Catherine of Siena said “All the Way to Heaven is Heaven.” I’ll dodge the temptation to write “Amen I say to you” then differ with it. Instead I’ll riff on Catherine’s words and get to the point: for the true self, schooled in letting go, All the way to enlightenment is enlightenment. This is the value of an incarnational messiah: people are messy, and Jesus acquired his non-dualistic mind by encountering it.
Just as cancer patients are taught, in meditation, to enter into their pain and transform it, our emotions can be entered into. They, in their turn, gain some of their force from subconscious psychic wounds. But the seat of enlightenment, and consciousness, is prior even to that.
A close reading of John 11 is instructive here: whatever is behind our subconscious wounds—I believe this is the persona with which Jesus spent his life getting acquainted. It’s a label for the non-dualistic perspective that assisted Jesus in encountering both himself, and ultimately the Father who begat him.
(Commercial break: I’ve never used the past tense of “beget” in my writing, and it’s fun, in the same way exclaiming “FORSOOTH” is fun. Y’all should try it sometime. Because I’m a big nerd, it’s a stress reliever. Now back to our regularly scheduled program…)
Let me pencil sketch the instructive bits of Jesus life for a minute: Lazarus takes ill, and Jesus hears about it. Despite his disciples’ insistence that they go to see him immediately, he remains where he is for two days, during which time Lazarus kicks the proverbial bucket. We know Jesus uses this as a teaching moment, because he says “This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” I don’t know for certain, but I imagine “Jesus the teacher” struggling somewhat with “Jesus the Human being” here, the way I do when I have to ask my students to do something crappy so that they’ll learn. Not fun, but necessary, and I bet Jesus felt that tension acutely.
Thomas then says “Let us also go, so that we may die with him.” I probably suffer from chronic low-grade depression (dysthymia), but I remember, back in the monastery, walking with my brother Sepehr. He said he felt dead—in response, I assume, to a short night of sleep. I said “I do too. The problem is, I don’t often stay that way.” Sepehr praised me for giving a “perfect buddhist response,” the way he sometimes did. The point is not that I got a pat on the head, but that I, like Thomas, recognized that there is a lowercase “self” whose greatest desire is to die, and to yield completely to who we really are. Of course, this insight did not result in consciousness of the Uppercase Self, the mahatman, any more than it did in Identification with that Self. I still hope, though, that the impulse to stay dead was doing important, foundational work.
When Jesus and pals finally go to the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus, they find Lazarus dead and the whole place in mourning. Martha says “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Jesus is said to have been “greatly disturbed in spirit” at seeing the grief of his friends. This is a clue, that the real work being done here is not on the level of ego. It’s not intellectual work, but a matter of Limbic resonance—the kind of intuitive empathy of which real “identification” between people consists.
Martha intuits something more, so she says “even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus says “I am the resurrection and the Life. Do you believe this?” He thus obscures the lines between his physical being and Martha’s own True Self. Martha’s response is “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” This is tantamount to Martha claiming her own mahatman. The line “if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” gets tossed at Jesus by Mary too, and the enormity of grief from one with whom Jesus had always felt such a bond moves him to weep himself.
Disturbed, Jesus goes to the tomb. He asks that the stone be moved, and commences to holler: “Lazarus, come out!” In short, our man Lazarus complies, and Jesus says “unbind him and let him go.”
This is significant for the way it shows Jesus having non-dual perspectives about his own emotions. (Commercial break: A modern cult movie has a character who says “strong men also cry.” Our Lord and savior agrees. Tune in next time...) In short, Jesus wants to usher others into a transformed consciousness, a non-dual perspective. And he wants us to transmit that to each other. This is the key to his line “Unbind him and let him go.”
In a future post, I’ll talk more about Transformational Authority, and its transmission. For now, though, suffice to say that our problem is a “lowercase problem.” It rests not in our "Selves", but in our "selves". The problem is not perceptions or conceptualizations, but our attachment to them. It’s a question of claiming our impermanence versus getting stuck. When we’re acting out of the programming written onto our unconscious, we fear the death of the ego. This is why Jesus’ action garners assassination plots for both himself and Lazarus—those who plotted felt threatened. For Jesus, though, sharing others’ grief helped cement his identification with his mahatman, on the basis of which he became unafraid to surrender his life.
I have, for years, meditated as if thoughts and emotions are antithetical to what I’m seeking. Unwittingly, I was letting the 5 Skandhas ping my internal radar and influence my direction. The 5 skandhas are, as I understand them, the components of the buddhist “unconscious.” They are the equivalent to the desert fathers' teaching on the eight evil thoughts: mental phenomena that we mistake for an identity. The five skandhas are: form, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness. As I understand it, these are the 5 parts of our lowercase self that get reincarnated till we learn to let go of their drama. But the problem is not the skandhas, but our attachment to them. Respectively, we get attached to material form, sensory experience, mental examination, building a consequent mental narrative, and the sense of ourselves as separate or distinct from other objects.
I am slowly realizing my error. For an emotion, see, enlightenment is the moment it realizes it is in motion. For the ego, enlightenment is the realization that it’s already dead, (and perhaps death itself.) The Tao says “Things arise, and he lets them go.” It was talking about a true disciple here, but might as well been talking about the mahatman. I have only just intuited this, and I’m not certain of it. I think, though, that being able to allow emotions and egotism their existence for as long as it takes to accept them, this is just as important as eventually letting them go. That is the mind of Jesus. What's left--all of the life that endures beyond egoic death--might well be a legitimate foretaste of eternal life. With the right mix of providence, grace, and playing our cards right, it may, one day, be ours.
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