Faith, Non-Attachment and Wu Wei

As you can probably tell, I love to make connections. It's sort of my thing. I especially love to make connections between the various religions and philosophies of the world. I have been able to do this relatively successfully, but until last February, there was one big exception. Non-attachment (or Nekkhamma) is one of the highest virtues of the Buddhist religion. Essentially, it means that one should give up all desire, craving or attachment to anything (including God) in order to achieve the highest state of happiness. This principle is quite possibly the most important one in Buddhism, and is therefore very problematic for a person like me. There seems to be no parallel in Christianity or Mormonism.We are taught that we need to cleave to God and that we are supposed to be bound to our families for eternity. So I was at a loss as to what to do. Then, a miracle happened.

Last February, while I was reading my Statistics textbook for homework, I realized something. I understood nearly every principle in the chapter, but only superficially. Or rather, I understood that they worked, but not how or why they worked. I wanted to keep reading, so that I could understand every rule and formula inside and out, front and back. But I didn't have enough time to both do that and my other homework. So, purely out of a desire for efficiency, I at least temporarily refrained from a complete understanding and for a while, I was content with understanding only on a surface level. To my surprise, this did not lead to me falling behind in Stats, but rather to me soaring ahead. Without my desire for a complete and total understanding bogging me down, I was able to progress a great deal in getting my homework done and in doing well on tests. And unexpectedly, the how and the why came naturally later, on its own. In my journal, I originally called it a leap of faith, but I later I realized it was something else as well. I suddenly understood that I was letting go of or detaching myself from the Statistical principles, just as the Buddha himself would have wanted me to.

This led to what I think may have been the most important connection that I have ever made: Faith is letting go. To have faith is to be non-attached. This may seem a shocking conclusion to come to, and perhaps may even seem heretical, but bear with me. A person with faith goes through life free of any concern. They have faith that God will work out everything in the end. Similarly, a person without ties fettering them to the world is free. They can live life to the fullest without worry, pain or sorrow because all of those things ultimately stem from unnecessary clinging. Providing yet another view to look at this idea, the Taoist principle of Wu Wei (as I discovered soon after) is the same concept to a tee. Wu Wei means roughly "going with the flow" and involves natural action, or "trying without trying". A person who practices Wu Wei gives up the futile struggle to change the world by individualistic actions, and like a person with faith or who practices Nekkhamma, can go through life freed from worry and sorrow.

All of these things have yet another thing in common. They all involve giving something up. For the Christian, it is the sure knowledge of any truth, including God. For the Buddhist, it is attachments to the world. For the Taoist, it is a person's ability to feel in control. But inevitably, when you give these things up, something even better comes to you, of its own accord!

In summary, to have faith, practice non-attachment or to live by the principle of Wu-Wei are the same thing. They all consist of looking beyond a here and now that is full of separateness, temporality and mortality to the source of everything that is good. The Christian looks forward, to the time when God will come and renew the Earth. The Buddhist looks inward toward the deathless Self at the heart of all things. The Taoist looks outward, to a world where everything that seems like conflict is actually harmony. But looking forward, backward, inward, outward, up or down all ultimately lead to the same place: the presence of God. These points of view all involve realizing that the physical world of mortality is in fact transparent glass, through which can be seen pure light.

This metaphor may seem to say that we should "look past" the physical world and only focus on the spiritual. This would be world-denying, and is against the tenets of the LDS faith. However, this is not what I mean. On the contrary, to see the light that shines through something is to fully appreciate that something for what it is: an extension of the light's source. The light of God (or Truth) fills everything that it comes into contact with.

On a final tangent, this is why it is perfectly fine for a mystic to believe in a personal God: the light of the undefinable and unspeakable God completely fills the God we can talk to and pray to, such that they are indistinguishable. To speak of one is to speak of the other. In fact, I would say that to not believe in God in this way, and to try to directly experience the ungraspable, incomprehensible God is tantamount to spiritual rape (the sin of the architects and laborers of Babel). Instead, we should realize that, whether in terms of belief or eternal progression, the road toward the infinite is never-ending. The journey is a marvelous, beautiful process: ever-improving and ever-growing. To participate in it is the ultimate act of faith: we will never actually reach the infinite, but if we can see rightly, we will perceive that its light is always shining upon us and filling us to the brim. 


I hope this has been a delightful post for you. It certainly has been a joy writing it.

And if you read it and have something to say, please comment! I am always willing to learn more.

Divine Comedy

A few days ago, I came to a very interesting conclusion. When I was getting ready for P.E. in the locker room, there was a really annoying seventh-grader making really annoying seventh-grade jokes. My peers were there with me, and they expressed to me their frustration with him. However, I was hesitant to join them in putting him down, for the following reasons:

• I remembered being a seventh-grader and having seventh-grade humor. It seemed hilarious at the time, though I realize now that it was stupid. 
• I realized that just as we considered him immature, there were older people who considered us immature and probably had a more "advanced" level of humor than we did. 

These things combined made me point out to my peers that all humor is ultimately relative: someone always has a more (and less) advanced style of humor than you do. When they heard this, a particularly clever member of the bunch responded (semi-jocularly): "Okay, then what is God's humor like?". This post is my attempt to answer that question.

I've heard people say that God must necessarily have no sense of humor. Not only is humor not "appropriate" for a celestial monarch, but humor depends on a lack of knowledge, and God knows everything. God would therefore know the punchline to every joke before it has been told. I disagree. In my opinion, God sometimes imposes limitations on himself, on purpose. For example, God could ensure Celestial glory for everyone, but he's not going to. If he did, there would be no point: it's the "getting-there" that's the most important. In exactly the same way, God limits his knowledge so that he, like us, can enjoy a good joke. 

That answers how God can have a sense of humor. But it still doesn't answer my friend's question: what type of jokes does he tell? I thought about it for a while and then came up with another question that I hoped would lead me to the answer: what makes some jokes funnier than others? I decided that it is how unexpected the punchline is. The worst jokes you can see coming. The best jokes are unexpected. They have their punchlines hidden deep below the surface so that when they finally emerge, it happens in a way that you could have never anticipated. Because of this, the best jokes are those whose punchlines are thoroughly obscured and seem to have no point, like meta-jokes, surreal humor or even Seinfeld.

Now, getting back to God, it is only a natural to say that, just as my humor is more advanced than that seventh-grader, God's humor is infinitely more advanced than mine. And if we accept my proposition in the previous paragraph as true, then it naturally follows that God's jokes have the most obscure punchlines of all. To me, this means that God's jokes are so well-crafted that the punchline must be virtually invisible, so that when we get it, it is the funniest thing we have ever heard. I pondered on this for a while, and then came to a startling conclusion: since God's humor must be so well-designed that the point of a joke has to be hidden to all, what better to fit the bill of the ultimate joke than the universe itself? To put it simply: we are a part of the funniest joke ever told. 

To me it makes perfect sense. God's joke is infinitely subtle. Though it may seem to have no point at times and may even become boring or long-winded, ultimately we realize that those failings were intentional, and actually serve to enhance its humor: the ultimate meta-joke. Its punchline is so well-preserved that until the joke is finished and the punchline is revealed (a.k.a. Christ's second coming to the Earth and its subsequent renewal), only a select few can predict its outcome. The Buddha was one of them. So was Laozi. In fact, that's what having a mystical experience is: seeing the outcome of a joke and realizing the punchline before it happens. This is why many people who have true spiritual experience are so light-hearted. They see the world for what it really is: hilarity, hidden by a sheathing of seriousness.

Some people may say that this is a morbid and even offensive way to look at the universe. How can something like the Holocaust be part of a giant joke? It necessarily trivializes everyone who suffers in the world. May I offer a counterpoint? I don't see viewing the universe as a comedy as trivializing at all. I merely see it as another way of saying that the suffering is for "but a small moment". If we endure it well, we shall see that there is a much greater and more wonderful reality behind all of it. And what better way to look at that wonderful reality than as humor? 

If it helps at all, the movie Life is Beautiful is a very powerful example of how something can be both filled with suffering and be humorous at the same time. It beautifully combines the two, showing that humor and happiness can exist side by side with pain and sorrow, and will in fact eventually triumph over it. I'm sure that there are many more examples, but I trust you get the point.

To reinforce my point, I will also argue from authority. Here are two quotes by two great authors/philosophers:

"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."

-Voltaire

"[The angels sounded] like the laughter of the universe"

-Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy) 

Now, I need to point out that this is only a lens through which to see the nature of God. I am not precisely defining God's reason for creating the world. I am just providing a new way to look at it. I do not mean to exclude other ways of looking at God. I just wanted to share with you a view that I enjoy.

And so I say goodbye for now, hoping that we all someday will get the joke!

AUMen

While watching General Conference, I noticed how often they said the word "Amen". In case you didn't know, Amen is the word that Jews, Muslims and Christians use after a prayer or sermon. It is a word of affirmation, dating back from the earliest texts of Judaism. It literally means "So be it", or "truly", with the connotation of "truth" itself. In addition, Jesus Christ himself is referred to as "the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation" in Revelation.


Now, before I make a connection, I want all of you to know that the following is pure speculation. It could be completely wrong and not based in truth at all. But here it is nonetheless:


The Sanskrit word Aum or Om holds much the same connotation.  It literally means "yes", "it is" or "will be". It has the additional connotation of being a symbol for totality, wholeness and the divine. It is used as an object of concentration when meditating, allowing a person to focus their thoughts on its sounds so that their thoughts to subside. Its constituent sounds, A, U and M, are symbols for the three members of the Hindu trinity: A for Brahma, U for Vishnu and M for Mahadev (another name for Shiva). Incidentally, the A sound is formed in the back of the throat, U in the middle of the mouth, and M on the lips. In each case it symbolizes quite the idea of totality quite well, either in the context of divinity or of vocalization. As if to seal the deal, AUM is recited at the end of prayers.


I don't think I have to say any more to show you the immense similarity between the two words. They both symbolize the eternal, the whole and the truth. As if that weren't enough, they both indicate an acceptance and a peace with what is [Which gives me the idea that perhaps meditation is prayer without words. But I could be wrong, and it's beside the point]. But the connection isn't just limited to these two. Similar-sounding words indicating totality, wholeness, finality, etc. can be found all over the world: Amun (the Egyptian "god of gods"), words beginning with omni- (omniscience, omnivorous, omnipresence, etc.), omega (the last letter of the Greek alphabet).


As to how these similar-sounding words popped up all over the world, I have no idea. Perhaps, although unlikely, they spread from a single center to all of these places. Perhaps it is built into the human consciousness as an archetype (as Jung would tell us). Or perhaps, a little more orthodoxly, it is revelation given from God to all people. 


Anyway, hope you have enjoyed this! Take it with a grain of salt.


AUMen

Being Mothers of God

Here's a short and sweet post for you. And no, it is not the one I said I was working on in my announcement. That one's still in the works.

Meister Eckhart was a German theologian, philosopher and mystic from the 13th and 14th centuries. His views were quite unorthodox (much like mine), and he was subsequently brought up on charges of heresy against the [Catholic] church by the local Franciscan-led inquisition and was tried before Pope John XXII. He published his famous Defense as a challenge to his accused crimes. However, he died before his verdict was received. However, today he is considered "a good and orthodox theologian" by the Catholic Church.

Anyway, there is a quote of his that I really like. It is as follows:

"We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born."

I had my own understanding of what this means, but it was enhanced by something I heard today in my English class.

We are reading Ceremony, a book by Leslie Marmon Silko about a Native-American man trying to retain his cultural identity in a white world. In an introductory poem, it says the following:

"He [it is not stated who] rubbed his belly./I keep them here (he said)/Here, put your hand on it/See, it is moving./ There is life here/for the people. And in the belly of this story the rituals and the ceremony are still growing."

When he read this, my teacher made a connection. He pointed out the obvious, that it was talking about pregnancy, or at least some form of it. But, interestingly enough, it is a man who is pregnant. To explain this, my teacher pointed out that many religions (Mormonism in particular) emphasize a very physical, spiritual sensation in the belly. In Mormonism, it is called the burning of the bosom. So perhaps that is what Ms. Silko meant,

But I made an even bigger connection. To me, this meant that when we are filled with the Holy Ghost, we are figuratively becoming pregnant with God. We are filled to the brim with God's goodness, love and light. At least to me, this means that God is born in you. It also means that everything that is good about God (his love, his light and his happiness) grows out of you and spreads into the world like grass, improving and permeating everything that you come into contact with.

Right here, I could make a connection with the idea of the hierarchy of Gods, but I trust that you can see the connection for yourselves. Plus, it is late, and I am tired. Here's hoping that you learned something when reading this post. I certainly did while writing it.

Things to Come

Hello all!

If any of you are fervent readers of my blog (which I doubt you are), you've probably been disappointed with my lack of posting over the last two years. But I have good news! I'm working on a post that will be uploaded shortly. Hopefully it will go well.

And there is yet more good news! After that, I intend to publish much shorter posts, mostly centering on a single thought I had that day. Hopefully that should lead to more frequent posting.

And I have even more good news! I changed the title of the blog (but not the URL, unfortunately) to Journals of a Mormon Mystics, as opposed to Diaries. I realized that the latter seems way too effeminate.

Anyway, love to you all! You should expect a lot more from this blog in the future.

Lessons from the Aitareya Upanishad

I had known about the Upanishads for a while now, but I only recently decided to sit down and read them. They are the core scriptures of the Hindu school of Vedanta, which teaches primarily the doctrine that humanity is divine. When I did read them, I was astounded. I had never read a text so densely pumped full of meaning in every verse. I highly recommend them.

I've been reading them in order, and so it is natural that my first blog post about them should be about an excerpt from the first one, namely the Aitareya Upanishad. This short book of scripture describes the creation of the universe in terms of the creation of an individual soul, or Atman. However, there is something in the second chapter which I find particularly applicable in helping to understand Mormon scripture. Here is an excerpt from it:

1. In the male first the unborn child becometh. This which is seed is the force and heat of him that from all parts of the creature draweth together for becoming ; therefore he beareth himself in himself, and when he casteth it into the woman, `tis himself he begetteth. And this is the first birth of the Spirit.
2. It becometh one Self with the woman, therefore it doeth her no hurt and she cherisheth this self of her husband that hath got into her womb.
3. She the cherisher must be cherished. So the woman beareth the unborn child and the man cherisheth the boy even from the beginning ere it is born. And whereas he cherisheth the boy ere it is born, `tis verily himself that he cherisheth for the continuance of these worlds and these peoples; for `tis even thus the thread of these worlds spinneth on unbroken. And this is the second birth of the Spirit.

In short, this says that the father is the son. Or, in less profound language, the son is an extension of the father. When the father begets his son, he takes the concentrated essence of his self (like his DNA) to make him. As the son grows and learns, the father grows and learns with him. Any triumph or failure of the son is the father's triumph and failure as well. And any good father will tell you that they care more about their children's success than their own. So, you could even say that the father is born again through his child. And you could even go farther and say that when the father gets his first grandchild, his lives through him as well. And it could continue for eternity, insuring that, at least in one way, you are immortal. And so, as it says, "the thread of these worlds spinneth on unbroken".

Now, I'm not saying that this doesn't apply to mothers and daughters as well. You have to understand that this was written in a male-dominated society. Plus, this is only partially a literal story; it is also a grand metaphor for the creation and workings of the universe. In this conception, you would consider the father to be the great Self, or Brahman. Brahman divides itself up to become different parts of the universe or people (the son), which aren't really creations of Brahman, but extensions of Brahman itself.

And so I would say it is with our Father in heaven as understood in LDS theology. He is a perfected being. According to D&C 88, "All things are before him, and all things are round about him; and he is above all things, and in all things, and is through all things, and is round about all things". So, what else is there for him to do? Not denying that the Father has a body (see my previous post about Light), he essentially is the universe and experiences everything. He seems to have reached the end of the road. There's nothing else left for him to learn or experience. And so, he does the only thing a person in that state could do: create. Thus we come into the picture. We are not creations of God in the sense that he makes us out of something external to him. Just like the son is made from the father's body, we were made from our Father in heaven's body.

But I would challenge the notion that once we were created, we became separate from our Father. Just like it says in the above quote from the Aitareya Upanishad, we are a part of him still. He lives through us. He experiences everything we experience. And when we get to the point where we have all that the Father has, and are also "in all things and through all things" we can do the same thing he did: have children. Then we live and grow through them just as our Father lives and grows through us. And we would also live and experience through our children's children, and our children's children's children, and so on forever and ever. We would never stop progressing and learning. I would say that this is one way the LDS church does believe in reincarnation: through the creation of spirit children.

So that's my take on the LDS doctrine of eternal progression through the eyes of a mystical school of Hinduism. I hope you have enjoyed this post. You can look forward to a much more frequent posting schedule in the future. Happy summer!

Water

Water is an incredibly important symbol, used throughout the scriptures, but it is almost always forgotten. Because of that, I feel like I should bring to light again some things about the symbolism of water that often pass us by.

In the opening verses of Genesis, it says

"[...] and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. "

The word firmament comes from the Hebrew word "raqiya", (called Raukeeyang in the Book of Abraham's facsimile #2) which comes from the root "raqa", which means to stamp, beat out or stretch. The firmament was perceived as a giant hemisphere above the ground, likened to a bowl, which is beaten and stretched out of metal (see Job 37:18).

The deep refers to an enormous ocean that originally made up the entirety of existence. As the above verse demonstrates, the Hebrews believed that great primordial deep was separated into the waters below the firmament (the sea), and the waters above the firmament, perceived as a literal ocean above their heads. In fact, the Hebrews believed that "windows" in the firmament were what caused rain (Genesis 7:11). It was the rising of the deep that caused the flood, and the receding of the deep that allowed Moses and the Israelites to pass on dry land.

[See the picture at the bottom of the blog for an illustration of the above concepts]

Basically, it's saying that everything in the world originally came from water, and that water was there before anything else. The Qu'ran, also stemming from a proud Hebrew heritage, seems to agree:

"Have those who disbelieved not considered that the heavens and the earth were a joined entity, and We separated them and made from water every living thing? Then will they not believe?" (21:30)

It says much the same thing in the New Testament (The New International Version, FYI. I've checked the Greek, and it makes more sense):

"But they deliberately forget that long ago by God's word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water. " (2 Peter 3:5)

Obviously, the Hebrews believed that the universe was created out of something, and not nothing as many other Christian churches would say. I think Joseph Smith recognized that fact when he said that the world was made out of "unorganized matter". But I don't literally believe that the entire universe, or even the earth, came from an actual ocean. If modern science is anything to go by, the earth began in fire, and not in water. But I won't deny that there is an incredible symbolic truth being expressed here.

The Hebrews are not the only ones who believe the world came out of a primordial ocean. According to that wonderful website Wikipedia, many cultures have a creation myth where water was the original substance. The creation myths of the Hindus, the Finns, the ancient Egyptians, the Cherokees, the Bakuba and the Hmong all involve a primordial ocean of some sort that the world was made out of.

But why would they all use water, of all things? Well, I can imagine that a person who saw the ocean for the first time would see that it goes out to the horizon, as far as they can see. Perhaps they suppose it goes on forever. It makes them feel small. And so, they suppose that everything he knows on the land must be mere blotches on the infinite ocean of existence. As a result, they would come to think of water as the blank canvas of existence that everything is painted on.

In other creation myths, other "blank" substances were used. For example, the Shinto think the world was created from a cloud, which separated into the sea and the sky. In Greek mythology, according to Hesiod's Theogeny, the primordial substance Chaos gave birth to the first deities representing the earth, the underworld, darkness and desire.

The Chinese creation myth, although it is much more philosophical and mystical, also has a blank original "substance"

"There was something featureless yet complete, born before heaven and earth; Silent – amorphous – it stood alone and unchanging. We may regard it as the mother of heaven and earth. Not knowing its name, I style it the Tao [Way]"

In modern science we don't see the world very differently. Space (and energy, as well) seem as "blank" and as "empty" as any ocean. So we today see ourselves much like the ancient Hebrews, as an island in the middle of an ocean of space.

Additionally, in nearly all of these myths this original substance “gives life” in some way. In the case of the Tao, it is actually called the mother of heaven and earth. But the use of water as this substance makes this more explicit. Water gives life, more than anything else on earth. We need to drink it, and so do the animals which we eat. It waters our crops and we were actually born from water in the womb. Appropriately, the Hebrew word for the Deep, "Tehom", comes from the Sumerian word/deity Tiamat, also associated with a primordial ocean, which literally means "the mother of all life".

In other areas of scripture, water is also seen as life-giving and therefore divine. In 1 Nephi 11, Nephi speaks of a "Fountain of Living Waters" next to the Tree of Life (which I assume is the same one as the Garden of Eden), which is also a title later applied to Christ. Before the animals of land were created, the animals who live in the lower ocean (the sea) and the upper ocean (the sky) were created. The four rivers coming out of the Garden of Eden in Genesis seem to water the entire known world. Multiple times throughout the Qur'an Paradise is described as being filled with water of different types. God is described as speaking with the "voice of many waters" and in D&C 133, Joseph Smith speaks of barren deserts that shall bring forth living water after the Second Coming.

So, in that context I will liken the previously mentioned function of water: the life-filled original material of creation, to the other more well known function of water in the Gospel: as a purifier. The best example of this function is the ritual of baptism, performed to "wash away the sins" of the person being baptized.

Baptism has its roots in the Jewish ritual of mikveh. The Mikveh is ceremonial bath for Orthodox Jews to regain purity after encountering "unclean" things or activities, like childbirth, menstruation, touching a dead animal, etc.. Purifying by mikveh would be a common activity to Jews at the time of Christ, and baptism would be seen in its context. But according to the Orthodox Jewish author Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, that too has its origins in the conception of water as the source of all life. In his work Waters of Life, he says that the types of uncleanness that a mikveh purifies most often have something to do with death. And so, by ritually washing you are connecting with water, which he says come from the Garden of Eden, the source of all life.

And so I believe it is for baptism. As I mentioned before, water is inseparably associated with its life-giving qualities. By being baptized, we are coming into contact with the original source of all life and creation, and it repels unclean materials causing sin and death. It also has the added symbolism of going back into the waters of the beginning of life, the womb, to be symbolically reborn.

And as many have said before, the Great Flood (the other great water-related thing in the scriptures) was the Earth's baptism. It was filthy with sin and death, so the waters of life rose to cover it and purge it of evil. It wasn't merely being washed; it was going back to the world's original state of creation and remaking the undivided primordial ocean. It was returning to its womb: the Great Deep.

I hope you enjoyed this entry after a Christmas and early January hiatus. Thanks for reading!