Jesus Wasn't Polite Company

Well-intentioned followers of Jesus too often assume he was a warm, fuzzy guy. 

In him they see someone preoccupied with keeping the peace, not making waves. And there can be no doubt that Jesus was a peacemaker. He was non-violent to the core. But non-violent is not the same as non-confrontational.

Non-violence is an inherently confrontational practice. We need not look as far back as the Gospels to confirm this fact. Both King and Gandhi used confrontation to effectively dramatize injustice. Similarly, confrontation was a preferred tactic of Jesus. 

Jesus was undoubtedly a kind, compassionate, and loving man. But Jesus's message was subversive. His behavior, tactics, and rhetoric call to question the simple-minded ideas many of us cling to about love and compassion. The fire-brand that turned over the money-lender's table is tough to square with the overly sentimental image of Jesus many of us hold dear.

Jesus was not an "agree to disagree" kind of guy. When the Pharisees asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?" Jesus did not say, "To each their own. Now go in peace my brother." He instead called them "hypocrites" and said,

"You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!"

Ouch. That is the sting of brutal honesty. 

“Our ideas of God tell us more about ourselves than about Him,” said Thomas Merton. I suppose the same is true about Jesus. The always affable and courteous image of Jesus that occupies the altar of our mind conforms more to our fears and expectations, than the picture painted by the Gospels. It appears to be an image cast in the shadow of our fear of confrontation. We don't want Jesus to be confrontational because we are afraid of following him into the conflict.

Conflict can be scary business. 

Jesus never declined an invitation to a good debate, even when tensions were high. "They took up stones to stone him." Stop and think about that: "They took up stones to stone him." If there is ever a time to keep your mouth shut, it is when they take up stones to to stone you. Yet, Jesus offers perhaps his wittiest response of all to this stone-toting audience: "Is it not written in your law, 'I said, you are gods?' (82nd Psalm) Now if those to whom the word of God came were called 'gods'—and the scripture cannot be in error—can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, 'I am God’s Son?' If I am not doing the works of my Father, then do not believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father." He said that to people who were about to stone him!

I am not saying that Jesus was unnecessarily combative or the First Century equivalent of an internet troll, but I am saying that when ideas and practices deviated from the truth as he saw it, Jesus turned into that friction, rather than away from it. He was not concerned with "keeping the peace," so to speak. He said, "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword." Obviously, he is not referring to physical violence. He is talking about the sword of wisdom which cuts through those ideas, beliefs, traditions, and institutions that prevent us from realizing what he called "The Kingdom of Heaven."

Challenging someone's "beliefs" is often thought to be impolite. Social customs that place our religious ideas above dispute are built in memetic devices that aid those ideas in their struggle to endure. On the spiritual path, such etiquette is counter-productive. It compartmentalizes our beliefs, segregating them from the reality of our daily life, which is the environment they must learn to operate within. In fact, unless they learn to operate within that environment they cannot be considered proper beliefs.

Kant describes three degrees of conviction: opinion, faith, and knowledge. In brief, opinion is both subjectively and objectively insufficient; faith or proper beliefs are subjectively sufficient but objectively lacking; and knowledge is both subjectively and objectively sufficient. Sufficient to what? Establish truth. What is the minimum threshold of truth? According to the pragmatic theory of truth as fleshed out by William James—which is the most suited for our purposes—it is utility. When an idea inspires action and the corresponding result of that action proves to be useful, then that idea ceases to be a mere opinion and becomes a proper belief, though it lacks the persuasiveness or efficacy needed to be universally accepted as knowledge. This is the ladder our ideas must climb to become beliefs, the ascent of which requires study, debate, self-examination, and spiritual practice.  

Social taboos against openly critiquing religious or spiritual ideas do nothing more than guard those ideas against the pressure truth applies to them, which is what forces them to adapt or mature into proper beliefs. As a result, our ideas about spirituality fail to ripen into a practical and effective spirituality. They remain adolescent, under-developed, ill-suited for life in an adult world, which is why Jesus ignores this custom. He embodies the sentiment expressed by Paul when he wrote, "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways."

Politics is another sphere of intellectual life that is often quarantined. We are afraid of the tension soaked conversation that ensues when politics, religion, or the ever combustible combination of the two surfaces. People tend to identify with the the ideas that collectively define their religious and political orientations and therefore feel internal friction—stress, fear, anger—when those ideas are challenged by competing points of view. Therefore, those conversations typically surface only in the "safe space" of like-minded people. And breach of this unspoken protocol is thought to be bad manners, as the old saying goes, "In polite company, it’s not proper to talk about religion or politics."

Jesus is not polite company! 

He is extremely critical of other's beliefs. In fact, the word "hypocrite" appears approximately twenty times in the Gospels. I am not suggesting we run around calling people hypocrites, but I am suggesting that open and honest debate is healthy, even necessary, for spiritual growth and a thriving democracy. We should be respectfully critical of other's beliefs, as well as our own. And by critical I do not mean rude, but "crit·i·cal: an analysis of the merits and faults of a given idea, proposal, or practice."

Beliefs are the ideas that orient us toward the world in which we live. They are those ideas upon which we act. When beliefs or traditions prevent ourselves or others from orienting their entire Being toward the reality of our daily life, they should be challenged. If there is a manner of living that is more fulfilling, then that life should be lived and any beliefs that prevent us from actualizing that life should be challenged. Avoiding this confrontation is a form of spiritual bypassing. When our ideas are challenged, it is an invitation to grow: an invitation to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.

I am not suggesting that walking the spiritual path requires us to become contrarians. I am simply saying that debate and discussion are an essential part of a balanced and healthy spiritual diet. And furthermore, they are part of the path outlined by the example of Jesus.

We have to be willing to have those uncomfortable conversations. Discomfort is the texture of kenosis, which is the active ingredient in spiritual growth. We have to be willing to question not only our beliefs and traditions, but the beliefs and traditions of others—not out of spite, but as an expression of love and fidelity to the truth. This is part of Jesus's yoke, his jnana yoga, if you will.      

The Proclamation of Basic Goodness

The following is an excerpt from Finding God in the Body, Chapter 8, "Is It Not Written in Your Book?" Click here to order on Amazon.

“They took up stones to stone him,” John writes in Chapter 10, Verse 31. Jesus responds:

I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these are you going to stone me?

They answered, as Caiaphas would soon thereafter:

It is not for a good work that we are going to stone you, but for blasphemy, because you, though only a human being, are making yourself God.

You see, moments before Jesus said, “The Father and I are one.” Steeped in Jewish mythology, as Jesus was, he turned to his stone-toting audience and asked, “Is it not written in your book, ‘You are gods’? If those to whom the word of God came were called ‘gods’—and the scripture cannot be in error,” he skillfully continued, “can you say that the one whom the Father has sanctified and sent into the world is blaspheming because I said, I am God’s Son?” Simply put, if I am in error so is the book you believe to be inerrant.

Frustrated by Jesus’s sharp-witted response, the mob tried to seize him, but he escaped. Later, in the Sanhedrin trial, Caiaphas tried to pin Jesus down once again: “I put you under oath before the living God, tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God.” Jesus replied, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”

First he tells Caiaphas, “You have said so. But I tell you…” In other words, what you and I mean by “messiah” are two different things. Jesus then unpacks his messianic vision. He describes “a new heaven and new earth” where “God lives amongst mortals.” In his vision, humankind is at the “right hand of God.” The phrase “right-hand man” refers to someone who does the work of another, usually someone more powerful. Jesus is saying that humankind is the instrument of God’s peace and creativity. And that all the kings, queens, and ecclesiastical hierarchies cannot stop this evolutionary force because it is coming on the clouds of heaven. This is the messianic hope of Jesus.

The messianic hope is realized not by a prefigured savior or by a chosen few, but by the whole of society. “Messianic consciousness is not something that comes in the future; it is our intrinsic nature,” writes Rabbi David Cooper. “It is our birthright, available to all of us here and now. Although obscured over the millennia by clouds of ignorance, its light continues to shine in the divine sparks at the core of our being… In our time, the goal of raising holy sparks is nothing less than the attainment of messianic consciousness for all of humankind. In this context, the individual cannot be separated from the integrated whole; the collective enlightenment of humanity is clearly as relevant as any focus on individual attainment.”

When the messianic impulse is read through the lens of fundamentalism, it leads to complacency. Instead of saying “Yes!” to our adventure, we sit on our hands waiting on our savior. When the messianic myth is read within, it leads to responsibility. We all bear messianic responsibility. “You are the light of the world,” says Jesus. “A city built on a hill cannot be hid. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lamp-stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

It is our task to transform the world, not by trying to change the people in it, but by recovering the spark of basic goodness that shines within ourselves and elevating that light to new heights. We must allow the flame of God’s Being to consume our whole person. When our life is set ablaze by the fires of basic goodness, others feel that flame burning within themselves. This is how the world is transformed.

Just before his arrest Jesus prayed, “Father, the glory you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one.” Jesus did not see himself as the Boss’s Son. He saw the flame of basic goodness in the heart of all people: “God makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust alike.” His message was a universal one. He did not see man, woman, black, white, gay, straight, Jew, or Gentile. Jesus wanted to speed up the day when all of God’s children would answer the call to participate in the Power of God.

Reverberating in the mind of Jesus were the words, “God saw everything that God made, and indeed, it was very good.” This “goodness” is at the core of the gospel message. It is the “good news.” At his baptism, when the heavens parted, Jesus heard the voice of God say, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am pleased.”

At the top of the mountain, during the transfiguration, Peter, James, and John saw the heavens part and heard a voice say, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am pleased.”

When we look deep within ourselves, we see that we are good. “Christian life and growth are founded on faith in our own basic goodness, in the being that God has given us with its transcendent potential,” writes Father Thomas Keating. “This gift of being is our True Self.” The light of our True Life may be obscured by the clouds, but it still shines.

On the mantle of Jesus’s baptismal confession was the proclamation of basic goodness, the gift of eternal Being—not immortality but I am-ness. When we place him at the center of our baptismal confession, we become idolaters. When we place Jesus on our altar, we end up loving him more than we love what he embodied, which lives in our body. When we love something more than the indwelling presence of God, we break the first commandment.

Jesus walked the path for us, but not in place of us. He blazed a trail, but it is up to us to walk the path. The Power of Being must be resurrected in our body and no one can do that for us. We have to take up the yoke before us. We have to pick up the tools of self-analysis, study, prayer, and meditation.

There is No Room for Admirers.

"Of all the children born to women, there has never been anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he." - Matthew 11:11

Conversion or the rebirth experience (metanoia) marks the resurrection of our True Self, which is of the Kingdom and not born of woman, so to speak. Metanoia is a renewal of one's mind and motivations. It is an experience that re-orients our entire being because it relocates the point or center from which we live our life, moving it from the head down into the heart.

In the Gospels, the Christ image is made manifest in Jesus of Nazareth. Through Jesus's life and actions the indwelling presence of God is born into the world. But the life of Christ does not end with the crucifixion of Jesus. Christ is resurrected. In fact, Christ is Resurrection. This unending Resurrection is the story of Christianity. It is the True Self or the Resurrected Christ that, in Galatians, Paul says has replaced his false-self.

Paul further elaborates on this point in Ephesians where he writes, "Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, putting on the new self, created after the likeness of God." This false-self/ True Self, former life/ New Life dichotomy is common in spiritual literature. In Alcoholics Anonymous members celebrate "sobriety birthdays." The sobriety birthday is often more significant than their biological birthday because it marks the point at which they adopted a new manner of living. The sobriety birthday is in fact a re-birth day. It is a celebration of the True Self, which obviously was not born of a woman or brought about by reproductive means, but by a spiritual death and resurrection.

In the opening quotation, Jesus also says "the least in the Kingdom" which denotes a spectrum of realization (least to greatest). This spectrum recognizes both maturity and depth of insight into the Kingdom, ranging from the admission of powerlessness found in Alcoholics Anonymous to the realization of Oneness with God proclaimed by Jesus in the Gospel of John.

But either way, he who is of the Kingdom is greater than he who is of the world because Kingdom dwellers, so to speak, strive to live in accordance with their True Nature and not the law or the prescribed guidelines of religious and social institutions. In fact, the prescribed guidelines of churches and governments are legitimized only in so far as they relate back to the inclinations of human nature and aid individuals in their quest to realize or embody that nature for themselves.

Often, institutions fail to do this because they are more concerned with perpetuating their power, which is why people like Jesus, Gandhi, and King are seen as subversive by those institutions. They embody the principle freedom of the Kingdom, not the ways of the world.

Many Americans believe America is a Christian nation. The majority of Americans may self-describe as Christian, but it is becoming increasingly clear that the spiritual principles outlined in the Gospels—the principles Jesus embodied and Christians are called to follow—are repugnant to many American "Christians," especially those that frequently say America is a Christian nation. It is obvious from the Gospel account that Jesus offered a counterculture and because of this he was seen as a troublemaker. And he was. But he also still is. He causes trouble for anyone that claims to follow him because the path he outlines is not an easy path to walk.

Richard Rohr wrote in Jesus' Plan for a New World, "We keep worshiping the messenger, keeping Jesus up on statues and images, so we can avoid what he said. It's the best smokescreen in the world! We just keep saying, 'We love Jesus.' The more we talk about Jesus, the less we'll do what he said. That's the way the ego fools itself. And in this case, it's the way culture, nations and even churches have fooled themselves."

We worship the messenger but ignore the message. In the process, Jesus obtains admirers but not followers. We have confused our ego with the Christ image depicted in the Gospels, and tragically with the image of God that lives within us. This is spiritual materialism.

The Christ image is subversive. It undermines our ego and all of its attendant fears, prejudices, resentments, and defense mechanisms. This is a challenge. It requires that we empty ourselves. Letting go of the false-self and it's strategies takes the burden off of the True Self. It shifts the burden over to the false-self. This burden is the cross upon which the ego is crucified. And the resurrection of our True Life is proportionate to the death of our false-self. "He and I cannot dwell together in the same space." Without death there can be no rebirth. "We cannot welcome the presence," writes Rohr, "the Parousia, the full coming of Christ until we've let go of the old."

Beyond the noise, the chaos, the stress, fear, and anger we can feel our heart beating, calling out to us, pleading with us to let go of our false-self and to return to the life of the body. This is the call of Christ, which lives within us as the image of God, our True Self. Jesus shows the way. And only those that follow can be called Christian in any meaningful sense of the word, regardless of what beliefs they affirm. On the path Jesus outlined there is simply no room for admirers.

Order Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West by Benjamin Riggs today. Available in Paperback and Kindle on Amazon. 

How Belief Prevents Believing.

I have worked in substance abuse for the better part of a decade. 

I regularly lecture and give workshops on 12-Step spirituality at drug and alcohol treatment centers. Often it is those of agnostic or atheistic temperament that are thought to struggle most with the spirituality of the Twelve-Step program. But this has not been my experience.

In my experience, it is the more religiously inclined people that struggle with Twelve-Step spirituality. This is because Twelve-Step spirituality is action-based. Alcoholics Anonymous has no prescribed theology, no system of belief. It is a pragmatic spirituality. In a single AA meeting you might find a couple of Christians, a Buddhist, a Jew, maybe a Muslim, and a handful of people that identify as "spiritual but not religious." They all believe different things but enjoy the same result: sobriety. This is because they all follow the same course of action.

Pragmatic spirituality focuses on how you believe, not what you believe, which can be difficult to grasp if you are used to propositional religion. 

Evangelical Christianity is the largest single religious denomination in America, accounting for 25% of the total Christian population (40% in the South). Evangelical Christianity stresses the acceptance of certain theological propositions more than the practice of spiritual principles. It is more concerned with what you believe than it is how you believe it. When these people try to get sober they think they already have the spirituality angle worked out because they answer in the affirmative to all the right propositions. They already believe, and as far as they're concerned belief is what spirituality is all about. And that is why they struggle with Twelve-Step spirituality.

Their religiosity prevents them from seeing the obvious: "You already believe." If the problem persisted in the face of your belief, then more of that belief cannot possibly be the solution. The Twelve-Steps are referring to action or practice, when they prescribe spirituality, not the affirmation of supernatural propositions. You can believe that Jesus Christ is the one and only Son of God and still walk into a liquor store or the dope dealers house. Belief is worthless unless it effects our actions. In fact, a "belief" that fails to inspire action is no belief at all.

According to Pew Research, 58% of Americans believe the Bible is the Word of God. Over 80% of Evangelicals believe in the existence of heaven and hell. Now, think about that for a minute: There is an afterlife. You will spend eternity in either perfect bliss or unimaginable torment and God alone is the arbiter in this matter. He will weigh the balance of your life against his prescribed guidelines recorded in the Bible and assign you to eternity in either heaven or hell.

If you really believed that wouldn't you read the Bible cover-to-cover over and over again? Wouldn't you consult it before every consequential decision made? But what percentage of people who claim to believe all of that have read the Bible cover-to-cover?  Approximately, 1 in 3 Evangelicals  read the Bible once a month or less and 1 in 5 church-goers say they never read the Bible. Why does a substantial portion of the people who accept those religious propositions not read the Bible more frequently?

People often do not believe what they say they believe. 

At this point, we must distinguish between a belief and a thought. A thought is an unsubstantiated idea; whereas a belief is an idea we are inclined to trust based on some measure of evidence, even if we cannot prove it to be true or rationally explain our position. Belief is an idea or network of ideas substantiated by enough reason or experience to inspire action, though it falls short of knowledge or the state of knowing.

For example, imagine being in a strange house all alone. Late at night your mind may start to wander. Based on nothing at all, you start thinking there is someone in the house. But you don't call the police. Why? Because you know those thoughts are nothing more than the spontaneous ruminations of your paranoid mind. Now imagine you heard a strange noise in the house, something that sounded like a person rummaging around. Now you have reason to believe there is someone in the house, so you pick up the phone and call the police. You are not certain. It could be a mouse, a raccoon, or the old home settling, but there is enough evidence to take action. That is the threshold an idea must cross to become a belief.

Most people do not actually believe, they think. Their "beliefs" are in reality unsubstantiated ideas. This is a serious problem in American religion, which is ate up with fundamentalism. As I wrote in Finding God in the Body:


"The fundamentalist is an individual who subscribes to a system of ideas that do not belong to them. They rely upon a book or the experience of another person who relies, interestingly enough, on a book or the experience of someone else. This line of co-dependency stretches back to the source of the tradition, the owner of the original transcendent experience...Fundamentalists study books rather than using books to study themselves. They mistake myth as fact and read it like history. This inoculates religion. It says that the transcendent realm is off limits to everyone except the historical embodiment of transcendence that sits on the altar of their tradition."   

Fundamentalists have an unwavering attachment to a set of ideas that do not belong to them and lack the potency to effect meaningful change in their lives, partly because a strong in-group dynamic is established which utilizes the mechanism of fear and the threat of ostracization to perpetuate their psychological identification with those ideas. But those ideas are not beliefs. They lack the experiential component needed to effect action.

The experiential component comes from spiritual practice. That is why practice-based spirituality is so important. 

Practice can be seen as a process of experimentation and experimentation leads to experience. Ideas, which are otherwise unsubstantiated, can be tested using spiritual practice. The truth or validity of a certain spiritual ideas can be tested using prayer, meditation, and self-examination. In more religious language, you could say that practice makes us susceptible to revelation.  

Once again we must pause to clarify an important issue. When I say the "truth" of an idea can be verified through spiritual practice, I do not mean, for example, that the existence of a personal God can be proven using prayer. I mean "truth" in the pragmatic sense. William James wrote, in The Meaning of Truth, "The true, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in our way of thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in our way of behaving." It is also worth noting that Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous and the author of the Twelve Steps, was deeply influenced by James.

The idea of a personal God, if properly understood and skillfully employed, can be proven effective--and therefore true in the pragmatic sense--through spiritual practice. Prayer can be used to transcend our limited, self-centered point of view and arouse courage, compassion, and sanity in the face of fear, anger and confusion. This obviously does not prove the existence of a creator God, but it does demonstrate the truth or expediency of the belief in God.

In order for the idea of God to be transformed into a belief in God the idea must be practiced. In Luke 6:32-34, Jesus defines practice as the application of an idea outside of our comfort zone: 

"If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again."

In other words, practice must be demanding. There must be sacrifice. Prayer cannot be limited to periods of quiet reflection in our bedroom. It has to enter our daily life, particularly when we are angry, stressed out, and afraid. The expediency of prayer is demonstrated when we pray beyond the false-self system and reconnect with the life of the body. There we tap into the power needed to "love our enemies, do good, and expect nothing in return." This is where we discover the truth of God or as Jesus said, "Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High." But this is easier said than done.

Bill Wilson wrote, "Almost none of us liked the self-searching, the leveling of our pride, the confession of shortcomings which the process requires for its successful consummation." It is easy to think, but the work and sacrifice that belief requires is demanding. So we go looking for the easier, softer way. "The gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it."

For most people, the concept of God never matures into a proper belief--an idea that orients their entire being toward the world in which they live. Instead, it remains an impotent piece of intellectual property with which they psychologically identify. This identification is a form of spiritual bypassing. It circumvents the painstaking work of transformation by plastering over fear, anger, and self-centeredness with delusion and spiritual rhetoric. But that rhetoric is empty. "Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven."

What we think and say does not matter.  It is our actions that matter. When we think and talk of spiritual principles but fail to express those principles in our daily life, we betray our True Self. This is the betrayal of Christ, the Kiss of Judas. 

Spirituality is nothing if it is not the act by which we transcend the claustrophobic world between our ears and reconnect with the vastness and richness of our True Life. Any ideas about spirituality we possess or identify with must be measured against their capacity to realize this goal. If those ideas fail to inspire action or bring about meaningful change, then they must be discarded. If they inspire us to give freely of our time and energy, to love our enemies, and shed the skin of our false-self, then these ideas must be practiced until they become a working part of our mind. That is the path of transformation. 

Following the Myth Within: A Contemplative Reading of Sacred Texts

The following is an excerpt from Finding God in the Body: A Spiritual Path for the Modern West

Finding God in the Body is available for purchase on Amazon. Click here to order. 

Capitalism & Spirituality: The Dehumanizing Effect of Materialism

Man can only worship that which he was made for.

This is his true life, the life that is pre-ordained by his body.

A life of devotion is a journey where the goal is to arrive more fully where you already are—to live for the sake of life alone. From this point of view, the steps we take in order to complete our journey are characterized by an attitude of willingness, rather than willfulness. The present moment is revealed to be an endless act of consent, where we are giving into the revelation of who we are, and as a result, who we are becomes our technique.

Initially the journey is necessarily concerned with your relationship to the external world. This is simply because the search begins with a mind that is scattered out in multiplicity. Our minds are all over the place and we feel trapped in an authentic way of life. But as the search matures and the questions become simpler our focus begins to move away from the margins, back to the center, out of which, our authentic life emerges. Only an unmediated life, a life characterized by simplicity and directness, can accept the search itself—the very question, "Who am I?"—as the definitive answer.

We are looking for the ground out of which the seeds of meaning and love sprout into our lives. And we must look with all our heart, as a life disconnected from meaning and love is a life prey to misery. We must look under every rock, every stone, and in every nook and cranny. We must be willing to question anything and everything, including the existence of God and what we think is important in life.

We must search until we find the truth in our heart that cannot be undone by reason or rationale, as it is unspoken Truth, substantiated by direct experience. Then, we devote ourselves to the unfolding of Truth by organizing our life around the expression of Truth. This is the proper meaning of devotion and worship. Devotion, in its proper context, is not blind obedience. It is an attitude of willingness that transforms us into a disciple of Truth. In this way, our life is shaped by the expansion of Truth into the domain of our Incarnation.

In the modern world, many of us worship money.

We seek gain for the sake of gain, and in doing so, make money our master. We follow it as we organize our lives around the dehumanizing patterns of behavior that lead to the acquisition of money. Then, we use the acquired money to purchase 'things' that require more money, which reinforces the automatized habits necessary for the production of more money. True, many of us have families to support, and we want to provide the best possible life for our children, but we need to understand that the life we give our children is not the one we pay for, but the one we live. We must be sure that the life we are offering our kids by way of our example is not an automated life that reduces us, and consequently them, to just another cog in the wheel of an economic machine. This is the rat race, the unavoidable consequences of which, are sickness and insanity.

Spiritual practice is necessarily a challenge. It is a protest of the dehumanizing manner of living prescribed by materialism. "You cannot serve two masters, as you will love one and despise the other."

But true spirituality never calls you out of the world. In fact, it brings you into a greater intimacy with the world. True spirituality brings you back to the self existing world, which cannot be undone by any amount of effort or rationalization, as it is pre-dates both effort and rationalization. So naturally, spiritual practice appears to take you out of 'this' world, but only because it is pulling you away from the automated routine and bringing you back to a spontaneous way of life that enables you to realize your humanity.

Sanity and Politics: The Lost Gospel.

“I stressed the need for a social gospel to supplement the gospel of individual salvation. I suggested only a ‘dry as dust’ religion prompts a minister to extol the glories of heaven while ignoring the social conditions that cause men an earthly hell.”  ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

We, in the west, have for far too long been subjected to the unbearable consequences of a theology that denies the revelation of direct experience. Inspired by a fundamental sense of broken-ness or incompleteness religion has, for many westerners, reduced to nothing more than an escape route. Not only has religion become an enterprise of redemption, but redemption remains just around the corner in the afterlife. The affirmative side of popular spirituality is the promise of greener pastures and sunnier days, but the implied consequences of such wishful thinking—the negation of our day-to-day life—has led to a belief in our own insufficiency, articulated by the doctrine of original of sin.

Our “earthly hell” is revealed to be the absence of content or meaning, the sense of lifelessness that characterizes the way we are living. There is no vitality. We are just trudging along. Life feels mechanical or numb, as if we are living once removed. We feel disconnected from the life we are living, as if we were a spectator watching as someone else’s life unfolds. This fundamental form of dis-ease constitutes the basis of self-hatred.

“Self-hatred is the basis for hating others or the world at large. For self-hatred, being really unbearable, is easily justified by making the others and the world bad, so they can become the object of hatred instead of the own self. Thus, pessimism maybe called the philosophy of hatred, or, as Nietzsche termed it more subtly, of ressentiment.” ~ Otto Rank

Ressentiment is the French word for resentment. In popular language, resentment has been reduced to nothing more than un-resolved or aging anger. In the above passage, psychologist Otto Rank suggests a deeper meaning. Rank defines resentment as the projection of self-hatred onto objects in the environment as a way of relieving ourselves of the turmoil wrapped up in our festering self-hatred.

Embedded in the life we are living is a feeling of disgust. Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, writes, “We were having trouble with personal relationships, we couldn't control our emotional natures, we were a prey to misery and depression, we had a feeling of uselessness, we were full of fear, we were unhappy, we couldn't seem to be of real help to other people…” What could be more important than an accessible down-to-earth resolution to these most basic of human problems? What could be more important than our basic sanity and well-being?

Unfortunately, the attitudes and states of mind that breed these basic human bedevilments are ignored, as we frantically project our sense of disgust onto objects in the environment. We become obsessed with decrying the moral shortcomings of those politicians and their supporters who stand opposite of our convictions. Liberals and conservatives alike, log onto facebook to spew their self-hatred onto the news feed in the form of short opinion pieces that point out the stupidity and treasonous opinions of those on the opposite side of the aisle. We are so lost in this depreciating process that seldom do any of us stop to consider the role this behavior plays in the inflammation of self-hatred.

Resentment is not responsible for self-hatred, but it is obvious that projection is one of the more common ways we deal with the pains of self-hatred. We experience ourselves as removed from the scene—a spectator watching life unfold from a distance—because the life we are living is a scam. We are more like an actor playing the part, and the part is assigned by our environment  The views we are vehemently defending do not belong to us. They are the intellectual inheritance of our family, social class, and education, which we feel compelled to defend, but lack the felt conviction to author for our Self. We lack authority, confidence, and creativity in our convictions. This leads to insecurity, fear, and aggression.It has nothing to do with whether the points of view we are sharing are reasonable or "right" or "wrong," instead the problems seems to be how we are arrived at these conclusions. We were given the answer by our minister, parents, friends, boss, neighbors, or the news media, rather than given the space needed to arrive at our own conclusions. We were taught what to think, instead of how to think. 

Sanity is a point of view substantiated by reality. Reality is revealed in the body. Insanity begins with misplacing the body. We have forgotten how to listen to our hearts. We have replaced the biological or spiritual imperative to live fully and honestly with the tendency to think about life, and the voice in our head is inspired by everyone except our heart—the preacher, the pundit, the teacher, mom, dad, those socially and economically successful role models we strive to imitate—all have taken up space in our head, drowning out the voice of our true Life, and as a result we feel lost and lifeless. We are only pretending to be passionate. In fact, we are angry and disembodied. We are plagued by a spiritual rigamortis.

“Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.” ~ St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 6:19

You can almost hear St. Paul’s surprise…. “Wait! You don’t know?! The temple ain’t some building or institution out there. It is not a document, political or religious bureaucracy, or ecclesiastical hierarchy. It is your beating heart. It is the life of the body.” Our relationship with God or Truth is not limited to periods of worship on Sunday mornings, nor is it dependent upon quiet moments of prayer and meditation in our bedrooms. God lives in the body and the variety of affairs that make-up our daily life— political, economic, social, and intimate—constitutes the womb out of which God is born into the world.

The misplacing of the body in western theology is the source of our misplaced spirituality. The body of experience is the ground of being or basic sanity. To talk about life apart from the body is to speculate or hallucinate. We migrate out of the vitality of the body and into the lifeless world of ideas. Unfortunately, hallucinating and faith have become synonymous. But St. Paul is inviting us back into the original meaning of faith, back into direct experience.

The body is the house of God or the temple. Truth is revealed in and through the body, which means that Truth or God’s will is first and foremost an unformed or un-interpreted feeling, spontaneity. Listening to this still voice is commonly referred to as prayer. We come back to the body and we reclaim the quality of wakefulness and vitality that we crave. Until we reconnect with a God that actively reveals itself to us through the silent revelation of our body, we will continue to be plagued by the fundamental sense of disgust and self-hatred that arises out of the unfortunate fact that we are only thinking about life or pretending to live.

So, how do we reconnect with the body? Simple. We let go of the tendency to think about life, and fall into the immediacy of direct experience. Rather than projecting our experience onto objects in the environment, we silently accept the movement of our body. We own our experience with the willingness to embrace whatever arises in the body with simple awareness. We move into the feeling, without words, and feel through the feeling. It does not matter if we are talking about a pleasant or unpleasant experience, we remain present to the feeling. To deny the body is to deny life, which is the source of dis-contentment or the absence of fullness that we have been projecting onto others. This is the work we are called to before we offer our gifts to the world.

“Leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to your brother; then come and offer your gift.” Matthew 5:24

Our offerings to the world are not to be tainted. They are to be the pure, unadulterated expressivity of God as revealed in the body, as the above passage from 1^st Corinthians indicates. Glory, in the Hebrew bible has a sense of majesty, splendor, or brightness. So, to glorify is to allow the splendor of God’s creativity to shine through our pores. Before making any offering, even a political opinion on facebook, we are directed in Matthew 5:24 to first go and be reconciled with our brother. We must be free of insecurity, fear, and aggression, less our body become an instrument of self-will and destruction. We are warned that to be crossed with our neighbor may lead to more worldly consequences, but to become resentful is to be damned to an “earthly hell.”

The content of our politics is of little importance. The tone is far more important. The tone tells you the source of this opinion. Any argument that tries to dissuade those with differing points of view from responding, through the use of technical, wordy jargon or aggressive, incendiary rhetoric is no offering at all. It is a projection of our own self-hatred, and a demonstration of our own refusal to participate in the unfolding of our life. Rather than embracing the unfolding of our life as the movement of the body, we turn our feelings of discomfort into behaviors that seek to transfer the sense of disgust to another person. This leaves us feeling empty and broken. A passionate, non-aggressive offering shines through our pores and inspires healthy dialog that promotes understanding and growth. Creativity can transform simple conversation, political, religious, or otherwise, into a transformative experience, because it invites the energy of God into the exchange.  

Jesus: Fully Human and God Incarnate–One Epic Bodhisattva.

What is a Bodhisattva?

Fearlessness is the underlying principle of the Bodhisattva vow and the Mahayana path. In this sense, fearlessness refers to the organic, in born courage that is characteristic of human nature. This sort of courage may not be visible on the surface, but, as Alexander Hamilton suggested, it does exist as a sort of potential energy just waiting to be liberated: “There is a certain enthusiasm in liberty, that makes human nature rise above itself, in acts of bravery and heroism.”

Organic fearlessness involves no pep-talk, nor is it something that we create or obtain through effort. It is discovered when we let go of effort and begin to relate with the rawness of our human condition. When we look beyond the veil of our thoughts—our limited self-image—we discover a limitless presence. This presence, in all its vastness and immediacy, is the totality of our being, and it knows no fear.

The fearlessness of the Bodhisattva is an expression of shunyata or emptiness. Initially, we sit in the practice of meditation and observe the mind. We watch as thoughts arise and pass away. Eventually, we begin to notice that there is something going on beyond the thinking mind. However, we are confronted with a problem: The thinking mind, which at present we strongly identify with, is incapable of accessing that which is beyond it. So, we begin to investigate this tendency to identify with thought. Then, like a “flash of lightening in a dark sky,” a discovery is made: The ego or our limited self-image is revealed to be nothing more than the personification of thought. We realize that the ego is incapable of observing anything without thought, because the ego is nothing more than a collection of thoughts. This is the realization of egolessness—insight into the empty nature of the ego concept.