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Greg Mayers
Zen taught me everything I can do; Christianity taught me everything I can't do.
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3rd Tier Response
Posted September 14th, 2011 | 13 Comments
If you want to know what a 3rd tier behaivor looks like read this story from the Desert Fathers.
Once a brother committed a sin in Scetis, and the elders assembled and sent for Abba Moses. He, however, did not want to go. Then the priest sent a message to him, saying: Come, everybody is waiting for you. So he finally got up to go. And he took a worn-out basket with holes, filled it with sand, and carried it along.
The people who came to meet him said: What is this Father? Then the old man said: My sins are running out behind me, yet I do not see them. And today I have come to judge the sins of someone else. When they heard this, they said nothing to the brother, and pardoned him.
The "sin" the brother committed must have been pretty awful for Abba Moses the Black had been a brigand, thief and murderer and the brother's sin divided the community so much they couldn't resolve the issue themselves. They had to call Abba Moses in for a proper judgment. Abba Moses' response to the situation disarms everyone.
For Self or For Others
Posted September 14th, 2011 | 3 Comments
For the first thirty or forty years we do our meditation, or contemplation, or zazen (our spiritual practices) for ourselves. On the one hand we are searching for our true self, our real self, the free, happy, balanced, sane, generous, holy self that we want to be. On the other hand, we have this awful fear that we are going to be exposed for who we really are: a fraud. We aren't quite sure how we are fraudulent, but in our search for our real self we have this vague sense that we are terribly fraudulent and someone is going to find us out one day. So there is a kind of desperation to our meditation, an urgent need to stay ahead of this creeping fraudulent self and find the authentic self. For the first thirty or forty years we do our spiritual practices for ourselves, with a little monitor looking over our shoulders grading us on how well we are doing.
Then something happens. It isn't dramatic. It isn't a bolt of lightning. There may be deep and insightful experiences along the way for sure, but what really changes us is very prosaic and goes almost unnoticed. Our spiritual practice changes the way night changes to dawn which changes to day, hardly noticed at all, but real nonetheless. Then we notice as we meditate that when we look for the real self we have been searching for we can't find it. If fact, when we look within and without we can't find any self. We just notice these thoughts and feelings that seem to arise of themselves and belong to no one in particular. We simultaneously notice that the search for the real or authentic or true or sane or wholesome self has withered away and with it the fear of the fraudulent self dissolves into the background mist of our own awareness. There is no real point at which this happens. It changes by eliding into this new no self form unburdened from the need for a true self or a cleansing of the fraudulent self.
Something else changes as well. We are no longer doing our spiritual practices (meditation, contemplation, zazen) for ourselves. It wasn't a conscious or intentional decision we made. It is a discovery that dawns on us. We are doing our spiritual practices for the world, for others, for the blind, for the hurt, for the lost, for the innocent, for the ordinary, for the common undistinguished ones, for us all. Through the years of fitful spiritual and meditative practice our foundation shifted in ways unknown to us, shifted behind our backs while we were busy with our fruitless search for a reliable sense of self. Now we know in a way we could not foretell the purpose of our life. It is for others, not for ourself. And everything we do, the holy and the profane, the noble and the hideous, the selfless and the selfish, the successful and the failing; all are for others. We are the same as before and paradoxically completely different. We have the same habits and patterns, the same stumbling blocks and difficulties, the same prejudices and preferences. But none of it seems to matter which makes it easier to slip away from their control and influence.
We have been quietly taken over in a non hostile acquisition, a take over that can fall apart at any moment. This is what Meister Eckhart calls "the birth of the Son in the soul." This is what St. Paul means when he says we are "in Christ." It happened to us. All we had to do was to unknowingly make ourselves available. The nothingness of our spiritual practice balances out a world that has gone mad with activity, or perhaps gone mad because of activity. It is a world crying desperately for what we have found and doesn't know it wants what has been offered to us. In our silence we add a tiny weight to balance out the insanity of the world. Now, when we enter the silence of our spiritual practice, we and all the world sink into the deepest stillness, quietly, gently, effortlessly, and tickle the heart of God.
Trinity Unveiled
Posted September 9th, 2011
There is probably no doctrine more difficult to explain, defend or make relevant for us mortals than the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Christianity, a monotheistic religion which acknowledges only one God, has been accused of worshiping three Gods because of its insistence on the Trinity. The one God has three hypostasis, a Greek term that is translated into Latin as persona, and into English as person. But what does hypostasis, sometimes translated as substance, something that subsists, something that is self sustaining or self supporting, mean? Here is a working definition. Hypostasis, or substance or person is an indeterminate center of irreducible uniqueness. “Indeterminate center” means that it is non-local or as we say in Zen, “not-body and not mind”. “Center” means it both radiates out and is radiated into, or attracts into. “Irreducible uniqueness” means it cannot be boiled down to something else or substituted for or by something else. This definition or description would apply both to a human person and a divine person of the Trinity.
The Father, the Source, constantly and completely pours himself out fully into the Son, the Logos. The pouring out is so complete that from a human perspective we would say that there is nothing left of the Father to give. The Son, constantly and completely receives fully all of the Source so much so that he reflects perfectly the Source. The receiving is likewise so completely that from a human perspective we would say there is nothing left of the Son Then paradoxically the Logos constantly and completely pours himself out fully into the Source. This outpouring and inflowing is perfect selfless Love, both the Source and the Logos imitating each Other, overcoming their "Otherness" in their imitation of each other, without dissolving their Otherness.. The "catching" that Love is the Holy Spirit; the Logos "catching" it, the Source "catching" it, and we "catching" it. The Father and the Son perfectly mimic each other and that mimicry is the Holy Spirit. The mystery of the Holy Trinity is that even the One and Only God can't know himself without an Other, and can't help but love that Other completely and thus love himself completely. The over flow of that love is called creation and we humans are creation's crown meant to imitate or mirror the One God of unrelenting and unconditional Love.
Jesus, the incarnate, the enfleshed Logos, says, I do only what I see my Father doing. And again, I have come to do the Father's will. The English word "will" has come to mean "willfulness" and this is not what Jesus is saying. He is saying I desire only what the Father desires, and that desire is "seen" or revealed in the teachings, life, death and resurrection of Jesus and later in the dynamics of the teaching about the Triune God, formulated as the doctrine of the Trinity. We are what we desire. Desire gives us our sense of self, so much so that without desire we have no sense of self. Jesus desires the desire of the Father, and thus he is God's own self because his desire and the Father's desire are the same desire.
Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind and all your soul, and love your neighbor as yourself. These are instructions to imitate the Father, to desire what the Father desires, as Jesus did. The more we do that the more we are like Jesus and as St. Paul says, children of God. In other words, our own sense of self conforms to what we desire, the divine in all its fullness. On this all of theology and doctrine depend.
Have this mind in you that was in Christ Jesus. Put on the mind of Christ. Girard says that we do not have a sense of self until we have acquired desires from others. What Paul is actually referring to is becoming Christ's own self by catching his desires, or his desire. The Church Fathers spoke of the same thing in a different way. We are made in the image of God, but we are to become the likeness of God in the course of our human life. That is, we are to have a new self created in the image of Christ, born of the acquired desire of Jesus who can now be seen as our Lord, in contrast to the lord of this world, which is the lord of mimetic rivalry, the lord of lies. The title “Lord” has lost all meaning for us today with our hyper-individualistic sense of self. But in the Mediterranean world, the “Lord” was more than the overseer and protector. He was the one to whom one looked for how to live life, what to value, how to act, who to be friends with and foes of. In short, a Lord, was the model for living successfully. Giving Jesus the title of Lord, means all those things. He is the model from whom we catching the divine desires, which are creating us anew at this moment.
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies. Romans 8:22-23
Christianity, Gnostics and Rosicrucians
Posted July 12th, 2011 | 34 Comments
Modern people in the first world cultures have a suspicion, it seems to me, that somebody is hiding something really important from them. This is especially true when it comes to religion. The "suspicion" expresses itself in two ways, that I can tell. One is that the established religions, which in the West means Christianity mostly, are trying to pull the wool over their eyes. So this group sets out on a journey to unmask these magicians. The other way the "suspicion" expresses itself is that Christianity is hiding something from them. This group is like a child who sees an adult put something in one hand, then place both hands behind his back, then bring both hands out in front of the child. The child gets one choice, but doesn't know which hand, if either does, holds the hidden treasure.
As far as the first group is concerned, there is nothing to do for them. Doubt is their divine guide; indeed it is their god. They will serve him well and he will continue to bless them with uncertainty. The second group is a different story. Strangely enough their instinct that something about Christianity is hidden from them, is smack on the mark. But, alas, they too often look at the wrong hand for what they suspect is hidden. They think that the institution of Christianity suppressed that hidden something. It was the Gnostics who had the real inside story, and if we could only recover what they taught we'd also have the inside story. Or, it was the Rosicrucians, or some other historically marginalized Christian sect who supposedly possessed the real jewels of Christianity.
One of the most astonishing historical facts about Christianity is that the Christians of the Roman empire and the Christians of the Persian empire (and beyond into Indian) end up with the same texts as their sacred scriptures. One would think that they must have conspiratorially collaborated in settling on these texts. Except that historically they could not have done that. Their was an iron curtain between the Roman and Persian empires, which were at constant war with each other. Christians in the Persian empire never gained the political status they did in the Roman empire. They were always on the margins, subject to suspicions about their loyalties to Persian kings. As a result they were anxious to prove their loyalty for their own safety's sake by staying away from the Roman Christians. Secondly, the Roman Christians, probably due to mistranslations of documents between Greek and Aramaic, anathematized the Persian Christians. The Roman and Persian Christian were as much at odds with each other as were the Roman and Persion empires. The result of these two historical conditions is that the two groups of Christians were separated for 700 years developing in their own ways, during which time both settled on the texts of the Christian scriptures without knowledge of what the other was doing. Yet they come up with the same texts as sacred scripture? How does one explain that historical anomaly?
Both sides start from Jerusalem followers of Jesus, known as "the people of the way". Both had various interpretations of the historical Jesus to contend with (Gnostics, Manicheans, etc. - historians count around 23 separate interpretations in the early centuries of the meaning of Jesus' life and teachings) yet separately they did not endorse these interpretations, which came to be known as heresies, from the Greek word meaning "a faction," something that is not whole. They both separately reject the factions' writings and separately accept the same texts as authentic Christian witness! Something more than chance or coincidence is at work here. The least that we can conclude from this fact illuminated by modern historical scholarship is that we ought to take the texts of the Christian scriptures seriously. They bear the validity not only of time, but of two separate and great cultural settings. (It is a shame how little we know of Persian Christianity and its thousand year great achievements which rivaled that of the West. Muslim fanatics today are killing off the final remnants of that tradition in Iraq.)
What does this have to do with those who feel that institutional Christianity is hiding something from them? Well, for one thing they are looking for a special knowledge to unearth what they think are the secrets in Christianity, just as the factions in Christianity were doing 1500 years ago and all the way up to the present. This is especially true of the Integral community that embraces a new gnosticism for Christianity, which turns out being the old gnosticism in modern garb. No one can doubt Wilber's great talent as a synthezier and interpreter of that impressive Indian tradition known as the Vedas and its philosophical children. What Wilber accomplishes is truly impressive. He takes ancient texts that are mostly inaccessible to modern readers and lets those texts interpret him. Then he writes about his discovers in ways modern readers can grasp, at least intellectually, while insisting that an intellectual understanding falls far short of reaching the riches of this tradition. His methodology is noteworthy for its order, and his insistence on that order. First, he lets the orginal texts interpret him, then he writes about what that interpretation revealed to him about himself at the deepest levels. But he goes further. He warns that using his writings to interpret the tradition cannot yield the tradition's treasure. In other words, the process does not work in reverse. One cannot gain a transformation by analysing and interpreting the tradition. One can only gain a transformation by letting the tradition work on and in you - interpreting you.
But then Wilber makes a mistake, I believe out of a deep compassion. He applies his methodology to the Christian tradition, but only to a part of the Christian tradition; and without doing what he did with the Vedic tradition: let the Christian texts interpret him, which is fatal to his attempt. The part of the Christian tradition that he accepts is what he names as the esoteric or mystical version, which he defines narrowly according to Vedic criteria. The point is not that there isn't a mystical strain in Christianity similar to the Vedic tradition. The point is that taking only that strain as representative of real Christianity is truncating the Christian witness and thus distorting it, the way the 23 or so faction in the early church were seen as distorting the whole of the apostolic witnesses' reporting. In other words, Wilber is offering us a new kind of gnosticism, which is not really a different kind of gnosticism than what was found in the early Christian communities, and, I might add as noted, was rejected as incomplete. The new gnosticism equals the old gnosticism dressed up in modern garb. With the best of intentions and some justification, Wilber unwittingly mixes up the Vedic and Christian traditions. He gives the Vedic tradition its full voice, but mutes the Christian voice to a narrow range that sounds like the Vedic voice with a Christian accent.
Wilber should be taken seriously and his methodology applied rigorously. Something of Christianity is hidden but not in apocryphal writings or heretical views or the new gnosticism. It is hidden in the texts themselves. No, not as some system of code. It is hidden in the witness that the texts of Christian sacred scripture illuminate. The texts tell a story of events that were witnessed and those who want to discover the hidden meaning of Christianity must let the texts work on and in them; let the texts, the story interpret them. The problem is that the process is not as straight forward as it sounds. It never is in any tradition. The problem is twofold. One, the texts are ancient and not readily available to our modern minds' outlook. This is a job for scholarship; exegetes, archeologists, anthropologists, authoritive interpreters of the texts, etc. The second problem, as with all great religious traditions, is us: we don't want to be interpreted. We don't want to be vulnerable to the texts. We don't want to be caught out. What the great traditions have in common is the recognition that what we consider normal life is a lie that makes us miserable. Furthermore we lie about the lie we tell ourselves. We prefer that everyone else change to accommodate us. The problem is always out there. We may not be able to do much about the scholarship part of the problem, except honestly study. But the personal part of the problem is entirely up to us. Even when scholarship makes the whole of the texts crystal clear, still the scales must fall from our eyes for us to see that the story is about us, in us, for us, interprets us, tells us who we are. Then it will resonate in us, and what seems obscure and ho-hum now will be obvious then. Encrusted eyes and encrusted textual cultures must be cleansed first.
Can anyone say clearly what the "hidden" meaning of Christianity is? Not only can it be said, it must be said anew for every generation. What Wilber has done for the intelligent contemporary mind for the Vedic tradition, Rene Girard has done for the Christian tradition; taken the texts seriously, let them interpret him, and given us the benefits of his insights, and they don't look like the Vedic tradition. They look like the Christian tradition. There use to be a group called "The Reduced Shakespeare Company" that performed the bard's plays in 5 minute or less. Here is the "reduced Gospel", the hidden meaning of Christianity. All the Christian texts are witnessed, told, written and transmitted from the perpsective of the Resurrection of Jesus. No Resurrection, no Christianity, no texts, that simple. What is the Resurrection? Surprise, everybody, God is not about death. God does not demand death as a tax for peace or for living. God has never been about death. This is just the reverse of how you have seen it and do see it. In fact, you've never had to win God over by death, for God is and always has been for you. Not for you and against your enemies, but for you without any against anything. You live in a world of opposites, God has no opposites. Jesus is Yahweh enfleshed overcoming our otherness without dissolving it. Now stop the rivalry between yourself and everyone else. Stop imitating one another and imitate Yahweh, Jesus, who is non-intrusive love for you. Then you will know eternal life. Oh, and by the way, this will likely inflame hatred in others toward you because it will expose the lie, as Jesus exposed the lie, that we live. But don't worry about it. Jesus has overcome the world (the lie) and even the most horrible death (crucifixion) cannot dent or defeat God-being-for-you. The End.
However, reduced Shakespeare is not Shakespeare, and the reduced Gospel is not sufficient to "get" the message of Christianity. There are no short cuts. There is no easy method. One must do the work of letting these ancient text, this unprecedented story, the apostolic witness, work on you and in you. And as St. Gregory of Nyssa said, the work goes on and on and on....
Rainbow Body and Resurrection
Posted June 1st, 2011 | 4 Comments
Introduction
All we have to rely on for understanding both the rainbow body and the Resurrection is the testimony of witnesses. There is no modern empirical evidence to demonstrate either. When we take the witnesses' reports on both phenomena and compare them, we can see that they are pointing to two different kind of reported events. The similarities between the two are merely superficial, while the essential messages encoded in each are radically different.
The Rainbow Body
The corporeal body of the realized Dzogchen practitioner ... returns to the primordial energetic essence of the five elemental processes (bare non-conceptualizing awareness, mirror-like awareness, awareness of sameness, investigative awareness, awareness that spontaneously carries out all that has to be done for the welfare of beings) through the bardo of Parinirvana (ultimate extinction). This is then projected as the mindstream through the process of phowa (the ‘transferral of consciousness’ into the constituent Five Pure Lights: space, air, water, fire, earth). The realiser of the rainbow body resides in the timeless, eternal space that is considered a mystery.
“The realised Dzogchen practitioner, no longer deluded by apparent substantiality or dualism such as mind and matter, releases the energy of the elements that compose the physical body at the time of death." (Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche: Healing with Form, Energy, and Light. Ithaca, New York: Snow Lion Publications, 2002, p 141.) The rainbow body, according to reports, sometimes leaves behind finger and toe nails, and hair, which are considered non-living parts of the physical body by the Dzogchen doctrine.
In other words, the rainbow body is the physical body in the process of decomposing into a spiritual body. It is a process that is both unique and rare, reserved to accomplished practioners of a particular sect of Buddhism. After the process of decomposing there are no reports of a deceased practitioner appearing bodily or physically to others over distances of time or space.
The Resurrection
The Resurrection is the overcoming of death by Jesus who undergoes death (Mt 27:54; Mk 15:39; Lk 23:47) and rises out of death (Lk 24:4-7; Mk 16:9: Mt 28:5-7). He bears the wounds of his crucifixion in his resurrected body (Lk 24:39f; Jn 20:20). People can physically touch the resurrected Jesus (Lk 24:39b; Jn 20:17), Thomas puts his fingers in the nail and spear wounds (Jn 20:27). The resurrected Jesus eats cooked fish in front of his apostles (Lk 24: 42f), and can handle physical things, as witnessed when he is seen preparing a meal in Galilee where he went to meet his disciples (Jn 21:9-14). Finally the Resurrected Jesus appears over the distances of time and space (1 Cor 15:5-8).
Comparing the Reports
Both the rainbow body teaching and the Resurrection claim a transformation for human beings. But the types of transformation in each tradition are not differences of degree, but differences of kind. The two types of transformations are more dissimilar than similar. The rainbow body is a kind of rare physical decomposition, revealing that the physical world is illusory and the spiritual world is real. The result is that the rainbow body teaching spots a previously unacknowledged dualism in Buddhism. The Resurrection makes no such distinction. It is a physical and bodily resurrection, not a transformed spiritual body as with the rainbow body. The physical reality of Jesus is as real as his Spirit which gains the term "Holy Spirit". Physical and spiritual are simply referential distinctions that have no clear separation in reality, similar to left and right, up and down. In other words, the Resurrection illuminates that physical and spiritual are non-dual.
The rainbow body points to a spiritual realm of which the physical is only a component and the spiritual is the foundational. The Resurrection points to a new creation, as claimed by the apostolic witnesses (1 Cor 15:20-23). It is a life in which physical and spiritual are not-two, a non-duality that even death cannot separate. The Easter troparion in the orthodox liturgy both proclaims and summarizes the significance of the Resurrection: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down Death by death, and to those in the tombs bestowing life.
Conclusion
There is little doubt that the rainbow body reports can appeal to the 21st century sophisticated mind, a product of the rationalist Enlightenment movement. But we shouldn't take this appeal too seriously. It is little more than the arrogance of the living, a pitfall for every generation of humans since, and probably before, the Enlightenment. Christian orthodoxy has consistently warned against a type of creeping rationalism that leads down a path that dehumanizes us, obscuring the mystery of being human. A sophisticated rational understanding is as inadequate as a pre-analytical mythical understanding when considering the reality embodied and encoded in Christianity. Just as the beginning of the universe (the Big Bang) is a miracle of creation, so too the Resurrection is a miracle of a new creation. Neither miracles can be penetrated by the human mind. But both can be accepted, and in the acceptance help us make sense of what we are called to live and to help us live accordingly.
The Tax On Being Human
Posted May 13th, 2011 | 2 Comments
There is a new theory out about how we became human, how the transition happen between a higher primate species and the human species. The theory is not in competition with the theory of evolution, which is a theory of genetics, of material development and completely ignores the non-material reality of our humanness, or reduces that non-material to a function of the material dimensions of being human. In fact the new theory is a compliment to the theory of evolution we all know under the generalized term of Darwinism, a term vigorously defended or much maligned depending on one's ideological stance. The new complimentary theory is called the Mimetic Theory, which is most closely associated with the work of Rene Girard, professor emeritus of Stanford University and his collaborators.
First a word about theory. The common misunderstanding about the word theory is that it means simply one's opinion on a matter that has no evidence. This is the popular understanding and is used as a way to dismissed inconvient facts, observations and effects. In other words, the word theory is meant as a reduction to mere personal preference and of no significance in the public sphere. In fact within the scientific community a theorem or theory is an assumption or principle that does explain or illuminate one or many observable and testable phenomena.
For example, the theory that the universe we live in and observe started with the Big Bang or the Big Inflation as scientist now insist. The Big Bang theory is based on observations of the current universe and stated in mathematical language and formula which are "run back" to the "beginning" of the universe until the math reaches the point where it no longer becomes useful, or adequate as a tool of understanding. In other words, the math works out as far as it can go, but it cannot go farther than a certain point. Thus assumptions have to be made to explain what is left unexplained by the math, which otherwise works out for the observations we now have of the universe. This is to say the obvious that there is no direct observation of the Big Bang, and there is no way to directly validate this theory. We are unable to change this theory from a theory to a certainty, an empirically incontestable fact. Yet the theory holds up under other mathematical and empirical testable facts. The preponderance of evidence strongly suggests at this time in our scientific observations and calculations that the universe began as a Big Bang.
It is well know that the theory of the Big Bang predicts that there will be left over stuff from that event. And it is almost part of the modern scientific folk lore about how that left over stuff was accidently discovered at Bell Laboratories. That evidence for the left over stuff is made famous in the well know background radiation map of the universe, oval and colorful, which everyone has seen in various presentations on modern astronomy. As the preponderance of evidence shifts in the future another theory will arise to explain the origins of the universe.
Another example is the theory of evolution, initially put for by Darwin and his contemporary Alfred Wallace, to explain the variations in nature that he oberserved. That theory has been greatly refined over the course of years and is validated by genetic observations, which of course, were unavailable to Darwin. By following the track left behind by our genetic make up, we can trace our material, or physical origins back in time to a certain set of conditions or circumstances lost in pre-history. We cannot go back in time and make direct observations of these alterations, which happened at a glacial pace in comparison to our sense of time bounded by a set life span. So, we have to depend upon a theory about the origins of the genetic development of the human race. The preponderance of evidence points to the justification of the theory of evolution.
The Memetic Theory of the "humanization" of our species put forth by Rene Girard is deceptive in its simplicity. The theory states that over an unimaginable and indeterminate period of time, thousands of year or maybe even millenia, higher primates became self conscious by means of their imitation of others in their social group. His theory is simply stated this way: We desire according to the desire of the other. This theory was explicitly and almost exactly stated in a recent film, although used in the film in a cynical manner and probably without conscious reference to the work of Girard. The film is entitled the Affair of the Necklace, based on a court case that served as the spark for the French revolution. One of the characters at the court of Louis the XIV is asked how he knows what to desire amidst all the intrigue and manoevreings of court life. To which he replies: I ascertain what I desire when I learn what everyone else desires.
Girard's theory is as deceptively simple as is Einstein's theory of relativity, and like Einstein's theory is blossoming out with enormous implications for anthology, sociology, psychology, political science, evolution, religion and philosophy. Further more it is validated, like any theory must be, in texts of literature, both secular and sacred, a validation exhaustively documented in Girard's major works. To make a very complicated scholarly research accessible to our understanding without going into it in detail, we can say that what Girard has discover is the "left over stuff" from the first incidences of our becoming human beings found in the literary texts of human history is similar to the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. His theory is also being validated in the recent neurological observations regarding "mirror neurons" in the brains of higher primates and humans. In other words, it can be demonstrated empirically that we humans are hardwired to imitate others.
The important point to notice is the the "object" of what we desire is always and every where, a learned desirable object. We do not have desire in us, we acquire desire from outside ourselves, from an other than me. The second important point to note is that without desire we do not have a self, we don't know who or what we are until we acquire desire. Our desire, and thus the self we think is so independent, is mediated by the other. It is always a three way proposition, a triangulation. We (the subject) learn what to desire (the object) through and by the object desired by the other (the medium). This gives us a sense of self, which we don't and cannot have alone, that is inter dependent on the social structure, the others of our social context. In order to be, we have to be taught what to be, a teaching we acquire from another.
Just as in the genetic theory of evolution there is no single point at which physical stuff, genes, changed enough to support consciousness identity, that is there is no "missing link" to be discovered; so too in the memetic theory there is no single point at which "humanization" happens. In both cases of evolution and humanization, we can say that they happened repeated in numerous favorable circumstances over the course of thousands of years, even over millenia, but the origin of both are lost in the mists of pre-history and are undiscoverable. Thus all we can relie on is a "theory" supported by the preponderance of available evidence.
There is one more important point in Girard's theory that cannot be overlooked, although it is the most disturbing and controversial element of his theory. Human conscious identity popped into existence, or rather popped into and out of and into etc. existence, at the point of the death of another. In other words, human identity, the sense of self, is defined by death. It is impossible to discover what these foundational events actually were, but we can see traces of them in the human mythological record across cultural barriers. The foundational episodes leave behind their patterns in the stories that human tell themselves in order to make sense of their world, much as the cosmic background radiation map is the left over patterns of the original Big Bang. Although we cannot actually see it, there is a (or many such) real event that gave birth to these patterns. And that event was death. We can imagine that it started with death of the prey in a group hunt. The animal is killed in the usual manner, a pattern learned, improved on and repeated over millenia. But one time something unheard of happens. Instead of the group falling upon the caucus of the prey in the usual social hierarchical order, perhaps the alpha individual or perhaps the group as a whole, stand back waiting for what...? Instincts would urge them to fill their hunger. But this time, instinct is abated, perhaps only momentarily, in one or many or all of the hunters. Instinct is suspended not by external circumstances or conditions which most certainly would have happened many times over in the course of pre-history. Rather instinct is abated by something internal to the hunter or hunters. Over the course of time, this suspension of instinct is learned by others in the group, following Girard's theory: desire is learned from the desire of the other. In our imaginary story this becomes the foundational event for conscious identity, the first halting steps toward humanization, through the process of imitation.
The imitation of the other cuts two ways and both ways are simultaneous. We learn from others in our social group what to desire leading to both cooperation and competition. At some point we have to confront the documented fact of not just same species, but same social group killing, in human terms murder. It is now a well known fact that in higher primates more individuals die at the hands of other group members than die as prey. Girard explains these "murders" as competition for the desirable object. But the significance of this particular act of taking life begs to be clarified. One individual gets tagged as the source of the group's dis-ease by standing in the way of a desirable object. In this case, group peace and order. The more agitated the group becomes, the less efficient and cooperative it becomes in hunting and survival skills. How to resolved this conflict? Remove the source of the disorder. Why the murder of another group member? It follows the logic of Girard's insight: we acquire desire according to the desire of the other. An individual is tagged as introducing chaos in place of group order by its behavior. Once the individual is removed something miraculous and magic happens. Order and peace return. The tension is released. A condition that holds for a time until the next group disturbance, and identified scapegoat, happens. Murder is then reenacted to restore order out of the chaos. The reason the foundational murder keeps getting reenacted all the way up to this present time is that it keeps working. Get rid of the cause of the problem and the problem disappears, at least temporarily. But it also gets passed on.
This is Girard's most arresting insight into the origins of humanization. In addition to and posterior to the foundation event for conscious identity, namely death of an other, there is also a foundational murder that gives birth to the social order and by extension to our sense of self. The foundational murder that gives birth to humanity in consciousness is lost to our awareness, just as the actual origins of the universe is unavailable to our observation. We have forgotten that we are individuals because of a murder or murders, the sacrificing of another individual for the sake of releasing the tension of our existence which arises out of our competition for a learned desirable object. The foundational murder gets transmuted into hero stories and religious sacrifices to appease angry gods, all of which are strategies to forget the original or foundational murder, to forget the horror of it and the weight of this horror on human consciousness.
Life is not only suffering, unsatisfactory (dukka) as Buddha taught, life is unbearable to the point where we must remove the very thing that is bearing it, namely the fragile sense of self which pops into being along with learned desire. According to Buddhist teaching anatman is the solution to the tension of life. Instead of removing the other by means of scapegoating them, or instead of sleeping in the foggy forgetfulness of our origins, which most human do most of the time, we remove the self, no-self. No-self means no desire. No desire means no tension, nothing to fight over. It is a retreat into a pre-self consciousness. Please note this is not a pre-conscious state, a primitive condition of human awareness. It is a state of consciousness without a sense of self clinging to it. Consciousness without content, and the most fundamental content of consciousness is self. That is one religious strategy for dealing with the unbearable likeness of being.
There is another religious strategy for dealing with the horrors of the origins of the fragile sense of self, a strategy that does not implicate desire as totally in cahoots with our distressed condition. And this strategy is to change the medium from which we learn what is desirable and thus gain a sense of self. Instead of desiring according to the desire of any other, and thus gambling on our sense of self in that any "other" will do, we learn to desire according to the desire of a particular other. This is the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition. The Judaeo part is called the "law" and the Christian development out of that is called the Christ, the resurrected Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian traditions says that the law didn't work. It doesn't absolve our complicity in the foundational murder and the resulting horror in human consciousness. We remain bound up in that trauma, and all human strategies finally fail to extract us from our complicity with it. Rather what is needed is a new start that goes back further than the foundational murder all the way to the foundational event, the enthrallment with death itself. This new start couldn't take place until the human species evolved enough to bear it, in the Christian terminology, "in the fullness of time."
The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is the corner stone of Christianity. Without it there is no Christianity, for the resurrection redefines the story of humanity. Instead of death defining what it means to be human, an unimagined and unexpected life uncoupled from death defines what it means to be human. The new model of what it is to be human is not just an "other", or the "law", neither of which addresses the fatal problem of death. The new model is the One who has undergone death, physically bears the marks of his death, showing that death is both real and a hollow threat to who and what we are. If one person can undergo death and overcome that fatal condition in rising from the dead, then that fact is of enormous significant to what it means to be human.
Equally important is that the one who rises from the dead appears to other humans who knew him to be dead. Their reaction to this appearance is noteworthy. They might have been in shock, or grief, or guilt after the death of their friend and teacher. But the Christian record explicitly notes that they are terrified at the appearance of the risen Jesus. Their whole sense of self is threatened by the resurrection. The very debt or tax of being human is abolished. In Christian terminology not only sin is forgiven, but what we know, and have hidden from ourselves, to be the very origins of being human is forgiven. We have been wrong from the very beginning and that is no longer a problem. So we can look the big lie in the face, eye to eye, without fear of loosing our footing. The resurrection shows that being human encompasses all of that, the foundational event, the foundational murder, the fragile sense of self received from others, and out paces it all in orders of magnitude unheard of before. Instead of getting rid of the self, Christianity seeks the truth of the self. Or perhaps the truth in the self. That truth is uncovered in the fact of the resurrection.
There is one more part to this that cannot be seen intellectually or felt emotionally or otherwise brought down to what we sense as human finitude, much less written or spoken about. This story begs for a satisfying ending, a key to finally grasping the meaning of life, the reality of the resurrection, the model of being human. But how does one close on life uncoupled from death, where death is not denied and is made unnecessary? "Not denied and made unnecessary" just don't go together in human consciousness. This requires something different. The self we think we know cannot grasp what the new self evoked in the resurrection is. Perhaps this very conundrum is only resolved in the imitation of the new Other, rather than in just any other. Going back to Girard's theory that we learn desire from the desire of another, perhaps we can invoke a refreshed desire by changing the mediator, the model, the medium through which desire is learned. We don't have to change the pattern or the conditions by which we have become human through evolution. The pattern holds true, in the sense of reliable. Instead of competition for the desirable object, the resurrected life, we simply, but not easily, become like the one who already has what we desire. By taking on his vantage point, we can see what is obvious to him, but hidden from us and only revealed to us in him. This means that in order to get what we want we have to become the medium of what we desire, instead of acquiring the object of our desire through a medium or by sacrificing the medium. The purpose of human life is just that, to be the medium of what has been uncovered in the resurrection. But in attempting to write about this already unravels and bleaches the tension out of our quest in a way that discourages us from the adventure it is meant to encourage.
The strategies of Buddhism and the strategies of Christianity could not be more different. Buddhism seeks peace. Christianity seeks truth.
Greg Mayers
What Is The Resurrection, Really?
Posted May 8th, 2011
We are enthralled by death. It is what gave us awareness, then consciousness, then a sense of self, according to Rene Girard. Our “animal” attention was drawn to the death of an “other”, fixed on it. This happen not once, but repeatedly over thousands of years until enough development took place that attention evolved into awareness which is the foundation for consciousness (focused awareness), which in turn registers the “other”, which paradoxically returns to me as a sense of self different enough from the other out there while possessing enough similarities. There is no little self or big self outside of our social context. As one of Girard’s followers and collaborators puts it, we are interdividuals, not individuals. (Thus the importance of the Trinity: God cannot known himself outside the “social” context of the other – indeed cannot “be” outside the social context.) (Is the Buddhist experience of “no-self” a retreat from the human social context? And if so, is this retreat an evolution or a devolution?)
Things don’t go so well when we are conscious of an “other”. Eventually that consciousness transmute into an obstacle for us, for we learn from the other how and what to desire, want, value. (Cf. empirical research on “mirror neurons” in the brain which shows that we are hard wired to imitate others). And that shows us what we are lacking, or think we are lacking. It can be anything: love, recognition, value in and of ourselves. Because we learnt desire from what the “other” desired, and because we see the “other” as possessing what we want, we conclude that all that is necessary is to remove the other in order to get what we want. Our dis-ease is misinterpreted as caused by the “other” having what they want and we lacking what we want, a desirability we learned from the same other, but never knew that we learned it that way for that learning pattern is lost in the pre-history of the human race. To resolve this crisis all that is necessary is to remove the cause of the crisis, which is mis-identified as the “other”. This leads to the foundational murder that becomes the origin of religion, sacred sacrifice, the glue of the social order and the sense of a self that is different from that bothersome “other” who causes such problems for all of “us”. See the Cain and Abel myth.
The resulting death of the other has an unexpected calming effect on us (all of “us”). The dis-ease and chaos that preceded the murder, suddenly disappears. The obstacle to the object of desire is gone as well. Nothing stands in our way to what we want. Except that without the other we cannot know what to want, much less know what we do want. Egoism leaps to the forefront of human evolution. That peace in the wake of murder lasts for awhile, until the whole pattern of learning desire from the desire of the other repeats itself in the unfolding of human and personal history.
The death of Jesus, who is the face of God, the enfleshment of God, and his resurrection breaks our enthrallment with death and thus smashes our identity, an identity formed precisely by death. No wonder the apostles were frightened when the Risen Jesus appears to them! It was the end of them as they knew themselves. It is interesting that the Risen Jesus appears with the wounds of Calvary still fresh in his body. God didn’t just “cure” Jesus of death and return him to his life, as if he came back after a long weekend holiday, to take up where he left off. The Risen Jesus bears the marks of his own death precisely to show us that it is also our death that he carries and tramples down by his death. It is also interesting that Jesus doesn’t rise from the dead to take vengeance on his murders, or to scold his followers for their lack of faith and their betrayal of him. Rather the message is clear: the abundance of God’s gratuitous love and life is yours already and the Risen Jesus is the evidence for that. Not only is there no need to sacrifice anyone or anything again to get what you want, but we no longer need to be enthralled by death of any kind. Death ceases to define us. Eternal life, meaning boundless life is our birthright, life uncoupled from death. Furthermore, that boundless life, the risen life, has already begun in us, for we are given the same spirit that animates the Risen Jesus. The transformation from being held hostage to death, to the freedom of the children of God is already happening in us and as us. Our rivalry for life as an object to acquire by removing the obstacles to that acquisition is transmuted into indebtedness to and gratitude for the Risen Jesus, who continually sets us free. Sin is undone in us. The knot choking the life out of being is loosened. Life abounds.
The pattern of life to death is broken in Jesus risen from the dead, and it is being smashed in us too. The old sense of self defined by death cannot possibly grasp what the new sense of self given by the Resurrection, means. We must die to the old Adam and rise in the New Adam, putting off the old man and putting on the new. Biological death is a major concern to the old Adam trapped in his binary dance with death; but a non issue for the New Adam. The old Adam cannot imagine any “Other” without the necessity of death about it. (See the repeated temple sacrifices in Jerusalem). The New Adam cannot imagine death as a concern at all: whether alive or dead, we are the Lord’s. This means that we are in the process of becoming the face of God as Jesus is the face of God. And to be the face of God is to act gratuitously always and everywhere in favor of the other as God continually does with us, His “others”, until the “his others” are no longer “other”; instead of in rivalry with the other.
It is the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus that shows us that God identifies with us, easing out our otherness while honoring our uniqueness. We are no threat to God. But God is a threat to us, to our sense of self, a mortal threat that we can relax into for to do so is to rise to boundless life that is God himself.
That is the message of the Resurrection which to this very day, 2000 years later, still mostly goes unheeded, contorted and dismissed, perhaps more by those who claim it than by those who disbelieve it.
Stephen Hawking "The Grand Design"
Posted September 18th, 2010 | 1 Comment
I probably won't read Stephen Hawking's book, The Grand Design, mainly because of what I heard today (Sep 17) on Science Friday on NPR. You can check this out on the web page. Recent (like within the last few months or maybe a year) observations have brought into question something physicists have taken for granted: the Fine Structure Constant, aka the Alpha Constant. The simplistic version is that 1 equals 1 everywhere and everywhen in the universe - the immutable laws of nature that allow Hawking to run all his calculations in his head, or on super computers. Now it appears (and is debated) that 1 does not equal 1 everywhere and everywhen in the universe. To say it another way, a lab experiment that consistently gives the same results on earth, when duplicated under the same conditions in a different part of the universe will yield different results. Even the vaulted theory of relativity is brought under question since it depends on a constant, the speed of light, but if constant is inconstant in physics, then everything is brought into question. In other words a randomness or unpredictability seems to be built into the very structure of the nature.
If these observation prove true, then this is as revolutionary to Einstein's physics as Einstein was to Newtonian physics. (There has to be a preponderance of evidence to overthrow established laws of physics according to the Carl Sagan theorem). In short all of our calculations are true only for our small part of the universe. The rug has been pulled out from under physics. The great question now becomes: Can there be a starting point in physics for the universe? This addresses a great question in physics: why are the conditions for life to arise true for the universe - only the slightest of variance and life could not arise in the universe. But according to this new theory (the alpha constant is not constant) the conditions for life are only true for this portion of the universe, and are not true for other portions of the universe. It also brings into question all the conclusions about other places, times and scales that modern Astro-physics draws. In other words, physics as we know it might have to be completely revamped.
I bring this to your attention not because I think physics is wrong. I don't. I think it is a methodology that can yield only relative measurable truths which open up further questions to investigate. But I think we suffer like those before us from the "arrogance of the living" and in our day that arrogance is the arrogance of the human intellect, the proclaimed supreme arbiter to all things "real.". My suspicion is that we've hardly begun to begin to understand the sciences. Five hundred years from now we will be laughed at by our progeny. I do believe that Truth is One and that at some date theology and science will converge. But that convergence is a long way in the future, more than millenia away. (Can we count on millenia being a constant any more?)
Secondly I don't think science and theology can or should be mixed up now- and from what I read reported about Hawking's new book he oversteps his bounds when he starts on theology. Some of history's greatest theologians (thinkers about God) refuse to define God, but it seems that Hawking has some presumptions about God that he doesn't explicate. What God is he referring to? No religious tradition endorses a generic Deists' god, which is an invention of the Enlightenment. What does he mean by "create"? The Buddhist say that reality is cyclic, without beginning or end. The monotheistic religions say that reality is linear, and science seems to take its view of reality from the monotheistic religions. The universe starts and stops. Is Hawking's conclusions about god a modern variant of the philosophical uncaused cause argument?
Hawking is a brilliant physicist, but he is drifting into his undeveloped areas of knowledge. And who knows, if the alpha constant is definitively shown to be inconstant, and table top lab experiments are in the works to answer that question as I write, maybe even the brilliant Hawking could be irrelevant...
(As an aside, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are opposing a god that religious traditions do not recognize, the Enlightenment god mentioned above. The monotheistic religions are especially skeptical of a quantifiable deity. The wise religious man doesn't debate these modern atheists who are fundamentally only having an argument with themselves about their anemic definition of god. The wise religious man just sits back and watches the show, knowing that it's just a battle with windmills.)