanding that to do good in the world he needed a body.
Both sages faced three trials: physical, mental, and spiritual—a kind of integral temptation-ism. And through these trials, both grasped that the enlightened state brought with it a compulsion to teach the noble truth of the good news.
I wanted to respond in some small way to the very thoughtful article by Meera Francois [“West Side Stories,” December 2003] on the seeming lack of Western religion in the integral movement. It’s a huge question and certainly not one I can definitively conclude in this short piece, but for whatever it’s worth, here are some thoughts from my first-person experience as a seminarian and a Westerner conversant in Eastern terminology.
I have a tattoo on my back of a Celtic Cross with a Dharma Wheel. The Celtic Cross is a typical cross with a circle connecting the horizontal and vertical beams, symbolizing in Irish Christianity the amalgamation of Christianity (the Cross) with Paganism (The Circle recalls the Sun of Native Indo-European Earth Religions). Though the dharma wheel and the Cross appear at odds, they represent a fundamental similarity. Take the Cross: imagine it shifted onto a horizontal plane, then gaze at the side-view and make it spin on its axis. What do you have? A wheel—the wheel of existence.
Yet while the union of paganism (or worldliness) and mysticism (pure spirit) can bring extremely high levels of blissful experience to the separate sense self, they cannot bring final liberation. No one knows what brings enlightenment—it is not something that can be gained, but simply a gift. We understand conditions that we as humans can do to promote the possibility, but we cannot engineer moksha. All we know is that somehow the experience seems to coincide with a life spent trying just about everything else—even subtle states of consciousness—that nevertheless leave one with a separate self-sense… terrified, grasping and avoiding.
The true sage gives up searching and eventually just accepts What Is by throwing him/herself on the wheel-cross and allowing the crucifixion of the small mind to occur so that the Resurrection of Big Mind might happen. In this absolute sense there is only one prayer in Christianity—“thy will be done,” a will that we now know to be evolutionary, creative, and post-metaphysical.
For me the tattoo symbolizes the best of both traditions—the Western combination of Transcendence (Christianity) and Immanence (Paganism) with the East (The Wheel). Or it could be interpreted as the merging of Evolution (West) and Enlightenment (The East).
Integral theorist Ken Wilber states that he has never met a mystic “on” 24 hours a day, i.e. continually in the state of sahaj. At the risk of sounding like a heretic, maybe we could imagine Jesus according to that understanding.
One of my favorite scenes in the Gospels is the Last Supper. Jesus, as per Passover custom, prays in thanksgiving to The Lord of the Universe for Her-His goodness in granting us breath, food, and companionship. This moment is a moment of a subtle duality, though an enormously profound one. Moments later his body-mind drops, as the nondual voice of I AM speaks through him saying: “This is my body, this is my blood, eat and drink it. Whenever you do this re-member me.” There is only This: a piece of bread, a cup of wine, the love of your friends and the truth staring you in the eyes.
The Hindus Say:
The World is an illusion, Brahma alone is real [Causal realization]
BUT
Brahma is the World. [Nondual realization]
The Buddhists Say:
Form is Emptiness [Causal realization]
BUT
Emptiness is Form [Nondual realization]
The Christians Say:
The Father and I are One
AND
There is only Christ [Causal realization]
BUT
Christ is only loving himself in all her members [Nondual realization]
Religion uses analogical language when it talks of God as a personal being, maintains metaphysical distinctions between the human and the divine, and generally exists to strengthen, and not crucify, the separate self-sense. Religion as myth is simply the Great Self searching for itself in an externalized format. Nevertheless, all the world religions, Western or Eastern, acknowledge to greater or lesser degrees the absolute truth of realization beyond the religious and analogical. In Christianity it is called the apophatic, where God is said to be not love, not a person, not a thing.
No Western Christian wrote more profoundly of this experience than Meister Eckhart. In his own words:
A great master [i.e. Eckhart himself] says that his breakthrough is nobler than his flowing out, and this is true. When I flowed out from God, all things spoke: God is. But this cannot make me happy, for it makes me understand that I am a creature. In the breakthrough, on the other hand, where I stand free of my own will and of the will of God and of all his works and of God himself, there I am above all creatures and am neither God nor creature. Rather, I am what I was and what I shall remain now and forever. Then I receive an impulse which shall bring me above all the angels. In this impulse I receive wealth so vast that God cannot be enough for me in all that makes her God, and with all his divine works. For in this breakthrough I discover that God and I are one. There I am what I was, and I grow neither smaller nor bigger, for there I am an immovable cause that moves all things. Here, then, God finds no place in people, for people achieve with this poverty what they were in eternity and will remain forever. Here God is one with spirit. [from SERMON 15]
May the peace of Christ which surpasses all understanding shine in our hearts always. God bless you all.
FOR FURTHER READING:
Alan Watts: The Supreme Identity
or Myth and Ritual in Christianity
Jim Marion: Putting on the Mind of Christ
Andrew Harvey: Son of Man
Bernadette Roberts: Journey to No-Self
C.J. Smith is a young seminarian in the Roman Catholic Church. He resides in New York and is, as of this writing, still celibate.
