CC34: Pseudo-Enlightenment

My friend Linda is dying of cancer, but this isn't the part I'm worried about. 

Linda was first diagnosed with colon cancer three years ago, and she's had a challenging course. The cancer has metastasized more than once. Most recently, a tumour was found in her brain. She's definitely going to die. The people who love her are going to miss her, but she's going to die, and that's the reality of the situation. Her friends and family will grieve in different ways, depending on whether or not they believe she has transitioned to a loving afterlife in Heaven with God. But prayers and faith will not stop Linda from dying.  

No one, no matter how devout, gets out of this life alive. 

I'm not losing any sleep over the idea that Linda is going to die. It will happen when it happens, and nothing I think, say, or do will have any effect on the outcome. That's up to Linda, her doctors, and her God.  

On the other hand, I did lose sleep -- quite a bit, actually -- worrying about Linda's mental state over the past few months. It's not that I thought she was mentally incompetent in a medical sense. (Her doctors didn't deemed her incompetent, even after the discovery of the brain tumour.) My concern was that Linda was starting to behave like a tyrant -- an abusive, controlling, manipulative tyrant. A bully. A control freak. A nasty person. A cunning person. A person who's not very nice to be around. 

I'm not alone in this assessment. Linda's behaviour became so verbally and emotionally abusive that in August she drove her own mother out of their shared home. Linda's mother is in her mid-80's, so this hasn't been easy for the family. Linda's mother moved out because she couldn't tolerate the abuse from her daughter any longer. (Good for you, Kay!)  

Linda has been relying on her network of friends to help her while she receives palliative care at home, but each time someone objects to her demands, she "fires" them. One by one she has cut off most of her oldest and dearest friends.  

She has also fired several paid assistants. This is because they haven't been doing a good enough job, according to Linda. Some have also been accused of stealing.  

Despite her aggressive behaviour, she was not delusional until quite recently. (Delusional thinking appeared for certain only in the last couple of weeks). Until recently, she showed a truly frightening grip on her own mind, her own logic. Her memory was excellent in all areas where she wanted to exert control. Her ability to organize her environment was fine-tuned to the point of obsession. (She had a pre-existing diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD, the symptoms of which were unfortunately exacerbated by her cancer treatments). She retained an ability to recognize and respond to social cues. She could be polite and friendly when it suited her.  

All this was very upsetting. But I haven't told you the worst part yet. The worst part is that Linda (a devout United Church of Canada Christian) has now come to believe she's spiritually enlightened.  

She believes that her battle with cancer has brought her to a point of heightened spirituality, a state of spiritual purity, a transcendent state of wisdom that her friends and family simply can't understand. 

She speaks often now of her "voice," of her need to have her voice "heard." Regular people can't hear her voice. Only other spiritually enlightened people can hear her. She thinks I'm one of the people who can hear her voice. But what I hear when I listen to her is the paranoid, grandiose thinking of a person who has suffered a psychotic break. Linda is psychotic. Under the stress of her illness and treatment, her biological brain has gone into "self protection mode" (sort of like the dreaded blue screen on a computer), and is refusing to accept external data and input. She's now living entirely inside her own head. This means there's no room in there for empathy. (Empathy requires you to reach out to other people, and temporarily place yourself "inside other people's heads" so you can understand their needs.) Her brain is now a closed system. She's stuck in an infinite thinking loop, which causes her to repeat a small number of ideas again and again, each time expressing them as if they're new and exciting insights that have just occurred to her. To her, it feels as if she's transcended time. She thinks she's living in a state of enlightenment. But really her brain is "fried."  

No one who's in a true state of enlightenment would ever treat people the way she's treating people.  

Linda's doctors really dropped the ball on this one. They failed to arrange appropriate psychiatric or neurological care for her when it would have done some good. Now she has to live out her final days in a state of acute mental dysfunction. This sucks.  

The honest truth is that some people will be relieved when Linda dies because she'll no longer be able to abuse them. 

If this isn't a tragedy, I don't know what is.

"Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits" (James 3: 1-5).  Shown here is one portion of a large early 14th century CE (Yuan Dynasty) wall mural called "Homage to the Highest Power (west wall)" that originated from a monastery in Shanxi Province, China. It's one of a pair of murals that expressed Daoist concepts of cosmic order. As part of the Royal Ontario Museum collection, the two murals underwent a significant conservation effort in the early 1980's to remove earlier repairs that could have damaged the long-term integrity of the original clay, paint, and ink. I know this because I spent 8 weeks on the conservation project as part of a 1982 summer internship program. A properly trained conservator never tries to fill in the gaps by guessing what used to be there or trying to create perfection or wholeness where wholeness no longer exists. Hence, you'll see many spots on these murals where bare clay is allowed to mar the perfection of the overall image. The bare clay spots mark areas where the conservators didn't have enough documentation (e.g. early photographs) to support their theories about the original composition in those areas. It was more honest, in their view, to repaint only those sections where they were certain they were following the original intent and artistic conception of the unknown Daoist artists. Photo credit JAT 2017.

 

CC30: Forgiveness: The Free Lunch You've Been Looking For

Ask most Christian ministers what forgiveness is, and you won't get much of an answer. 

This infuriates me. Christian ministers have been given an incredible opportunity to help people of faith understand what forgiveness is and how to bring forgiveness into their daily lives. In fact, it's one of the few things the church can offer that isn't being offered elsewhere through service clubs, secular charities, and weekend workshops taught by various coaches and New Age gurus. 

I have a book called Helping People Forgive by David W. Augsburger (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996). According to the back cover, Dr. Augsburger is a Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling at Fuller Theological Seminary. I'm sure Dr. Augsburger is a sincere, well-meaning man. But he doesn't know the first thing about the mystical reality of forgiveness. 

Early in his book, Dr. Augsburger says, "A major paradigmatic shift occurred two thousand years ago in the philosophical breakthrough that allowed persons to disavow their past and alter their future through 'forgiveness'" (page 9). 

I disagree. Forgiveness is not about disavowing the past, nor about reversing a moral judgment (Augsburger, page 11). Nor is it (as one of my classmates said, though he ought to know better, considering his interest in restorative justice) a state of "just not thinking about the harm at all."

Forgiveness is an act of great moral courage that requires the person who's doing the forgiving to dredge up from within their own soul all the divine love they're capable of. 

Forgiveness is not for the faint of heart. 

While it's quite within the capacity of all human beings to forgive themselves and to forgive each other (as Jesus taught), it's not something a person can learn overnight. For many people, it will take years to learn how to forgive. Part of the reason for this is that when you open up your heart wide enough that you can hear your own soul, you have to deal with a lot of intense emotions, including painful emotions. Many people don't want to deal with such emotions. 

If you've never learned to master intense, positive, mature emotions such as gratitude, trust, devotion, and courage, you're going to find it difficult to master the emotion of forgiveness. 

Not impossible, but difficult. 

This shouldn't stop you from trying. Each day, your beloved Mother and Father God forgive you for everything you do that's motivated by status addiction, or greed, or rudeness, or cruelty (to name some of the less-than-loving motivations you might choose in a typical day). They forgive you whether or not you ask for forgiveness. They forgive you for everything -- and I mean everything. 

Divine love and forgiveness are like this hoard of 1st century CE Roman coins found in an ancient pottery amphora in Egypt. The original owner buried the coins for safekeeping, but he and his heirs eventually lost track of it. Such treasure hoards, when found today, usually fall under national laws that require the finder to first offer the hoard to a public museum at a fair price. This allows the treasure to be shared equally by all those who visit the museum. In other words, like a museum treasure trove, forgiveness belongs to everyone. Photo credit JAT 2017

HOWEVER, the fact that they forgive you does NOT mean they consider such behaviours acceptable. They forgive you when you're abusive towards others, but they also have an opinion about your decision to be abusive towards others. 

God the Mother and God the Father have free will, just as you have free will. They're within their rights to have an opinion about your harmful actions. They're also within their rights to promptly respond to you, to share their thoughts and feelings with you about the choices you're making. This means, of course, that God is not transcendent and God is not unemotional with regard to your choices (although orthodox Western Christianity would have you believe that God would never cry about the choices you're making.) 

God forgives you whether you ask or not, and by the same token, God is always watching and listening whether you ask or not. God is always watching and listening to you, because this is how God knows when it's time to intervene to help you (whether you ask for help or not). 

God will intervene whether or not you recite the right prayer to God, whether or not you think you're worthy of God's love, or whether or not you think you're worthy of God's forgiveness. 

You don't get a say in these things, because it's not up to you to decide what God should be thinking, feeling, or doing. That's up to God. 

You can't make God stop loving you. You just can't, no matter how hard you try. 

You are one of God's children. They love you. They forgive you. There is no force anywhere in Creation that can block their divine love. The flip side of the coin is this: there's no ritual, no prayer, no temple, no church, no sacrament that can give you more divine love than you already have. God loves everyone -- from the North Pole to the South Pole and all points in between -- in the fullest, most wondrous way imaginable. God's love cannot be purchased. Ever. 

Anyone who tells you that you can only receive God's love by accepting baptism in Christ is lying to you. Give God some credit for being able to love you completely without attaching a bunch of religious strings. 

Trust in God's love and forgiveness as Jesus trusted in God's love and forgiveness. There's only one free lunch in all Creation, and this happens to be it. 

As a mystic, I've worked extensively on the question of forgiveness -- what it is, how to do it, how to let it transform your life. I'll continue to write on this topic in future. 

Thanks for listening. And thanks be to God!

CC18: "Oneness" -- The Great Bait and Switch

There's something particularly insidious about the idea that "We Are All One." 

Yeah, I know, I know . . . it sounds wonderfully spiritual and enlightened to say "we are all One." It sounds, oh, so inclusive, so un-American, so gentle and loving and soothing and healing. It sounds like the very opposite of our society's social isolation and lack of love. It sounds like something the soul would say, doesn't it?

"Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, 'Here we are'? Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together" (Job 38: 34-38). In this passage from the Book of Job, God is reminding Job that human beings, though loved and  cherished by God, are not being offered a chance to feel "transcendence." Photo credit JAT 2023.

Millions of spiritual seekers think so. They're out there trying to become "one" with God, "one" with Creation, "one" with each other. They're trying with all their might to "let go." They've been told by religious and spiritual teachers that they have to dissolve themselves and let go of their wants and needs in order to experience transcendence -- a blissful sense of union with the oneness of all life, a sense that all boundaries have vanished, a sense that they're finally free of all longing and suffering.

This, my friends, is not what mystical union feels like. This is what dissociation from your thoughts, feelings, and inner wisdom feels like. This is what the major mental illness called Atypical Dissociative Disorder feels like. Sometimes the dissociation is so extreme that the person can be said to exhibit psychopathy (also called sociopathy). 

Many people will be furious with me for saying this. But it needs to be said. And it needs to be fully researched. There's no excuse for the church -- or anyone else, for that matter -- to be teaching people to dissociate from their thoughts, feelings, and needs. This is reckless, dangerous, and abusive. It scars people's central nervous systems, typically for life. It's no different from driving a steel rod through their skulls, and turning them all into Phineas-Gage-lookalikes. (Phineas Gage was a 19th century worker who underwent a dramatic personality change after an industrial accident propelled a steel rod through his left cheek, into the orbitofrontal cortex of his brain, and out the top of his head.)

I am a practising mystic. I'm NOT a mystical wannabee who wants to be counted as a mystic but has never actually had a genuine mystical experience. Thomas Merton, famed 20th century Christian monk, contemplative, and writer on mysticism, died in his 50's without ever having experienced a transformative mystical connection with God. Yet he wrote many books on the topic. I think he was a very sincere man, but I don't think it was right for him to claim to be an expert on something he'd never figured out for himself. 

Me, I don't keep track of the many mystical experiences I've had in the past few years, because mystical experiences are now a normal part of my normal, everyday, Canadian life.

I live a normal Canadian life in most ways. I don't live in a religious community, and I don't live according to traditional Christian monastic rules. I have an apartment, a car, and a job. I take courses at the university. I get together with friends and family. I like to listen to pop music, and I love to watch TV (certain shows only, though).

Yet woven all around and within this daily life is a deep spiritual practice that yields a tremendous harvest of mystical connection with God. How have I managed to do this when dedicated, highly religious people like Thomas Merton have failed? I've managed to do this because I've discarded all spiritual teachings that insist "we are all One."

These ripple patterns in a still lake were formed as single water droplets fell from the trees after a heavy rain. As souls, each of us affects the universe in the way these small water droplets bring wavelets to the lake. From a distance, it may look as if the waters of the lake are "all One." But up close, each droplet affects the lake in unique ways. Christian mystics have too often looked at Creation from a distance and chosen to see it as "all One." In fact, Creation is a marvel of diversity and uniqueness. It's Divine Love that creates the background of calmness and beauty against which each soul -- each droplet -- can paint a small picture that says, "I'm here! I may be small, but I matter!" Together, countless small droplets flow and dance and weave together to create infinite wonders. Photo credit JAT 2015.

We are not all One. To say that we should have empathy for other people is NOT the same as saying we are all One. Of course I believe we should have empathy for others. Of course I believe there'd be a whole lot less suffering in the world if more people had empathy for others. Of course I believe that to cultivate empathy is to walk the walk of a spiritual life. 

But this isn't what spiritual leaders mean when they say to you that "we're all One." They mean it literally -- they mean there's literally no real distinction, no real boundary, between you and your God. They mean that boundaries between you and other people are "illusion." They try to use some of the recent findings from physics to "prove" that everything in the universe is really only a manifestation of one big blob of energy in the sky. (Yes, I'm being facetious).

When they say you're One with God, they mean that if you try hard enough to shed all your humanness (like a snake shedding its old skin), you'll be able to merge with that big blob of energy called Creator. In effect, you'll become God, because you'll be able to "remember" that your "inner spark" is God. Once you've achieved this wondrous state of perfection, you'll no longer have to struggle with annoying human challenges such as forgiveness. You'll be above illusory things such as forgiveness. What's to forgive, after all, if the neighbour who harmed you is really just "you" in a different snake suit?

Isn't it an interesting coincidence that when you fully embrace the idea that "we're all One," you don't have to do any spiritual work anymore?

It's a good life, being "One with the All." You don't have to struggle with messy feelings, because you've dissociated yourself from your healthy human emotions. You don't have to feel guilt or shame about your choices, because all choices are illusory anyway. You can smile when other people are crying, because you've detached yourself from all that pain and grief stuff. You can go around pretending you understand what unconditional love is, because words are cheap when you're disconnected from your own inner wisdom, disconnected from your own soul.

The true path of the soul -- a path that has rarely been described in the history of Christian mysticism -- is the path of finding yourself rather than losing yourself. It's the path of finding out who you really are as the soul God made you to be. (Needless to say, everyone's soul is amazingly awesome.) It's the path of finding out what makes you a unique individual in a vast angelic family of other unique individuals (none of whom are better than you -- they're just different from you). It's the path of learning how to deal with powerful, divine emotions such as love, gratitude, courage, devotion, and trust. It's the path of honouring and respecting the differences between us (i.e. our gender, race, age, talents, quirks, and "blind spots"), and at the same time rejoicing in what makes us the same (i.e. our innate ability to love, to learn, to change, to forgive). It's the path of knowing who you are so you can know who other people are. It's the path of respecting boundaries between you and other people. It's the path of respecting boundaries between you and God.

Only then will you be able to enter into a mature and humble relationship with God the Mother and God the Father while you're living your human life.

This is the path that Jesus has taught me. 

I highly recommend it.