Tag Archives: enlightenment

A Perspective on “Enlightenment”

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WordPress and Facebook introduce me to so many interesting people from different walks of life who I would have never met otherwise. I would like to introduce you today to a young Korean woman, Wanyoung Kim, who can be found on Facebook and is stunningly intelligent and erudite.

Recently she declared on Facebook, “You can be mentally Enlightened, but it is really the power of Christ that heals a person.” I was puzzled as this declaration reflected a dimension of Christian faith that I had not noted before with her postings. So I responded, “I agree. But, I’m curious how you would define ‘Christ’? This is not a cynical question. I just know that you are a very thoughtful person.”

Ms. Kim responded with:

A friend of mine (name omitted here)once described Him as the Internet of all hearts and minds- I cannot say it more succinctly than this. To believe is to know that his suffering accounted for all grievances of every heart and mind that walked upon this Earth in world history. ‪Christ is a man of sorrows himself like me, one can say. The heart of Christ is to see Him in every human being including myself- to empathize with the pain I see of a stranger in the street and this empathy is a healing act where a collective feeling of sharedness which in itself is a unity to the Other reassuring them we all are part of this suffering of Christ. I become Christ my self.

Ms. Kim does not see Christ through the narrow prism that I was taught as a child in conservative Arkansas as a Baptist in the fifties and sixties. And as I read her insightful observations some ancient part of my soul…which I often refer to as “literallew”…wants to denigrate her thoughts immediately. But “literallew” is increasingly buried under the Light of what I now see as Spirit of God which wants us to interpret the scripture and not merely regurgitate it as we have been taught. And this is not merely an intellectual enterprise but a gut-level enterprise that cannot be taught with “book learnin’”. It requires a willingness to have a heart that is “petal open” as Toni Morrison once put it; or, in the words of Shakespeare, a heart that is full of “penetrable stuff.” And this is scary for it subjects one to the flow of life and deprives him/her from the cold, sterile “certainty” that I was told was available and strived for so desperately and never was able to obtain.

Christ is not a “thing” that can be reduced to our “ideas” and thus captured by our ideology, as noble as that ideology might appear to be. He was, and is, an expression of the “Wholly Other” and can be known only when we are willing to experience our own finitude which can only occur when we come face to face with the Otherness that faces us daily with each one we meet and even with this beautiful world itself.  Eckhart Tolle reports He is the “Presence” which is the only thing that “is” if we can separate ourselves from our compulsive thinking.

But seeing Christ in non-linear terms requires an ability to see ourselves in non-linear terms which for most of us requires a radical transformation in self-definition and view of the world. It requires a transformative shift of perspective which brings to my mind the notion from the Apostle Paul, “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” It is much easier to just tenaciously hang onto the  way that we have always seen and experienced our world. As W. H. Auden put it, “And Truth met him, and held out her hand. And he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

But I’m aware that what I’m writing now is “nuts” to nearly anyone from my youth that might happen to read this. This does not make any “sense” to a linear mind that is confined to the time-space continuum. But I have learned that it is very possible to escape confinement in that prison and still respect it and those that live in therein. And I, too, can still live within its confines which is known as “reality” even as I revel in the freedom which Christ represented and offers today.

 

The “Monkey Mind” and Insomnia

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My “monkey mind” is harassing me again so that I cannot sleep. I am so full of chatter.  And I do like my “chatter” but to have any meaning it has to find the primordial silence that is its Source. And I sure appear to be fearful of this Source even though I so often affirm my faith and confidence in it/Him/Her.

I recently read Jiddu Krishnamurti for the first time, a blog-o-sphere friend having recommended Freedom from the Known to me. This book so eloquently presents what I would call a Presence as encompassing the whole of life. As I read this incredibly insightful and powerful book, I am amazed at how it resonates with me on some level and I even suspect that I have some unconscious memory of having known this Presence in my early childhood and yearn to go back there. I think that probably I did know that Presence but discovered that I lived in a world where “chatter” predominated and opted for the validation that it offered.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Krishnamurti that really grabbed me:

You are never alone because you are full of all the memories, all the conditioning, all the mutterings of yesterday; your mind is never clear of all the rubbish it has accumulated. To be alone you must die to the past. When you are alone, totally alone, not belonging to any family, any nation, any culture, any particular continent, there is that sense of being an outsider. The man who is completely alone in this way is innocent and it is this innocency that frees the mind from sorrow.

We carry about with us the burden of what thousands of people have said and the memories of all our misfortunes. To abandon all that totally is to be alone, and the mind that is alone is not only innocent but young – not in time or age, but young, innocent, alive at whatever age – and only such a mind can see that which is truth and that which is not measurable by words.

I do not think that Krishnamurti felt that we could or should purge our minds of accumulated memories. His concern was the attachment to these memories, this “accumulated rubbish,” an attachment which keeps us from being able to “be alone” in the sense of being autonomous.

But note what T. S. Eliot said in The Four Quartets on the issue of attachment and detachment and the oblique relevance of death to the issue:

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

 

A Picture of Me Being Enlightened!

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I finally “saw the light” and it hit me like 240 volts, as you can see.

Yes, I was reading in the book of Deuteronomy, wholly consumed by the intricacies and hidden meaning of the “begots”, and suddenly I felt a rumbling in my bowels, my head felt faint, and suddenly it got me! Seriously, a good friend of mine and I were having coffee last year and were kidding each other about our respective quests for “enlightment” decades ago. We were chuckling at our immature and ego-ridden our quest was. And I certainly admire anyone who seeks spiritual maturity under any guise, and all such seekings have ego involvement, but mercifully if we are patient enough God will address that ego. Actually, he will begin to address that ego as His work will continue the rest of our life on that issue.