We see him with many. [bxA] Mystery would overload the mind. And anyway, we need people to tell us we have spinach stuck in our teeth. God’s transcendence is totally intimate. Our intimacy flails about attempting to approximate it: it proves noses are, and at least one out of every four arms is, completely superfluous. Reality is what it is. Equanimity and suffering color our view of it. Everything is one, y’all, and the fault is ours.
Originally, ego was the result of not knowing how to navigate desire, fulfillment, and attachment: but the good news is, the sickness is also the remedy. Ego splits the world into this and that, divides the cosmos into different “realms.” I touched on the two realms in the last post: we called them the realm of mystery and the realm of revelation. Ultimately they’re just tools with which to shed the ego, but they’re worth knowing about, so we can use them more skillfully.
Revelation opens to mystery by intuition. Wisdom is the result. If we want to dodge the mundane blasphemies of mystery, we have to face revelation. The goal, in the realm of revelation, is seeking out the things that challenge our ego, and doing them. Its allowing life’s illogicality to break up our superficial existence. It’s to seek out the holdouts of trauma in our psyche, and face them. We feel the pull of both grief and gravity. And in the end, any energy we encounter is “our energy.” If demons appear and we get scared, if angels appear and we are fascinated—that all points to attachments we haven’t faced. And make no mistake, attachments aren’t easy to see—they’re buried under thought, a “level of existence” that it’s possible to spend whole lifetimes fooling with. They’re even buried under the deeper stuff: emotion, psychological history, sensation and energy. From Buddha to Christ, each teacher has a story of descending into hell only to find mercy: if “accept and let go” is your rallying cry, you’ll do as they did, with equal compassion.
Mystery consents to revelation through acceptance. Equanimity is the result. If we want to dodge the miniscule hells of revelation, mystery must become a tool. Those espousing one religion’s truths have got to remember that the concrete sidewalk, all of the world’s religions, every human being and every rotting corpse—they all contain a part of the truth, constantly available to those who listen without ego. Those of us who have an incarnation to navigate have got to find a way to remember, sans the neurotic self-deprecation, that we don’t know everything, we struggle more than we admit and that we absolutely aren’t the bees knees.
Of course, every illumination casts a shadow. People who grant their thoughts about mystery too much importance can easily start thinking their godliness is unlimited. People who get too excited about their own shrewdness are, in fact, living on the borrowed time of liars and thieves. Enlightenment may well consist of realizing that we may well have lived that way before—in some previous lifetime that’s long since forgotten—and that we could be there again with equal chance of missing the opportunities for awakening. On another level, living with our eyes open may mean admitting the possibility that we are, in a way that’s free of time, living all of our lifetimes in the present moment—and that the point, in every single one of them, is to minimize suffering. If you will become a buddha, perhaps you were once in hell: so stand up to the demon persecuting others. If you were a thief, perhaps you defended the innocent crucified beside you. Whatever the case, don't get too caught up: when it is now, you'll surely be both at once.
There's something that needs to be said about morality and ego as well. No one is ever free from the moral law. But there are times that "doing the right thing" becomes less important than "distancing from ego." There are, in the end, some problems whose resolution goes hand in hand with egoic distancing--they're mostly the problems that arise in an attempt to get basic human needs met. Affection and validation, power, control and security, food, clothing and shelter--habits we've developed in an attempt to get these particular needs met--can often be so compulsive as to be unresolvable. This is part of the reason the moral law ends in mercy.
But it's also why the moral law ends in non-self as well. It's certainly true that we will spend most of our lives trying to improved the way we use our egos. In the end, to truly act, to truly be--this is a process of making ourselves available to the energy flowing through the cosmos. And that means removing the impediment of ego altogether. A few great saints have bent physical laws in the process of becoming open to that energy. The point is twofold. Firstly, it's a process of willingly laying down the self, not of willfully setting a goal of enlightenment. Secondly, sometimes high and low, bad and good, right and wrong are not as important as the status of the self that's doing the observing and the acting and the being. All the laws apply still, while we are here in the body. But they diminish in importance.
These are big questions, and getting caught in the mind games of answering them doesn’t substantially help me practice. I suppose the point is to remember, like Adam, that being like God can have serious negative consequences, can make us miss out on the important things of earth. The point is to maintain, from the highest heavens to the depths of earth, an equanimous compassion that springs from self-acceptance. If we can do that, then perhaps we’ll find the teachers words—IT IS FINISHED—forming in our mouths in each quiet moment. And when we say it, God willing, perhaps it will be so.
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