Avatar adds new thread to growing tapestry of cosmic unity, spurs discussion of pantheism

Has Avatar added  a new thread to the unfolding tapestry of understanding the unity of the universe? Does it’s “Aha! Moment” measure up to true nonduality? Does it speak of the unity of Spirit and Creation as Chuang Tzu, Thomas Merton, the author of the Proverbs and Meister Eckhart have?

Let’s take a look.

Atavar lasts two hours and 40 minutes, can be seen in breath-taking 3-D and is showing on nearly 23,000 screens worldwide.

It tells the story of an interconnected universe in which people, plants, animals and a Mother God, Eywa, form a unified, dynamic network of life.
Not surprisingly, it has been attacked for being pantheistic. Those attacks, in turn,  have triggered responses that point out the value in its view of a dynamic, biologically networked world.

One of the first and most often quoted attacks came from conservative columnist Ross Douthat, one of the New York Times Op-Ed writers who generally is on the other side of the more liberal official voice of the Times.

Douthat called Avatar director James Cameron’s “long apologia for pantheism,” and ends his column by stating that if, at the end of life, “there is no escape upward” to a transcendent God, we are in an “agonized position” and our human lives are “deeply tragic.” Pantheism, Douthat says, is “a downward exit,” that leaves us with nothing but “dust and ashes.”

Quite soon after I read that in the actual paper New York Times with my breakfast coffee at a wooden kitchen table, I wrote a Letter to the Editor, pointing out a third way of looking at reality and spirituality. It was, of course, along the lines of what we have been discussing here.

The NYT didn’t print it, but I was thrilled to see that the letters they did print in response to the column echoed many of my thoughts and that some were written by religious leaders or professors of religion.

Here’s what I said:

Let me suggest that there is a third way to avoid the “agonized position” Douthat describes.

If one believes, as many have through the ages, that Spirit and Creation are One, then one doesn’t have to chose between escaping to God or turning to dust with Nature. The unity has already happened and will continue during whatever comes after the body dies.

That thought sings through the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, Alice Walker, Teilhard de Chardin and Meister Eckhart’s writings, and some parts of the Bible. Ponder the possible implications of unity in Exodus, 3:14, “I am who am,” and Matthew 26:26, 28 “This is my body…this is my blood.”
Martin Buber said it well: “There is no such thing as seeking God, for there is nothing in which He could not be found.”

Here are a few of the printed letters.

Ross Douthat gives us only two choices: the upward heavenly route or the downward earthly one. The latter, he says, results in the despair of atheism. This is much too dire.

Traditional religions teach the presence of God in all creation, an indwelling of the Holy Spirit in matter. Although we are all agnostics (in the sense of not knowing) about afterlife, it may be that nature mysticism is a prelude to something else. Why discard that possibility?

Eugene C. Bianchi
Athens, Ga., Dec. 21, 2009
The writer is professor emeritus of religion at Emory University.

*******

Ross Douthat’s column treats pantheism with straw-man condescension. It is simply not true that there is no demanding Almighty in pantheistic religions. In Hinduism — my religion and probably the oldest surviving religion with a pantheistic element — stories abound of divine exhortations and actions against evil.

Nor is it true that there is no escape except downward into ashes. The laws of karma and reincarnation are deeply moral constructs that specify a cosmic calculus matching each human action to a just reward or punishment, always fair, yet always allowing second chances to achieve Moksha, our interpretation of salvation.

These beliefs are nonverifiable scientifically — no more or less so than Mr. Douthat’s own, I might add — but it is a mistake not to discuss them when making claims about pantheism’s theological implications.

Raman Khanna
San Francisco, Dec. 21, 2009
The writer is a member of the Hindu American Foundation Working Group.

********

Ross Douthat is right to say that the ”circle of life” in Disney’s ”Lion King” and the Force of George Lucas’s ”Star Wars” represent a recent trend in American religion. For years, I have argued for the same point.

But the alternative to biblical monotheism is not pantheism or a religion of nature, as Mr. Douthat asserts, but a more sophisticated attitude.

Today, Americans accept many manifestations of God, from Ganesha of the Hindus to Sky Woman of the Iroquois, as equally valid. They seek a sacred power that is also immanent in nature, but not limited to the natural world of death and evolution.

The emergent sense of God in America is neither monotheistic or pantheistic, but transtheistic. It is an attitude that last appeared in the West among Romans of the time of Jesus, but that has been common among philosophical Hindus and Buddhists for many centuries.

Peter Gardella
Purchase, N.Y., Dec. 21, 2009
The writer is a professor of world religions at Manhattanville College.

I would like to know more about Gardella’s meaning in using the term. “transtheistic,” since it is new to me and what I find online isn’t very satisfying. Let me throw out another one, however, which I think fits our analysis of where Avatar fits in our thread of unity of Spirit and Creation.

Rather than pantheistic, I see Avatar as a good example of the slightly but significantly different term, panenthesism, which allows for the mystery of both immanence and transcendency to occur.

Traidtional  critics of pantheism, including Teilhard de Chardin, say it makes nature and God identical – God is everything and everything is God. Panentheism is a concept from the Upanishads that was made popular in the 20th Century by creation theologians.

The late Wayne Teasdale, a student of Bede Griffiths who was involved in the study of science and religions and in the dialogue between Catholic and Buddhist monks before his death in 2004, explained the dfference between the two this way in The Mystic Heart.

[In pantheism,] God is exhausted in his immanence in the universe…[and is] not able to sustain transcendence… [In panenetheism,] everything – the universe, nature, the earth or life – is within God, in the consciousness of the divine or the divine mind.

In other words, God is everything, but not every individual thing is God.

Does the world of Avatar fit that description? I think so. Please let me know in your comments what you think.

For more about the controversy surrounding Avatar and its possible effect on people’s behavior, please see CyberINKonline’s other blog, CyberINKonline.

Ask not when Christ was born… ‘the birth falls in the soul exactly as it does in eternity, neither more or less’ – Meister Eckhart. (But you can still like Silent Night)

Many years ago I asked a spiritual teacher whether she believed that Christ was God. She smiled and said, “Of course.” And then, before I could get too far into believing she had actually answered the question that I had intended, she added, “But aren’t we all?”

It was many years before I even started to understand the depth and wisdom of the seemingly contradictory mystery she had presented to me that day.

As Christmas approaches – a holy day that I embrace and look forward to every year, that I celebrate by trimming a tree, creating a village with sheep, angels, Mary, Joseph, Baby Jesus and several music boxes, by buying presents and cooking a turkey, and a day that finds me in awe at Mass with my family – it is important to ask a pertinent question.

Just what exactly does someone who believes in the complete yet mysterious unity of God and Creation, in the non-dualistic immanence of Spirit, in the Cosmic Christ of Teilhard de Chardin, celebrate on Dec. 25? What does this particular birth mean once you’ve moved beyond the dualistic way of looking at the Incarnation?

I’m nowhere near truly answering that question, but in reading the European mystics while writing In the Same Breath, (yes we are jumping ahead about 1,600 years, sorry), I came across one of the writings that got German Dominican Meister Eckhart accused of heresy shortly before his death in 1328. As you can see, he has gone about as far into believing in the complete unity of Spirit and Creation, of Self and self, of Brahman and Atman, as one can.

And yet, the words are familiar even without leaving dualism. Christians do pray for Christ to be born in their souls on Christmas Day, all the while believing in a transcendent, separate, omnipotent personal God.

Eckhart recognizes that, but then takes us firmly to the the unity his mysticism felt as he ends this homily on Christmas with the words “we are the Son himself.”

This is a common theme for Eckhart. To him, the core of our being is the “ground of the soul,” and this ground is “one with the divine nature or ground.” In Eckert’s words here: “Hie ist gotes grunt mîn grunt und mîn grunt gotes grunt,” or “Here, God’s ground is my ground and my ground God’s ground.”

Meister Eckhart – From Whom God Hid Nothing

Here in time we make holiday because the eternal birth which God the Father bore and bears unceasingly in eternity is now born in time, in human nature. St. Augustine says this birth is always happening. But if it does not happen in me, what does it profit me? What matters is that it shall happen in me…

Now note where this birth occurs … this birth falls in the soul exactly as it does in eternity, neither more nor less, for it is the same birth. This birth falls in the ground and essence of the soul.
…
‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son (John 3:16). By this we understand not the external world, but the inner world. As surely as the Father, by his one nature, gives birth to the Son innately, so surely he gives birth to him in the innermost recesses of the mind, which is the inner world.

Here God’s ground is my ground, and my ground God’s ground. Here I live in my own as God lives in his own…

On one occasion I was asked what the Father is doing in heaven. I said that he is giving birth to his Son, an act he so delights in and which pleases him so much that he does nothing else but generate his Son, and these two are flowering with the Holy Spirit.

When the Father gives birth to his Son in me, I am his Son and not another: we are another in manhood, true, but there I am the Son himself and no other …We are sons in his Son, and we are the Son himself.

Now I’ll admit that as far as getting into “the spirit of Christmas” goes, this isn’t the warm and fuzzy Silent Night that was written in the early 1800s in Austria.

But I would say that both have their place. Perhaps the goal is to be able to appreciate both in whatever our spiritual lives or beliefs are – the soaring philosophical treatises and aha! moments of deep meditation and the folksy, emotional hymns and rituals. Might not that be another form of nonduality?

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Blessed Solstice and Joyous Kwanzaa!

Wisdom personified, the piping of heaven, winter holy days

As this year’s Hanukkah celebration draws to a close and we move towards Winter Solstice, Christmas, and an amazing array of women and goddess-related holy days, it is good to take a look at a second Torah/Old Testament writing that evokes the spirit of the thread of unity we have been following.

While the “I am who am,” of Exodus is a fairly straightforward narrative, this passage from Proverbs is poetic and sounds more Eastern than most of the Bible. Wisdom is personified as a strong woman who was present as the Master Craftsman created the oceans and speaks of the wonders of those times.

The book of Proverbs is considered part of the wisdom literature of the Jewish/Christian scriptures, along with Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. Proverbs are sayings that use similes and comparisons to make a point.

Scholars disagree about exactly when the various parts of the Book of Proverbs were written, but place them somewhere between 900 and 350 BCE, partly overlapping the tail end of the Axial Age..

In Chapter 8 of Proverbs, Wisdom calls all to goodness and remembers her existence before even the oceans were formed. The chapter begins, “Is not Wisdom calling? Is not Understanding raising her voice? On the heights overlooking the road, at the crossways, she takes her stand.”

The chapter goes on to exhort “simpletons” to learn how to behave and “fools” to come to their senses in keeping with much of Proverbs, but then takes a mystical turn into our realm of unity-thinking that is breathtaking.

Proverbs 8:22-31

Yahweh created me when his purpose first unfolded before the oldest of his works.

From everlasting I was firmly set,
from the beginning, before the earth came into being.

The deep was not, when I was born,
there were no springs to gush with water.

Before the mountains were settled,
before the hills, I came to birth
before he made the earth, the countryside,
or the first grains of the world’s dust,

When he fixed the heavens firm, I was there,
when he drew a ring on the surface of the deep,
when he thickened the clouds above,
when he fixed fast the springs of the deep,
when he assigned the sea its boundaries
– and the waters will not invade the shore –
when he laid down the foundations of the Earth,

I was at his side, a master craftsman,
delighting him day after day, ever at play in his presence
at play everywhere in the world,
delighting to be with the sons and daughters of humanity.

A strong argument can be made that this connection of Wisdom, the Creator and Creation speaks of unity. I have read other interpretations that put more emphasis on the separation between the Spirit creator and what was coming forth. While I respect that, I don’t think it is the only possibility. The lens of nonduality seems to sing through these verses as Wisdom recalls when One Spirit decided to explode and become the physical world we know.

Staying within this time period, one can also hear chords of unity in this writing by our old favorite, Chuang Tzu. Instead of Wisdom and the Master Craftsman, however, this writing use the image of The Great Clod belching out wind that causes the “ten thousand hollows” to begin crying wildly as a description of unity.

To me, with respect to Teilhard de Chardin, the Cosmic Christ can be seen just as clearly in Taoism’s description of the crying of the hollows as in the Judeo-Christian depiction of wisdom. The following is a conversation between two men, one”leaning on his armrest, staring up at the sky and breathing – vacant and far away,”  and the other “standing by his side in attendance.” Conversations are a typical technique in Chuang Tzu’s writings.

The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu.
Chapter Two

Tzu-ch’i said: “…You hear the piping of men, but you haven’t heard the piping of earth. Or if you have heard the piping of earth, you haven’t heard the piping of heaven.

Tzu-yu said, “May I venture to ask what this means?”

Tzu-ch’i said: “The Great Clod belches out breath and its name is wind. So long as it doesn’t come forth, nothing happens. But when it does, then ten thousand hollows begin crying wildly.

“Can’t you hear them, long drawn out? In the mountain forests that lash and sway, there are huge trees a hundred spans around with hollows and openings like noses, like mouths, like ears, like jugs, like cups, like mortars, like rifts, like ruts.

“They roar like waves, whistle like arrows, screech, gasp, cry, wail, moan and howl, those in the lead calling out yeeee!, those behind calling out yuuu!”

“In a gentle breeze they answer faintly, but in a full gale the chorus is gigantic. And when the fierce wind has passed on, then all the hollows are empty again. Have you never seen the tossing and trembling that goes on?”

Tzu-yu said, “By the piping of earth, then, you mean simply [the sound of] these hollows. And by the piping of man [the sound of] flutes and whistles. But may I ask about the piping of heaven?

Tzu-ch’i said: “Blowing on the ten thousand things in a different way, so that each can be itself – all take what they want for themselves, but who does the sounding?

Who, indeed, does the sounding? Who is Wisdom? What is the Tao? Whence cometh the Cosmic Christ?

In a footnote to this section, translator Burton Watson explains that “heaven” “is “not something distinct from earth and man, but a name applied to the natural and spontaneous functioning of the two.”

So the spiritual realm and the physical realm are intertwined and function as one.

Amen to that!

Mystery and darkness, profound and subtle – Tao and Cloud of Unknowing?

After reading the most recent post here, Richard over at Buddhism Now sent me a piece of Zen Grafffiti that he said he thought I’d like.

We are all contemporaries of beginningless time, yet we run in fear of
death.

What a great way to express so many concepts in so few words. I’m taking the “we” to extend in all directions in time and space and the “beginningless time” to be one of those bare statements, seeming to be an oxymoron but not, that pushes our levels of thinking even deeper into nondualistic ground..

I’m tempted to jump ahead to some “ground of being” readings and comparisons between Medieval mysticism and the new physics that would fit well with this quote, but I will restrain myself. Best we become a little more grounded first in the thoughts of these epoch-changing years from 600 to 300 BCE.

Since Zen, many say, fuses many concepts of Taoism with Buddhism, perhaps Richard’s gift of that Zen graffiti can be an introduction to more of the Buddhist and Taoist writings of that time

Here are two that I chose for In the Same Breath – both seminal works in their own traditions.

Tao Te Ching – Stephen Mitchell, trans.

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

In reading this first of 81 chapters of the Tao Te Ching, of the one question that comes to my mind is, “What is this darkness and how can it be the gateway to understanding?”

It is often helpful when reading English translations of poetic writing from a different time and culture to look at other translations to see if the meaning becomes clear by seeing how severl people have expressed something.

The Tao Te Ching has been translated in to many languages and someone has taken the time to post the names of translators in 26 languages, including 112 in English, with links to their translations. Here are the final paragraphs of Chapter One from two of them.

Tao Te Ching – D.C. Lau

These two are the same
But diverge in name as they issue forth.
Being the same they are called mysteries,
Mystery upon mystery.

Tao Te Ching – Hua Ching Ni

Nothingness and Beingness and other conceptual activity of the mind all come from the same indescribable subtle Originalness.
The Way is the unfoldment of such subtle reality.
Having reached the subtlety of the universe,
one may see the ultimate subtlety,
the Gate of All Wonders.

Tao Te Ching – Bram den Hond

These two spring from the same source.
They have different names; yet they are called the same.
That which is even more profound than the profound
The gateway to all mystery.

Darkness, mystery, subtle, profound.

Four ways of describing where one must go to attempt to understand that which is not able to be understood.

And perhaps – to do what we said we weren’t going to do yet and jump ahead to writings of the Medieval mystics – these are also the same methods necessary to begin to “beat against the Cloud of Unknowing” described by an anonymous Christian European mystic of 1375 in a slim book of instructions to new monks.

But to understand how the mystical, spiritual landscape of the 14th Century was formed in Europe, we have many more paths to travel.

A closer look at Buddhism during the Axial Age when next we meet.
- Thanks to Christine Tobias for the new art on top, one of many from “In the Same Breath.”

Humanity’s beginnings – even if Chuang Tzu would call them beginningless – of a belief in One Spirit

Anyone interested in how humanity’s understanding of itself and its universe developed is bound to be fascinated by what happened between 600 and 300 BCE.

- Jane Gaunt

In all the parts of the world from which we have historical records, people were moving from a belief in many gods to a belief in One Spirit, and then to the concept that this One Spirit lived in mysterious but profound unity with all of Creation.

Those 300 years of spiritual and philosophical awakening are part of the larger Axial Age, which spanned 200 to 800 BCE. During that time humanity reached a level of self-awareness and linguistic ability that enabled significant leaps to take place.

We’ve  looked at a few writings from those times, now let’s look at more, one from Buddhism and one from Judaism. Notice that the form of writing between the two is stunningly different because each reflects the tradition from which it came. It seems to me, however,  the thoughts being expressed are strikingly similar.

Dhammapada: Sayings of the Buddha

The True Master

He is calm.
In him the seed of renewing life
Has been consumed.
He has conquered all the inner worlds.

With dispassionate eye
He sees everywhere
The falling and the uprising.

And with great gladness
He knows that he has finished.
He has woken from his sleep.

And the way he has taken
Is hidden from men [and women],
Even from spirits and gods,
By virtue of his purity.

In him there is no yesterday,
No tomorrow,
No today….

He has come to the end of the way,
Over the river of his many lives,
His many deaths.

Beyond the sorrow of hell,
Beyond the great joy of heaven,
By virtue of his purity.

He has come to the end of the way

All that he had to do, he has done.

And now he is one.

Because Buddhism doesn’t include a Creator Spirit in the same sense that many other religions or philosophies do, it is sometimes hard to figure out how to include Buddhist thought in a discussion such as this. However, it’s impossible to miss the message of unity in this passage.

This translation by Thomas Byrom, a brilliant English mystic and educator I had the honor to know before his death in 1991, uses the master’s indifference to such practical opposites such as the “sorrow of hell” and the “joy of heaven” to show unity.

But the lyrical yet pithy language also evokes Buddhist teaching in its reference to seeing  both falling and rising everywhere. Additional passages from the Dhammapada can be found in In the Same Breath.

Byrom also translated the Hindu Ashtavakra Gita, written in the 8th or 14th Century, which we will look at in more detail when we are explore what was happening in Eastern religions at time when Western thought was coming even more dualistic. Byrom’s comments on the Ashtavakra Gita will also be part of our look at the 20th and 21st Century renaissance of our waning and waxing thread of unity.

Turning to Judaism, we see the description in Exodus, thought to have been written in about 650 BCE, regarding the events that took place nearly a millenium earlier when the Jews fled Egypt for what was to become Israel. Biblical scholars believe Exodus was written by several authors over the centuries until it was solidified during Axial Age to what we have today.

Exodus 3: 13-15

Then Moses said to God, “I am to go then, to the sons [and daughters] of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you.’ But if they ask me what his name is, what am I to tell them?”

And God said to Moses,

“I Am who I Am. You must say to the [children] of Israel: ‘I Am has sent me to you.’

“This is my name for all time; by this name I shall be invoked for all generations to come.”

The key words here are “I am who I am,” or as some translations have it, “I am who am,” which is a more accurate translation of the Latin, “Ego sum qui sum.” However, just as the English came from the Latin, the Latin came from the Greek, and the Greek from a mix of Hebrew and Aramaic! Likewise, the English translations that we have of ancient Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist scriptures and canons came mostly from the original Chinese and Sanskrit.

- Christine Tobias

Regarding Exodus, there is much discussion over just what God meant in his answer to Moses, or to those who don’t believe that the bible was divinely inspired, what the writers in ancient Israel were trying to imply by their choice of words.

Some say that Moses was really asking what he should tell the Jews to get them to follow him out of Egypt, cling to their God and stay away from all the other gods being worshipped at the time.

In modern lingo, then the answer meant, “I am the only God. All those others are part of me. Stick with me and you’ll be fine. Just get them out of Egypt!”

Many mainline Christian theologians stick with interpret those words as meaning that God is the Supreme Being, infinitely perfect, who had no creator, is above and separate from everything, and thus is transcendent.

But looking at it with our lens of immanence, it seems that these powerful words could also mean that at least some in ancient Judaism believed that nothing exists outside of God and thus Spirit and Creation must be One.

The Hebrew phrase is “Ehyeh asher ehyeh,” which is literally translated as “I shall be who I shall be,” raises more questions than it answers. Some say it indicates that God is still becoming and his work isn’t finished. Others look to Aramaic-speaking Assyrians would translate those words today.

The translation: “I am the beginning I am.”

Wow! Do you suppose that Chuang Tzu just happened to drop in for lunch and a chat that day?

More about the marvelous times of 600 to 300 BCE when next we meet.

Beginningless beginnings in 350 BCE and the 20th Century – Chuang Tzu and Thomas Merton

Western society and its religions have traditionally fallen on the dualistic end of the philosophical spectrum. Good is good and bad is bad. Good is rewarded and bad is punished. God is all powerful and up in the heavens – transcendent. We are sinners way down here, and going to hell if we aren’t careful. Or if we don’t belong to the “right” religion.

Non Sequitur 10/29/09

Eastern religions have been more non-dualistic. There is yin in yang and good in bad. The spirit inside a person, Atman, and the spirit of the universe, Brahman, are the same. Spirit is immanent – in all things. The three religions of China – Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism – often meld the strengths of each and find a way to all get along.

For this and other reasons, there were few Western writings on the unity of Spirit and Creation until quite recently. Even the European mystics were trying to close the gap between themselves and God rather than believing there wasn’t a gap.

But then the tenor of late 1800s began opening some doors, in part because travel made contact between East and West easier. The first Hindu to set foot in the West came as a visitor to the Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893.

By the late 1930s, French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin was writing a stunningly non-dualistic vision of the Cosmic Christ, but on orders from the Vatican the controversial treatise wasn’t published until  the 1950s, when The Phenomenon of Man came out in French and English. It was discussed in some progressive Catholic colleges by the 1960s, although with the caveat that some Church officials felt his views bordered on pantheism, a no-no.

Since the mid-20th Century, Buddhism has taken root in the West; Hindus have grown to more than a million in the U.S. and practices such as yoga, tai chi and qi gong have introduced everyday people to Eastern concepts.

At the same time, changes in secular society in the West have created an atmosphere in which the unity of God and Creation could be seriously considered. Even the new physics and the interconnectiveness of the internet have given us a new way to look at reality.

In essence, if one’s entire philosophy and world view is built on dichotomy, a separate, remote God makes the most sense. When the focus is more on interconnections, the Vedic Upanishads’ sparks flying from the same fire can become part of our belief system again.

As I searched for writings for In the Same Breath, a few examples from the earliest times and today were particularly striking. In perhaps the most interconnected, a 20th century Catholic monk, Thomas Merton, studied the writings of one of the founders of Taoism, Chuang Tzu, and  wrote personal versions of his favorites. Merton was part of a group of Christian, Buddhist and Hindu monks who studied and prayed together as part of an ongoing inter-monastic dialogue.

Chuang Tzu lived between 370 and 301 BCE. His writing is mind-bending and often shot-through with surprising humor. One of his writings in The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu is responsible for the domain name of the blog – beginningless.  Merton’s version is in his 1965 book, The Way of Chuang Tzu. Merton died in 1968 while traveling in Asia.

Chuang Tzu

There is a beginning. There is not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be a beginning. There is being. There is nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be nonbeing. There is a not yet beginning to be a not yet beginning to be nonbeing.

Suddenly there is nonbeing. But I do not know, when it comes to nonbeing, which is really being and which is nonbeing. Now I have just said something. But I don’t know whether what I have said has really said something or whether it hasn’t said something.

There is nothing in the world bigger than the tip of an autumn hair, and Mount T’ai is tiny. No one has lived longer than a dead child, and P’eng-tsu died young.

Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things are one with me.

Chuang’s words sound to modern ears almost like a Zen koan to tease the mind into reflecting on the mystery of this unity on a deeper level than rational thought. One has to let the words seep into one’s bones over several re-readings to begin to comprehend. That’s the fun of it. This brilliant gibberish, this impenetrable clarity, is early Taoism’s way of describing the unity of spirit and creation.

Thomas Merton

In the Beginning of Beginnings was Void of  Void, the Nameless.

© the Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard

And in the Nameless was the One, without body, without form.
This One, this Being in whom all find power to exist  -
Is the Living.
From the Living, comes the Formless, the Undivided.
From the act of this Formless, come the Existents, each according
To its inner principle. This is Form. Here body embraces and cherishes spirit.
The two work together as one, blending and manifesting their Characters. And this is Nature.

But he who obeys Nature returns through Form and Formless to the Living.
And in the Living
Joins the unbegun Beginning.
The joining is Sameness. The sameness is Void. The Void is infinite.
The bird opens its beak and sings its note
And then the beak comes together again in Silence.
So Nature and the Living meet together in Void.
Like the closing of the bird’s beak
After its song.
Heaven and earth come together in the Unbegun,
And all is foolishness, all is unknown, all is like
The lights of an idiot, all is without mind!
To obey is to close the beak and fall into Unbeginning.

When next we meet: Taking a closer look at 600 to 300 BCE and all those beginningless beginnings!

gswimg at eartlhlink dot net

Writings on Unity of Spirit and Creation ebb, flow and spiral back from 600 BCE to today

The ebb and flow of writings since ancient times on the unity of Spirit and Creation show remarkable patterns. The most interesting is the spiral that takes us from the beginning in 600 BCE, through ups and downs, fertile flowerings and bleak deserts, to the 20th and 21st Centuries, when the writings flourish again and are more like the earliest ones than any that came between.

Some say we are in the new “Axial Age” of spiritual discoveries, but this time with everyday people making those discoveries and tying them to everything from popular music to the new physics to the interconnectedness of the Internet.

We will spend time in future posts filling in the details of the ups and downs and the spiral that is still going strong, but first it’s helpful to pull some examples from each of the the five most fruitful periods of time. This is how I broke them up in writing In the Same Breath, with illustrations by Christine Tobias. If you have other historical categories or favorite writings, I’d love to hear about them.

- Christine Tobias

There are are 52 writings in Same Breath, one for each week; here are some from each of the five time periods.

Beginningless Beginnings – 600 to 300 BCE

There was something formless and perfect
before the universe was born.
It is serene. Empty.
Solitary. Unchanging.
It is the mother of the universe.
For lack of a better name,
I call it the Tao.

Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu, trans. Stephen Mitchell, about 500 BCE

Bread, Wine and a Billion Arms – 200 BCE to 200 CE

In the beginning was the Word,
And the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning,
Through him all things came to be,
Not one thing had its being but through him.

John 1:1–5, The Jerusalem Bible, about 100 CE

Mystical Aha! Moments – 850 to 1600

I gazed upon [al-Lah] with the eye of truth and said to Him: “Who is this?”
He said, “This is neither I nor other than I. There is no God but I.”
Then he changed me out of my identity into His Selfhood…
Then I communed with Him with the tongue of His Face, saying:
“How fared it with me with Thee?” He said, “I am through Thee, there is no god but Thou.”

Abu Yazid Bistami, Sufi mystic, 804- 874

A Spiral Back to Flying Sparks – 1900 to 1999

When we enter the unknown
of our houses,
go inside the given up dark
and sheltering walls alone
and turn out the lamps
we fall bone to bone in bed.

Neighbors, the old woman who knows you
turns over in me
and I wake up
in another country. There’s no more
north and south.
Asleep, we pass through one another
like blowing snow,
all of us,
all.

“Our Houses,” from Seeing Through the Sun, 1985, by Linda Hogan,
Native American poet and author

There is no such thing as seeking God, for there is nothing in which He could not be found.

Martin Buber, Jewish philosopher, 1878 – 1965

Seeking Eden in the Chaos – 1999 – today

I believe that the Messiah is not a person, outside of us, but is a noble state of mind possible in each and every one of us, a state of mind which must be attained, too often through pain.

Storm of Terror, by June Leavitt, 2002

What was going on during all this time?

Here’s the capsule version – many more details to come in future posts.

First there was a flurry of juicy, prolific writing in all parts of the inhabited world, stretching almost nonstop for more than a millennium starting in 600 BCE.

Then wars and invasions in Europe made sheer survival take precedence over spiritual growth, at least in the West, for 600 years until the emergence of Christian, Jewish and Sufi mystics in the 9th Century. The thread was more subdued this time, especially among Christian mystics. Eden had been lost. Those in exile were now unable to completely embrace the unity that was once so natural. Even so, a few were determined to try to reach the God who had once walked by humanity’s side, but had now been exiled by the theologians to the heavens.

After a mere 600 years, however, the mysticism that flowered in Christianity was stopped in its tracks by the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic counter-Reformation, neither of which had any tolerance for mystical experiences or talk of other than a transcendent, separate God. The Enlightenment, for all its wonderful exploration of science and

- Christine Tobias

rational behavior, was also inhospitable soil for mysticism.  Kabbalah, however, kept the mystical thread going in Judaism, as did Sufism in Islam.

Meanwhile, the Eastern religions of Taoism and Hinduism were well into their 26th century of seeing Spirit and Creation as One; Buddhism had held up a mirror to the illusion of reality and Eastern Orthodox Christianity had found a way to continue to accept and even nourish mysticism.

It wasn’t until the mid-19th to the 20th Century, however, that writing of this unity began to appear again broadly in the West, often influenced by Eastern thought, but also at times quite home-grown.

We’ll explore how this came to be and take a look at Thomas Merton‘s 20th century rendition of the 300 BCE writings of Chuang Tzu, for whom this blog is named, when next we meet.

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