Dr. Freeman

While the popular New Age philosophy of “cosmic balance” tells us that all pairs of opposites (e.g. masculine/feminine, light/dark) are really one and the same, Integral philosophy (as pioneered by Ken Wilber) has a more discerning position: things which seem to be one and the same are really diametrical opposites.

Just a few examples of this from Ken’s own body of work include: states & stages of consciousness, pre-rational (madness) & trans-rational (mystical) structures of consciousness, qualitative depth (better) & population span (bigger) and the “mutual interpenetration of all things” in quantum physics & Eastern mysticism – all of these opposing categories were once seen to be one and the same, but in the clear light of Integral theory they are now seen to be describing very different dimensions of reality.

Likewise, it is widely accepted in the New Age movement that “All religions are the same”, different paths up the same mountain – and this is said to be especially true of Christianity and Buddhism. In other words, according to the conventional wisdom, while these two faith traditions seem to be different in their exoteric surface features they are really one and the same in their esoteric deep features - i.e. their external rites and rituals may look different, but their interior essence (usually a version of Non-dual awareness) is very much the same…

Here, I want to challenge this alleged spiritual/esoteric identity of Christianity and Buddhism and suggest that the truth is exactly the opposite – the exoteric surface features of Buddhism and Christianity are much the same - they both have priests, temples, scriptures, ceremonies, alters, sacred postures, mantras, secret brotherhoods - it is precisely in their esoteric depths that they are divided. To begin, all religions believe that we humans are caught up in a net of sin (suffering, delusion, ignorance) – and that there is some way out, a way of liberation, salvation or Enlightenment. But as to what constitutes the way out it seems to me that no two institutions in the world contradict each other so flatly as Christianity and Buddhism…

At G.K. Chesterton pointed out: simply consider the startling differences in the style of their religious art, in which the soul of these religions is made visible to us. No two inner religious ideals could be more opposite than a painting of a medieval Christian saint with eyes wide open, looking with fierce intensity outwards, staring at the world in astonishment and anguished intimacy – and a painting of a Buddhist sage with eyes shut in blissful peace, and with a peculiar inward intent oblivious to the happenings of the world around him. And the contention here is that there must be some real divergence at the innermost core of these traditions which produces such opposing symbols.

From another angle, It is a commonplace stance in many spiritual circles to say that the esoteric core of all the great traditions ascribes to the same fundamental notion of Absolute Truth in terms of a direct apprehension of Non-dual Awareness – i.e. the simple recognition that “There is only Spirit” as ones always already Free Self, a Self that existed from before the Big Bang and is fully present at each and every point of the temporal process. From the perspective of radical Non-dual Truth - which is said to be the ultimate realization of all the world’s great religion - the whole universe arises inside ones very own Big Mind, and it is just here that Buddhism and Christianity diverge in their central teachings.

To put it simply, Buddhism teaches compassion for all sentient beings because they are ultimately manifestations of one’s own true Self, while Christianity is grounded in love – and real love requires separation between persons. The Eastern sage says we are all Spirit (as un-qualifiable Emptiness) showing up with many different faces or aspects, that there are no real walls of individuality between different persons in the world. However, the Christian impulse is to love precisely that which is Other, to love the other person in the absolute singularity of who they are, to love that which is not-I.

A Christian is not called to love someone because they arise inside of his/her own Self but because they are different, strange, foreign, because that person shows up in my world from some unheard of time and place, just as a man loves a woman because she is entirely different from himself. To put it bluntly, in the Non-dual traditions of the East we are not to Love our neighbors, rather we are to Be our neighbors, but as G. K. Chesterton put it, “If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible.”

So it’s not so much that Love has no opposite (as the original punk monk himself Stuart Davis kindly suggests), but rather that opposites make Love possible!

Or again, where teachers of Eastern Enlightenment (e.g. Andrew Cohen) consider the insidious ego-personality to be fallen, like a drop of water that must return to a the vast ocean of Emptiness, it is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little fragments, because they are living, breathing fragments. So in contrast to the teachers of Impersonal Enlightenment that recognize no ultimate boundaries in reality, Christianity has always insisted that the boundary between God and the world (and the collective passions of human history) is not something to be regarded as unreal, illusory, or deficient. That is, the Judeo-Christian tradition has always seen Creation as “good, very good” (Genesis), not merely a veil of ignorance or illusion, and as such God wants us all to become real persons with a capacity to love one another, rather than the position of the Eastern traditions which teach one large ego to love him/her self and to have regard for other people because they arise inside ones own awareness…

So Christian love desires real personality, and personality requires division. That is, love requires that two people are different, set apart from each other, so that they are inseparable only in so far as they embody very real differences. In other words, there must be a creative tension between two people that are different (i.e. a masculine and a feminine personality type) for the loving union between them to be real…

So love divides and wants what is different, where many Eastern traditions tend to breed indifference and uniformity. As the 1st century Nazarene said, “I have come not with peace but a sword”, a sword which comes to separate, to set free - and even to set mother against daughter and father against son… The point being that no other religion makes God rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls, but according to Christianity it is this qualitative difference between divinity and humanity, and the real distinction between persons in relationship that is sacred…

What Buddhists consider to be only relative or phenomenal reality (remember the only thing that is real in Tibetan Buddhism is that which is present in deep dreamless sleep! – see Ken Wilber’s One Taste), Christians consider to be the whole meaning and purpose of God – persons-in-relationship, the miracle of We, i.e. the Holy Trinity. And that a person may love God it is necessary not only that there is a God to be loved but also a person to love him/her. Can the Buddhist really praise anything as really distinct from him/her self? Are we to seek God in the deeper and deeper regions of our own ego, or in the unconditional claim of the other person - the stranger, the foreigner, the widow and the orphan who come to us in their absolute singularity?

So in the Non-dual teachings of the East we get introspection, quietism, divine egoism and social indifference – Western Buddhism. But by insisting on the transcendence of God (the qualitative distinction between divine and human) we get wonder, astonishment, fear and trembling, curiosity, moral and political adventure, righteous indignation and social justice – Christianity. By insisting that God is inside man, man is always inside himself. By insisting that God is outside of man, man goes outside of himself. Where Christ says “Love one another”, the Eastern sage says “Be the only Self in the entire universe”, and this constitutes an intellectual abyss of the first-order that I heartily challenge each and all to respond to…

For instance, check out Ken Wilber’s 3 faces of God Audio CD)

Reference: G. K. Chesterton “Orthodoxy”, Ignatius Press, especially Chapter 8

As a Good Friday gesture I want to take a fresh look at the crucifixion of Jesus and develop an Integral short-circuit between the scandal of the Cross and the Always Already truth of the Non-dual traditions of the East, articulated so brilliantly by Ken Wilber in the last chapter of The Eye of Spirit (1998).

We can recall briefly that the radical secret of the Non-dual traditions is that you were never truly lost and that there is “nothing to attain” for ultimately: there is only Spirit. And therefore Non-dual awareness – as ones ever-present condition and True Nature - is not so much hard to find but impossible to avoid. Other ways of speaking of this profound realization on Non-dual Emptiness include: Primordial awareness, One Taste, the Is-ness of what is, I Am-ness, the Already Free Self, your Original Face and Consciousness without an object – and while these words are just fingers pointing to the moon and not to be confused with the moon itself, the basic point is that ultimate Reality is not something that can be attained, rather it is always already present and therefore impossible to avoid…

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Now, if we turn to Christ crucified and the scandal of the Cross we find the exact same teaching - but in a diametrically opposite form and context, for here also ‘the Real’ is something that is ever-present and therefore impossible to avoid… That is, in the last agonizing words of the crucified Jesus “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”(Mark 15:33-34) there is also sense of being directly exposed to the ultimate reality of “what is” – but in a contradictory and radically unexpected fashion.

For the extreme physical, emotional and psychological suffering experienced by Jesus on the Cross entails the impossibility of detaching oneself from the instant of existence. And at this point, right where his suffering is “ever-present and impossible to avoid”, Jesus is riveted to being, haunted by the impossibility of escape, where the painfulness of his pain lies in the sense of being pinned to existence, directly exposed to rock bottom reality and hard-wired to the unavoidable is-ness of human existence in the here and now.[i]

In other words, in the crucified and god-forsaken Jesus there is an absence of all refuge from the present moment, nowhere else to turn, an impossibility of fleeing or retreating from reality that is virtually identical with the Non-dual pointing-out instructions of the East that the ultimate Truth is “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”.

To be sure, the unavoidable suffering of the crucified Jesus is not about standing tall against overwhelming forces and coming out on top, like a Mel Gibson’s version of Jesus in the passion of the Christ.  This kind of secret pleasure in masochistic suffering is one thing, but it is quite another thing to be beaten senseless, reduced to “crying and sobbing”, to be turned inside out, reduced from a subject to subjection, where my activity is thrown in reverse into passivity, which is what happens when suffering “attains its purity.”[ii]

The supreme responsibility of following Christ turns here into supreme irresponsibility, into infancy, where to undergo the Christian experience is to return to an infantile state of shaking and sobbing… where we pray and weep in the power of powerlessness and groan inwardly for the fulfillment of something, we know not what. So to die to self in Christ is to return to this state of extreme irresponsibility – for as Jesus says: one must become like a child to enter the Kingdom - and this is also a profoundly Non-dual state for there is no longer anything between I (self) and it (suffering).[iii]

There is, then, a subversive message in the Cross, a message more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss. For in the anguish of Jesus’ cry of dereliction there is a radical suggestion that  right here - at the very turning point of world-history - God is not at one with God’s self. That is, in the crucified Jesus – God was forsaken of God… there is a gaping wound in the heart of God’s own self, where we encounter God’s decisive self-communication to humanity in the person and place we least expect… in the very midst of this senseless nightmare, where we cannot make things make sense… and where God himself seemed for an instant to be an atheist.[iv]

The radical message here is the impossibility of Nirvana, the impossibility of us escaping from the instant of existence into the fictitious peace of Nothingness beyond the pull of contradictory forces. And furthermore, it is precisely this absence of refuge from suffering that strips away the mask of the false self and exposes the survival-lies and character defenses with which it masquerades in the world.

So the message of Good Friday is that enlightened awareness is occasioned not so much in a vast Emptiness where the entire universe arises inside your own primordial awareness, but in pain of the present – where salvation (metanoia) is occasioned in the very instant of suffering, where suffering is the precise realization that “I cannot escape myself”. From this Christ-centered perspective spiritual awakening or realization eventuates when we face up to the cold hard truth: the absence of all refuge from the gaping wound of existence where the incomprehensible Mystery is revealed in a suffering, vulnerable and broken human being.[v] And so Jesus is here the ultimate divine Fool, deprived of all majesty and dignity, the one who is ‘Lord of lords’ precisely for those who are little in their own sight, conscious of their brokenness and powerlessness, astonished by the power of the Cross to make the impossible possible and who thereby cast themselves before the Cross trusting alone in his “mercy within mercy within mercy.” (Thomas Merton)

The crucified One also overturns all we thought we knew about transcendence, about a God who is identified as the one in control and having all power. And here it could be said that Christianity renounces the Jewish God of the Great Beyond, the un-nameable Real that resides eternally behind the curtain of appearances… For in holding still before the crucified God the Mystery behind this veil of tears is now the gaping wound in God’s own self. To be sure, it is not that we “renounce transcendence” in a this-worldly embrace of human finitude and mortality, but that the Great Beyond (Heaven, the Other-world) becomes accessible precisely in and through this vulnerable, suffering Jesus that we love. So far from being a projection of what is highest and strongest in man, the purely spiritual dimension towards which all humans strive, the love of God is a fragile appearance that can only really shine through in an imperfect and suffering creature. For just as we love someone because of their lack, their vulnerability to suffering, their helplessness, as German theologian Jurgen Moltmann says: God cannot love if God cannot make himself exquisitely sensitive to our pain and vulnerable to our suffering.[vi]

Furthermore, at this point where the crucified Jesus’ cries out in god-forsaken agony and doubt, there is also an existential confession of radical Not-Knowing where we refuse the temptation to construct a meaningful universe that makes perfect sense of everything. For where we no longer demand a causal chain reason to provide a meaningful story to account of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (also see the Book of Job, which anticipates the crucifixion) and where we see through the New Age notion of ‘bad karma’ and challenge simplistic conclusions about the link between right behavior and reward… and when allow ourselves to acknowledge an irreparable loss that cannot be compensated for or covered over, it is then that we release the event of a new birth (resurrection) as the condition upon which our true nature in Spirit is awakened.

As the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams tells us, when we strip it all back, when we shatter the precious illusions we hold about ourselves, when we penetrate the ignorance of Samsara and dig beneath all of the habitual thought-forms of our socially constructed reality we encounter not one but two undeniable realities, two different but inseparable realities that are “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”: irreconcilable pain and inexhaustible love.

With the influx of the Non-dual traditions of the East to the West we have been given the Non-dual secret of ever-present Awareness – “You are always already awake!”, “There is only the enlightened mind!” Of course, this has always been called Grace in the Judeo-Christian West – the ever-present self-offering of God’s to each and all, a radically free gift of God’s own self that is also “not hard to find but impossible to avoid”.

And in the crucified Christ of Christianity we encounter the other undeniable and unavoidable reality: the irreconcilable pain of human existence. And apart from this theology of the Cross (which originates with the Apostle Paul), the glorious Resurrection that follows (and the Eastern equivalent of Enlightenment) is only a side-stepping of pain—the same sort of “avoidance of legitimate suffering” that Carl Jung names as the root of all neurosis.

An encounter with unconditional love makes us divine and an encounter with irreparable loss makes us fully human… Love and Death, two equal but opposite realities both of which are “impossible to avoid” and both of which are ultimately inter-wined at the innermost core of our experience of being human, each one unhinging and deepening the other. Or as Ken Wilber put it so succinctly, as one’s awakening gets deeper, the pain of human existence “hurts more but it bothers us less”, that is, as we deepen our capacity for living consciously we begin, sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly, to let in more of both: more suffering and more love…

Again, the matter becomes too difficult for language at this point, but encountering the love of God in the impossibility of fleeing or retreating from suffering also reminds me of the story that Elie Wiesel reports in his book on Auschwitz called Night:

Two Jewish men and a child were hanged. The other prisoners were forced to watch. The men died quickly. The boy lived on in torture for a long while. Then someone behind me said: “Where is God?” and I was silent… After half an hour the boy’s body still convulsed and shook in the throes of death and my companion cried out again: “Where is God? Where is he?” And a voice in me answered: “Where is God? . . . He hangs there from the gallows…”

[i] Caputo, J. D. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, Indiana Press 2007

[ii] Levinas, E. quoted in Caputo 2007, p.332

[iii] Levinas, E. quoted in Caputo 2007, p.332

[iv] G. K. Chesterton “That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever… In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss… a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt… When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. [Mt 27:46 quoting Ps 22:1] And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt… Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” [cf The Everlasting Man CW2:344]

[v] “A Cross is a blunt and graceless form. It has not the completeness and satisfying quality of a circle. It does not have to grace of a parabola or the promise of a long curve… A cross speaks not of unity but of brokenness, not of harmony but ambiguity, it is a form of tension and not rest… The cross is the symbol because the whacks of life take that shape… And unless you have a crucified God, you don’t have a big enough God.” Joseph Sittler quoted in Westhelle, V. “The Scandalous God: The Use and Abuse of the Cross” Fortress Press, Minneapolis 2006.

[vi] Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, trans. R. A. Wilson and J. Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1974).