Christ spoke of false Christs. What Buddhists should be speaking of today is false Buddhas. In a recent article on Buddhist Geeks, Dennis Hunter wrote about the difficult pills of karma and rebirth. What is happening in the emerging face of ‘western’ buddhism is that the essence of buddhism is being converted into Christian terms: buddhism becomes about tenants rather than emptiness.

Pop-Buddhism does one of two things:

1. abandon everything so as to implement licentiousness, or
2. import entire foreign mythologies to replace the ones our parents had.

Pop-Buddhism is rebound from our parents’ Christianity. In the first case, it’s like a bad break-up with a girlfriend which results in sleeping around. In the second case, it’s a rebound — it’s not that this is the real deal.. pop-buddhism is just a rebound girlfriend for people getting over a bad breakup with their childhood sweetheart, Jesus. Both of these approaches are leaning, neither is the right path. One of the chief sins in Buddhism is metaphysical speculation. The imperative, “Kill the Buddha!” is the command to destroy our futile conceptions of everything, especially Buddhism. Yet, we see ‘western’ Buddhists adopting a host of alien myths as fast as they abandon their own. Buddhism isn’t about finding another religion — it’s about getting past religion. Dennis’ rebith and karma are nothing but superstitions.

What is karma? Karma is nothing more than cause and effect. I do this, which causes that. There is no need for a metaphysical dogma to reach enlightenment. The concept of karma might be useful for someone, but once you have used the boat to cross the river, you leave the boat behind. Dennis, while he may have already arrived on the other shore, is telling others to stay in the boat. Disembark. You have no need for concepts – not even mine. If you’re already there, why are you reading this?

Concepts are like like trying to catch an entire river with out bare hands. We might catch something, but it is not longer part of the river. We would be foolish to call the droplets in our hands a “river” but that is exactly what we do when we speak of anything but the present moment and the world right in front of us. We can’t see the beginning of the universe or its end, but we try to conceptualize it. We can’t see our own beginnings or our own ends, yet we try yet again to box that process and call it “ego.”

The best ‘western’ look at karma is in science. Karma is nothing but law of cause and effect. Like nirvana, karma is nothing special. To put it another way, karma is nothing but Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Thermodynamics:

“The mutual forces of action and reaction between two bodies are equal, opposite and collinear.”

For each and every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This clearly harmonizes with the Buddhist concept of dukkha, the etymology of which comes from a term originally indicating a wheel wobbling off its axis. Whenever we act or re-act, we “lean” as Buddhists like to say. One of the main criticisms of ritual is that it perpetuates karma rather than extinguishing it.

Rebirth is a superstition which leads to “hope” in the next life rather than dealing with life right now. Hope is essentially egoistic, but proponents of rebirth continue to propagate this lie. Rebirth is really nothing special. Every second of our lives, we are someone different, yet somehow the same. That is rebirth. Every moment of our lives we are made reincarnate with new contradictory desires and the desparate need for awakening. Scientific research affirms this: every year almost every atom in our bodies is replaced.

Life is comprised of an infinite series of instances. As one moment begins, another dies. Life is a series of little deaths. Life is change; change is death; life is death. And because of this, death is a series of little lives. This is the concept of reincarnation: we are constantly dying and being reborn both during life and during death. It is not that an atomistic soul finds it’s way back to a body, but that the biological configuration of a new brain matches your character. Not only is this possible, it is quite probable. There is nothing spiritual about reincarnation, unless spirit means that infinitesimal something which remains “me” through all my permutations. Spirit, meaning nothing but identity, is very difficult to grasp.

The problem of identity is one of the old boat. If you remove a rotting plank every year and replace it with a new one, is it the same boat once all the old planks are gone? Yes and no. It is both the same boat and not the same boat, just like you are the same person and not the same person.

By telling us to cling to karma and rebirth, Dennis Hunter tells us to stay in the boat and never to cross the river. By clinging to ego-based dogmas like karma and rebirth, we fail to see the world as it truly is. Whether or not we remain the same as our bodies change is irrelevant. We have to give up our ego-identity, and what is karma but the consequences of ego? What is rebirth but the journey of ego? If the concepts of karma and rebirth cling to you, kill them.

Talking about karma and rebirth, we might as well bring in other superstitions like heaven and hell and deconstruct them so they can serve as rafts for others on their journeys. The idea of karma still may be useful, but once it has been used, it must be abandoned. The same is true of heaven and hell.

The Additional Superstitions of Heaven and Hell

If we talk of karma, we are talking about the consequences of ego. If we talk of rebirth, we talk of the rebirth of ego. Therefore, if we talk about either karma or rebirth, we should also talk about heaven and hell.

Heaven and Hell are supposedly eternal; therefore, they are not contained by time. In fact, as infinite dimensions, the opposite is true: time is contained by Heaven and Hell. Even if an afterlife is a mere infinite extension of this life, it is safe to say that Heaven and Hell are present here and now.

And what is Hell? You see it everyday. Hell exists wherever you see someone who is miserable and makes others miserable. Chances are, if others make you miserable, you are in Hell presently and of your own creation. Sartre said that “Hell is other people.” But that is only true if you have a hellish disposition first. If you are selfish, the success of others is your failure, and their failure, your success. But anyone with a more impartial understanding knows that “success” is not a zero-sum game; in fact, success is only success when it is not a zero-sum game. The heavenly disposition knows the success of anyone to be the success of all and the success of others to be the success of itself. When my neighbor is more free, I am more free. When my neighbor is oppressed, I am oppressed. These pleasant statements are very practical truths.

It is important to note that the word “in” did not originally indicate a spatial sense. Instead, “in” has a purely existential sense. For example, “Achilles killed in anger.” The phrase “in anger” is adjectival: “Achilles killed angrily.” The word “in” is indicative of how, not where. In the same way, Being-in-the-world really means Being-worldly — the world is not where Dasein dwells, but how Dasein dwells. To say someone is living “in Hell” is to say that someone is living hellishly.

What constitutes hell? The only thing that cannot stand in the presence of “God”: Self. Selfish people wish for decorum when it concerns themselves, but ignore it when decorum requires things of them. From this comes the entire language of “rights” – an entitlement from others, rather than what we owe others.

Selfishness is the cause of misery. Without it, you can’t be truly miserable. There will be suffering, of course, but never more than you can handle. Heaven and Hell, as infinite dimensions, are always here and now. Every moment you waste in Hell creates a more destructive world. Every time you enter Heaven, you commit a cosmic act of peace. You can smile at offense, see your blame in all relative things, and most importantly, you give the possibility of Heaven here and now to others.

Heaven does not exist as a pie in the sky afterlife. It is here and now. When we postpone good behavior for later reward, we are committing great sin. When we mourn our situation, we are only mourning for ourselves. Our most tranquil moments are when we open ourselves to our perfect imperfection. In fact, when we least seek traditional perfection but adapt to our imperfect circumstances, we are perfect.

We see people (we are people) who condemn themselves to selfish habits, making themselves miserable and making others miserable. It is pitiful to see. No one ever consciously chooses to give up their freedom of authentic action, but that’s exactly what has happened to these people. Condemned to habit, they cannot “decide” or “choose” to change. They see only in their selfish way, and this only reinforces their behavior. How can someone like this be redeemed when they are dead in their transgressions? It certainly isn’t responding hellishly. The way to redeem those caught in Hell is to act as Christ did, visiting those in prison.

The hellish disposition feeds off action and reaction, crime and punishment — but only in a very limited context. When one thinks about it, every event is merely a point in time — no duration, no dimension — and any reaction to such an event, if of greater duration, is disproportionate and unjust. Within a limited scope, all actions are justified (or seem so), but within the broader scope of things, all actions have infinite repercussions, infinite ripples which affect all time. We cannot know if our actions are perfect — in fact, they can never be. What seems good one day will turn out to be bad the next, and good again on the third day.  This is the importance of the Heavenly disposition. Behind all hatred, all selfishness, all negative behavior is love. One cannot hate, fear, or be selfish if one does not first care — if only for oneself. It is only a matter of showing selfish people that their Self is most benefited by loving others.

To be in Heaven is to be forgiven and to forgive. Forgiveness is not reactive, but rather creative. A reaction is enslaved to its cause, but creativity is free and unforced. By suspending the cycle of action and reaction which the Hellish disposition feeds upon, forgiveness breaks open the possibility of peace even for the imprisoned soul. Forgiving universally and loving our enemies might seem radical — and it is — but this is what Christ called us to do. The greatness of Christ is seen in his death on the cross while pleading for the forgiveness of his unjust murderers.

The Great Commission did not say “Go and make disciples” — as if we have to go elsewhere to do this — but rather “As you are going, make disciples.” It is our calling to be peace here and now, to dwell in Heaven and to be Heaven to others. When we fail others, we fail God. The meaning of Hell does not exist after life, but in this life, here and now. It is our job to make the world more Heavenly and to start with the only thing we can control: ourselves. When we make ourselves more peaceful, we make others more peaceful becase we are the condition of others.

Buddha is dead. You shouldn’t worship Siddhartha, and you certainly shouldn’t reference him as an authority. The story of Siddhartha is an individual story about you: you are born free from ego, then as consciousness develops you begin to differentiate yourself from other things. You emerge from the palace of childhood and mature – but will you recognize your own innate enlightenment? The word buddha simply means “aware.” You should never speak in terms of “the” (capital-B) Buddha. You shouldn’t even speak in terms of “a” buddha. Buddha is a process, and is mistaken by so-called Buddhists around the world for numerous things: a god, a person, a thing. Buddha is none of these things. Buddha is not a person, or if “he” is, “he” is all of us. Buddha cannot be an authority, because he does not exist! Buddha emerges from a verb and only exists as a process. Buddha is a verb. If you think of “buddha” in any other sense, you must kill those concepts in order to step off the boat.

To become Buddhist, you do not convert “away” from anything or “to” anything. In fact, the most Buddhist thing might be not to convert publically but rather to embrace stillness and inaction: being compassionate towards all and caring nothing for one’s own label. You may be called a Christian – bring compassion in the language people know. You may be an Atheist – yet again, be compassionate and care nothing for labels. What is a label but ego again? Buddhism aims at seeing the worldpurely. Buddhism neither affirms nor denies religion. To be a Buddhist, you are first what you already are: your historico-cultural position; and second, what you always are: conscious.

Awareness is logically prior to all metaphysical speculation, religious or otherize. To put it another way, awareness is a prerequisite to any kind of awareness. One cannot be aware of the “numinous” experience without first having aware. Even if experience and the faculty of experience are chronologically simultaneous, the capacity for experience is logically prior.

If Thich Nhat Hanh can say that Love is Being There, I would like to take that further and use the German term Dasein (being-there). To join Heideggerian terminology with Buddhist: Dasein is always-already Buddha. Inasmuch as Dasein is aware of its own being, it is necessarily also “buddha.” Buddhism, especially Zen, is marvelously existential. Topics of suffering, effort, striving, death, meaning, value, emptiness, atheism, consciousness, constructs, and countless more are ubiquitous in both schools of thought.

I would even go so far as to say that Buddhism, in its purity, contradicts nothing — no science and no religion. Buddhism, as a willful destruction of constructed reality, is similar in some respects to postmodern deconstructionism. But this also has much in common with science — approaching phenomena without assumptions in order to better expose truth.

Thomas Merton said that there is a Zen element at the heart of every religion. I would go farther to say that Zen is ontologically prior to religion. The willful undermining of our habitual minds is frightening, but rewarding. Normally, our habitual minds filter our almost all of our experiences and does all our thinking for us — it takes shortcuts. To be honest, we never really experience the world as it is. We experience the world as our habitual minds think it is. Unless you’re thinking about it consciously, you don’t think about the texture of your clothes, the feel of your own skin, the texture of the chair you’re in. Zen aims at a suspension of this focus in order to encounter the oneness of reality and see everything.

The Christian author G.K. Chesterton, along with his pagan counterpart Nietzsche, misunderstood Buddhism entirely. Chesterton said in his brief Orthodoxy that Buddhist art always shows its saints with closed eyes, shut off from reality. First, this is false. Bodhidharma, the founder of Chan Buddhism, is always depicted with eyes wide open — in fact, he cut his eyelids off so that he would not fall asleep. Second, the point of meditation is to see the world, not to shut oneself off from the world. True, there are Buddhists who withdraw from the world, not unlike Christian fundamentalists in the West. But neither embraces life. Even among Western Buddhists, there is a gross misunderstanding of what Buddhism really is. Buddhism is opening your eyes to a newly-born world with the fascination and innocence of a child.

Behind each religion — and each science — is the fundamental childlike wonder in the guise of awe, which propels investigation. Without an essential curiosity, without a fundamental concern for the matter at hand. Each science is based on a fundamental ignorance. If we presumed we knew “enough” as average everday people do, we would never pierce through the magic spell of maya and ever join the quest for truth. But you are always and already “buddha.” Behind your concepts and presuppositions, behind your social conscience and habitual mind, there is your authentic being. The problem is the deception of our average everyday concepts. Concepts, at best, are approximations, and when they become casual, they become uncritical; when they are uncritical, they no longer reveal truth. As the meaning of “buddha” is a verb, so “buddhism” is a process. You are already aware, even if you haven’t discovered it yet. The call of Zen, to zazen (“sit”), is the call simply to be. Suspend belief, undermine habit, and forge a new path. Buddhism is merely openness to truth. But if that concept becomes habitual, kill it too. When you are done using this, forget it and forget me.

At the end of the day you find you have some time on your hands. What do you do? Some of us might chill in front of Frasier reruns; others might hang out with friends in the flesh, or on our own do something more active than vegging. When Douglas Harper has time, he is far more ambitious. Since 2001, Harper has maintained and updated the site etymonline.com, which is alone in providing a free, (mostly) comprehensive, and in-depth reference for etymologies on the internet. Drunken Koudou had the good fortune to catch an interview with Harper, an avid reader, an English and history major in college, and later a journalist turned historian. Trust us: if you haven’t used etymonline.com already, one peek and you’ll find you can’t stop going back.

DK: Why did you start this project in the first place? Were you interested in etymology long before creating the website?

DH: What I usually tell people is, I made etymonline because I wanted to use it. That is, I wanted a free, thorough, reliable place to go online to find the standard etymologies of English words. Or to discover that their origin was mysterious. I went looking for such a thing online, and didn’t find it. So I started to make it.

That’s probably too much of a reductionist answer. You also have to take into account that I have a naturally obsessive quality, and, during those years, I had a lot of energy and free time on my hands. Maybe some credit belongs as well to my forbears’ injunctions to make myself useful.

The Internet was still fairly young then, and it seemed like the right thing to do for people who were using it and getting a lot out of it — as I was — to return the karma by creating something useful and adding it to the big project. I created several sites in that spirit — one on slavery in the northern states of the U.S. (http://www.slavenorth.com/index.html), another on the election of 1860 (http://www.etymonline.com/cw/1860.htm), all sorts of things that, at the time, seemed not to be covered on the Internet. This one, the dictionary, is the one that’s taken off.

See, I’ve always been interested in a lot of things — astronomy, geology, history, poetry, psychology, — but it always circles back to words. At the time I began the dictionary I was trying to teach myself both ancient Greek (I failed) and Anglo-Saxon (success!). Also, in my career as an editor and writer, you can never know too much about the words you use, and to know their meanings but not their histories seemed a shallow learning.

I am not a linguist or “professional eytmologist” (I wonder if there really are more than a dozen people with that on their business cards). But the two careers where I have some experience — journalism and history — were good preparation for the kind of patient and thorough research I’d have to do in making this site. And they were a good training ground in the art of bringing technical or academic material into the range of the average intelligent person without mangling the sense too badly.

DK: Etymonline has only been around for the last few years. Why do you think it took that long for this kind of website to appear?

DH: Our perceptions differ! I think of it as a pioneering site on the modern web, lol. After all, it will be 10 years old soon.

I can certainly answer the question, though. Having done it, I can tell you it’s an enormous, endless, time-sucking chore. Not just the dictionary itself, but the related correspondence. I can’t imagine any sane person would do this with no prospect of getting paid for it. What was Samuel Johnson’s quip? “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” I’ll bet he said that after he did his dictionary.

That’s my guess, at least.

DK: Do you have any favorite etymologies? Are there any that particularly surprised you?

DH: I suppose I get a kick out of the same things other people do — words that have wandered far in their meanings, for instance — “nice,” “silly,” “filibuster,” “buxom,” “burly,” “banquet,” etc. Also words that are surprisingly old: “android” from 1727, “astronaut” from 1929, “crib” in the street slang sense from the early 19th century.

Words that preserve queer old scientific notions (“barnacle”) are fun; so are words that embody other archaic bits of history (“ostracize,” “money”). I enjoy the conservative jargons of sailors and lawyers — there is a whole group of Old English words that survive only in nautical terms (“belay”). It’s easy to imagine how the combination of sailors’ superstition and ships crews composed of men from many nations would make the language of the sea so changeless.

I like words that illuminate human nature. The fact that a word can’t stay neutral for long — It might start out meaning “x” but in time it will come to mean “good X” or “bad X” and people will have to find some other way to say merely “X.” “Stink,” for instance.

I also get a kick out of pulling apart a highfalutin’ word, usually from Latin, and finding it means literally the same thing as some slangy modern expression that people tend to use instead of the ten-dollar Latinate word. To “abhor” is “to feel one’s hair stand on end.” “Attrition” is “rubbing out.”

DK: You said that “you can never know too much about the words you use.” Could you elaborate a little on that? Why do you think it’s important for us to know where words come from?

DH: It’s part of who they are. Just like people. Their personal histories contribute to who they are now. Where they lived, how much they moved around, what disruptions they endured.

It’s not important for everyone to know that about words. Only the people who care about using them. When the original Oxford English Dictionary came out, writers grabbed it and devoured it. It changed, literally changed, the artistic use of the English language. Suddenly there was a new dimension available. Like a glass-bottomed boat, suddenly you could see where you hadn’t seen before.

And this historical identity of the words was something a poet could use to enrich his or her work. It doesn’t become the main point of a word (poor writers make that mistake online all the time, mistaking etymology for “true meaning” — which, actually, is what the word “etymology” literally means, so the error probably is as old as the ancient Greeks). But it becomes a shading, a reverberation, in the use of the word. You can see it in writers as diverse as James Joyce and J.K. Rowling. Both of them, I bet, kept an OED within easy reach when they wrote.

And sure enough, writers were among the first people to find and use Etymonline. I didn’t promote the site. I just put it up and listed it on Google and Yahoo. I figured if it was any good, it would grow on its own, and it has. But among the first people to link to it were writers of historical fiction. Also the author Neil Gaiman found it fairly quickly and wrote a blog post about it, and the writer Kurt Andersen plugged it in an interview (and also helped me back-date some entries).

DK: For our readers: could you briefly explain how you go about creating one of the pages for etymonline.com?

DH: The process has evolved over time, and as my reference bookshelf has grown. Here’s the basic system when a word is added to etymonline nowadays:

1. Look it up in the core sources, the general etymology dictionaries that I rely on — Barnhart etymology dictionary, Klein’s etymology dictionary, OED, Weekley, Ayto. Probably in 85 percent or more of the words, the derivations given are essentially the same.

2. Rough out an entry. Then go to a big stack of specialized works — dictionaries of Old English, Greek, Latin, Persian, Old French — wherever the word has been — to get more details on what the word meant at various stages of its life. Also this helps me to regularize the spelling throughout the site.

3. Look it up in other specialty sources — slang dictionaries, for instance.

4. Cross-check the date of first attested usage. These are in both OED and Barnhart, and, in a more general sense, in Ayto and some other sources. But the opening of Google books and other resources (newspaper archive collations, for instance) has made it possible to back-date these figures with a little effort, especially for modern words.

DK: Language in the information age has undergone some important changes, both in terms of vocabulary and medium. Do you think the internet helps or hurts our ability to use words in the right way?

DH: I’m always glad when people want to use words carefully and with an awareness that a word means one thing and not another. But people will use words as they choose, and they always have. In English perhaps more than most tongues, there isn’t a bright shining line around “the right way” to use the words. In fact, etymology dictionaries are testimonials to ways people have stretched, bent, and mangled the language to suit their needs. Language is for people, not pedants.

The “right way” to use a word is the one that communicates your intention most directly and clearly to your audience. I suspect some Internet communication does that perfectly, even though it makes English teachers cringe.

(A lot of the most fanciful Internet jargon is meant to be exclusive, to mark the user as an initiate into some clique. As such, it will die out as fast as uncool people catch on and start using it.)

It’s been fascinating to me to spend time online reading the English of, say, newspapers in India or teenager bloggers in Singapore. It’s English, but it’s evolving into something else. Perhaps English is at the point Latin was in the early Middle Ages.

English always has been a fluid language. I suspect the impact of the Internet will be more stressful on smaller and less flexible languages. I suspect Icelandic and French are having a time keeping up with it and keeping their integrity.

DK: You mentioned several etymological texts that you use. Would you recommend one especially for people who are interested?

DH: Well, I tend to use dictionaries, which aren’t interesting reading to most people. Barbara Kipfer, who edited the most recent version of the Dictionary of American Slang does have some good introductory books in language and etymology, one that I’d recommend is called “The Life of Language.” But personally I like good dictionaries.

DK: Have you finished etymonline.com? If not, how far until it is “completed”? And if so, what’s the next big project?

DH: It will never be finished. I realized that a couple of years ago. It will be what I do with the bulk of my free time and energy for the rest of my life, unelss something nasty happens and it goes down the drain.

Etymonline was meant to be a casual reference for non-professional users. Sort of like the Guinness book of records. A quick way to see where a word came from (and where it didn’t come from); something to settle bets made in bars. It came together in three years or so, and I felt at the time that it was finished. I knew it needed a good copy editing and write-through, but I was content to wait to do that.

So for a couple of years I went off and wrote other things, got married again, had another kid. I’d go back to update or fix something on etymonline, as it came to my attention, but it wasn’t something I worked on daily.

Then a couple of years ago I got a list of thousands of words people were searching for that weren’t on the site. I decided it was time to expand it, and at the same time to do the long-delayed rewrite and copy edit. I’ve been doing that literally every day for a few hours since last summer. The adding of words is up to about TO- right now; the edit is up to FE-. That alone will take another couple of years.

Frankly, if you had told me at the start that 10 years later this site still would be a principal go-to spot on the Internet for etymologies, I’d have been surprised. Back then I figured some academic or professional organization eventually would put up a thorough, accurate, free, searchable database of etymologies under the seal of some university or prominent publishing house. And etymonline could retire.

But I haven’t seen that yet. And this creates an awkward situation. I will stand up for the accuracy and thoroughness of etymonline; but in an ideal world this sort of work wouldn’t be done by obsessive amateurs like me, but by the people who have taken the pains to acquire the education that qualifies them to serve as authorities.

Yet there are now high schools and universities that use etymonline in their courses. I’ve heard from hundreds of students around the world, including some linguistics students, who have said it was invaluable in their studies. It’s even been cited in legal cases and entered into official records in other ways.

All of this makes me cringe a bit. The site has authority in so far as the sources are good ones (they are) and they are correctly interpreted and compiled by me (I’m doing the best I can, and readers have been helpful in correcting my errors). But I am not a trained linguist. Maybe that matters; maybe it doesn’t. I’ve heard from many academic linguists, and almost all have been kind and supportive. But I don’t like squatting on their turf.

Yet this awareness of how widely it is being used also motivates me to keep plugging at it, making it better and better. At the end of every day I ask myself what I did to make it better. I don’t think I’ll ever reach the point again where I can walk away from it and say it’s done.

Which is fine. I enjoyed the other sorts of writing I was doing. The work was more creative. But it never found more than a few dedicated readers. Etymonline seems more useful.

Some people have called this “selfless.” It doesn’t feel selfless. There’s a lot of me invested in the site and I take pride in it. But it is something that’s been useful and fun for a lot of people I’ve never met, and that’s a good feeling. Is it the altruism of egoism or the egoism of altruism?

The Devil goes by many names. Lucifer, Shaitan, the Evil One: these are a few of his Christian and Judaic names. He is called Adversary, the Liar, Old Scratch, the man downstairs. He is called Antichrist, Blasphemer, Heretic. He answers to Illumaniti, Knights Templar, Papism, the Bourgeoisie, the Communist Threat, Anti-Patriotism; in the east he goes by West, and in the west, East. He is called America, he is called Arabia, he is called China, he is called Russia. He is, to put it simply, Evil.

We humans are programmed by millennia upon millennia of scrabbling for survival to think in twos, to make split-second decisions on abstractions of available data. When there is an immediate threat, that response keeps us alive: fight or flight, eat or spit out, kill or capture, attack or negotiate.

The problem is that our species is moving into deeper and murkier waters. These days, thanks to the wonders of civilization, that split-second judgment is only rarely necessary.

And yet we make it anyway. Guilty or innocent, right or wrong, good or evil, for us or against us. Men and women claiming to be leaders shout from pulpits and election stands that there are no shades of gray, and that we will never compromise: as if the only possible response two being faced with two choices is something in the middle and less, and not a third choice and more.

Satan, of course, is behind it all. He’s been behind it from the beginning; can’t you smell the sulfur? The evil in the world is Satan’s doing, and the good is God’s, and us, well, we’re just here for the ride. The only choice we have, the shouters say, is black or white: we will follow God’s plan, or Satan’s.

As you may have guessed from the introduction, Satan isn’t just the Adversary of the Christian church. Satan, or what passes for him, shows his ugly face as the “Enemy” most of our species’ great movements fought against. In any war, he is behind the actions of the opposing force, just as surely as God is behind ours. In any religion, he is behind every belief that is contrary to ours. In any political or philosophical revolution, he is behind the old order of things, while God (or ‘Right’) is behind the new.

The Adversary’s role is to make our decision simple. We are either for him, or against him. Black and white. Pick a side, and remain loyal to it to the end. Obedience without complaint; faith without question; sacrifice without hesitation. It was Satan in the German armies advancing across Poland, whispering in soldier’s ear that maybe the Fuhrer wasn’t as right as he claimed. It was Satan in Luther’s study, arguing that the Catholic church didn’t have a monopoly on truth. It was Satan on Mount Moriah, telling Abraham: forget God, and let your son Isaac live.

This simple interpretation of reality is incredibly attractive. The idea that powers far greater than any of us are warring along clearly drawn lines removes us of any responsibility or need for deliberation. We follow orders, and write off our failings as personal inability to obey. It’s the same idea that draws us to works of fantasy like Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings; the villains are evil, the heros are good, and there is no mistaking the difference. It allows us to simply align our beliefs according to a preset pattern, where every statement can be declared simply ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ and every action placed into boxes of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’

But perhaps most importantly, it gives us a peace otherwise impossible to find. When an earthquake strikes and hundreds die, we can rest in the knowledge that it’s somehow part of the Plan, or perhaps the work of the Adversary; either way, it’s a strategem in a war far above us, and therefore is not our responsibility. We can even sooth our guilt at our inaction through prayer, or whatever passes for prayer in the atheistic manifestations of the War.

The Devil has many names, but he also has a secret. He, like the Power on our side, has no power beyond our belief in him. He exists simply as a thing to blame for all that is not good in the world. The Devil has many names, and the oldest is Scapegoat.

There is no grand master plan. There is no War. We are not pawns. We are not even pieces. We are tiny, fragile creatures in a vast and strange universe, who, incredibly, have begun to think. We are afraid of the darkness of ignorance, so, like children, we squeeze our eyes shut and pretend we have the light of knowledge. We look at the complex intertwinings of pain and love and hate and joy and sorrow that is our world, and, because we cannot imagine how to navigate it, we shut our eyes and pretend that from any given point there are only two paths. We invent demons that cause pain because real pain is much harder to kill. We invent angels that heal, because all too often healing is out of our grasp, and we are creatures that thrive on hope. We invent Gods and Satans because wars are much easier to wage when you’re Right.

We do these things not because we are evil, or because we are sheep, or because we are ‘fallen’ from some past greatness. We do them because we are in the infancy of our sentience, and we are terrified of what the future will bring. So: will we live in peace with our eyes closed and our decisions simple, or will we face our fears with our eyes open and seeking wisdom? Real moral choices do have value–nihilism never gave the world much–but they are never simple questions of black and white. They aren’t even gray. In real life, there are no villains, and very few saints. There are no ten-step-paths, rituals, purifications, payments, or incantations to cosmic success. There is no Right side and no Wrong side; there are no sides at all.

There is no us and them. There is only us.

This post was originally published at:

While searching for the fabled drunken koudou in far-off Georgia, I happened to meet three lovely young Orthodox women, who were kind enough to show me some of the ancient churches and cathedrals in and around Tbilisi. They also explained the meaning and stories behind many of the icons and murals adorning these churches, and, as they did, I realized something I never had before: that these icons serve as more than a simple visual representation of a saint or deity to pray to. They serve also as a trigger for narratives that have meaning within the Orthodox paradigm; as a reinforcement of faith and purpose within the church. The question that immediately came to mind was this: what is the place of such narratives in the human mind, and the species at large?

When your senses take in some section of reality in sequence over time, your mind constructs that raw data into a narrative; a structure of language and meaning arranged chronologically. This is a memory. Think of the last meal you ate. The memory is organized top down, triggered first by the words “last meal you ate”, subdivided into, say “pizza,” “coca-cola,” and “conversation with friends,” further divided into details and finally branching into the senses themselves; the smell, the taste, the look of the room. Though we do have the capacity to remember the raw sense data, we can’t help but organize that data into labels and narratives. Confronted with something we haven’t sensed before (a new city, for instance), we can’t help but compare it to other cities we’ve seen, and the concept of “city” as a whole. Confronted with something entirely new, we create a narrative and meaning to assign to it.

Any gaps in sense data are bridged by the pre-existing meaning and paradigm already within our minds. This can even create memories of things we never experienced, as demonstrated in the experiments conducted by Elizabeth Loftus, where, when shown doctored pictures, participants “remembered” visiting an amusement park that did not exist.

Stories we hear are treated the same way, though in reverse. The labels and narrative structure enter our minds first, and are then fleshed out with stock sense data. When we remember the story of Crime and Punishment, we don’t remember Dostoevsky’s words; we remember the look of the blood on the axe, the smell of the old woman’s apartment, and the burgeoning terror within our chests as we realize what we (as Raskolnikov) have done. Fortunately for us, our minds “tag” these new memory-stories as external to ourselves. When our minds fail to do this, psychopathy results: thus the mental patients or drug users leaping off of buildings believing themselves to be Superman.

We assign importance to these stories according to what we tag them as. The story of Mohammed’s hearing the Koran from the mouth of an angel, for instance, is tagged as “religious truth” in the mind of a Muslim, as “cultural myth” in the mind of an atheistic ethnographer, and under “pagan lies” in the mind of a fundamentalist Christian. In each case, the story is absorbed, but used differently. The “gaps” in the story are also filled in differently according to different receiving paradigms; the Muslim takes it at face value (the Koran is a gift from Allah), the ethnographer may consider epilepsy, psychosis, or greed for power, and the Christian may immediately cite Satan as the “angel” who accosted Mohammed in his cave.

The stories we tag as history are usually absorbed as little more than data, and brought to bear on applicable questions. The stories we tag as meaningful history (narratives from the War of Independence to many Americans, for example) are integrated into part of our paradigm as part of our national identity: we recall them with pride. With fiction, we tend to identify with a specific character or characters, and our memories are of their experiences. Some works of fiction we tag as simple fiction (used for entertainment or, perhaps, to fuel daydreaming). Others, those that strikes us more deeply, are tagged as “meaningful” fiction. In these cases we remember the experience of a character that touched us as if it had happened to us and, as with our own memories, those experiences may well change who we are. We can read of Odysseus’ brash taunts against the Cyclops and of the events that followed, and, remembering the story afterward, speak more prudently.

The most powerful external narratives (often more powerful than even personal memories) are the religious ones; the ones that are in our minds not only true, but True; eternally meaningful and universally applicable. A human of faith who holds such narratives close defines his or her paradigm by them. To a strong Christian, there is no narrative more powerful or definitive than that of Christ’s death and resurrection. To many Buddhists, the life of Buddha (as told or interpreted by a given sect) serves this role. Even the atheistic communists during Lenin’s rise to power had such religious narratives: the stories of the Proletariat Revolution and the coming worker’s paradise among the most significant.

Interestingly, even such definitive narratives can themselves be interpreted according to the pre-existing paradigm structure: compare concepts of Hell between modern America, Dante’s Italy, and Catholic Haiti to see just one example. Nonetheless, these narratives, once absorbed and interpreted by a personal paradigm, become structural within that paradigm according to the significance assigned to them. They give the holder meaning, purpose, identity, and a place within a community who shares those narratives.

This is perhaps one of the main functions of these stories. Shared narratives create powerful bonds between human beings: soldiers who experience a war together will be bound as friends for life and couples who share meaningful experiences will be bound tighter after the process. Similarly, shared external narratives create bonds between fellow believers, even with fiction–two people who both ascribe great significance to a given fictional narrative will have a bond pre-made and a faster friendship because of it.

Shared religious narratives, held with as much significance as they are, create very strong communities. As I traveled through Georgia, I was struck by the high place religion played among its people as well as its strong cultural identity despite two centuries of rule by Russia. I saw the way Georgian Orthodox believers would cross themselves when passing a church, and the way they would kneel inside a church to kiss the base of an icon, and tried to understand how a country under an atheist dictatorship from 1917 to 1991 could retain such a powerful religious identity.

When Nino, Nino, and Marine showed me around Tbilisi and explained the stories behind many of these rituals and icons, I began to understand. Georgian history, culture, and religion are all inseparably intertwined; its stories of national identity are also stories of the Orthodox faith. King David the Builder, a powerful ruler responsible for the first unification of the Georgian Caucausus, the Christianization of his territory, and the defense against the Selcuk Turks, is also a saint. So too is Queen Tamar, David’s great-granddaughter, the warrior-king Vashtankh of the Wolf’s Head, and the Russian-era poet Ilia Chavchavadze. So when a Georgian kisses an icon of Georgian saint, she is not simply kissing an image; she also is triggering an external memory, a narrative, that networks out through the entire Georgian cultural, religious, and political identity, and serves to strengthen all of them within the Georgian mind.

Rationally, “nations” do not exist at all; the Earth is the Earth, and has been here long before we were here and will be here long after we are gone. The concept of borders, cultures, governments, and states exist only within our own minds; perhaps it is these shared narratives that give us individual humans the cohesion necessary to draw together and, by doing so, create civilization.

To read more about Tim’s search for the drunken koudou in Georgia and the world at large, check out his personal blog:

To “conform” to the image and action of Christ is to be a true non-conformist, for nothing, absolutely nothing, confounds the world more than Christ’s presence in it. No saint conforms, but all saints obey. This obedience becomes, as the great mystic Simone Weil saw it, like the waves of the sea, or, as Kierkegaard imagined, Abraham saddling hiss ass to take his only son to be sacrificed: neither too fast (for that would smack of zealotry) nor too slow (for that would be playing the martyr) but steadily, deliberately, in perfect obedience to God’s will.

This “obedience” is the motion of God’s active grace. God wills, and saints do. This doing is almost always met by censor, persecution, and contempt, and, understandably enough, the censor, persecution, and contempt is often heaped upon the saint not by unbelievers (for being in Christ, the saint comes for those who are ill, not well) but by the very authorities in whom the body of Christ is said to lodge: the church, those within the church who prefer that the happy medium be upheld at all costs. I will make the following claims for obedience:

1. Obedience is always unprecedented, and original.

2. Obedience is always scandalous in so far as, like its binary opposition, sin, it confounds and angers the moralist and the Pharisee.

3. Obedience is always the motion of a man or woman who, having allowed God to shape him or her to his purpose, does not “act” on his or her own behalf, but moves with and through, and from the action (will) of God.

4. Just as it does not conform, obedience does not rebel, but submits to sufferings, trials, opposition, calumny, disgrace, torture, censorship, and misunderstandings because, as already said, it is the motion of God’s will and cannot be impeded. Embodying the Word, witnessing to the image and reality of Christ, it never comes without accomplishing its task.

5. Like Calvary, obedience is a triumphal march toward salvation that appears to those who cannot see as a death march, a waste of time, a failure.

6. Obedience is humble, yet fearless, submissive yet ferocious, inevitable and certain, yet willing to be confused, pained, ridiculous, even “sinful” (why does your master eat with whores, drunkards, and tax collectors?).

At its sight, the sinner may convert, for it shares this one truth in common with every sinner: conformity is never enough. In point of fact, mere conformity to the outward “righteousness” of moralisms and societal norms is the chief cover for a filthy soul. The one thing a great sinner has going for him is he knows, to his depths, that he is a sinner. The worst thing that can happen to a Christian is that he conform rather than obey, that he be puffed up on his own virtue, rather than brought down upon the body of the crucified one, and raised up with that body. The sinner can smell the phony moralist, the Pharisee, from a mile off. This is why Christ pleaded against the moralist and the Pharisee: because they impede conversion, because they are judgment rather than mercy, conviction rather than redemption, and Christ comes to convert, to forgive, to set free the captive, and proclaim the kingdom of God.

Most importantly, Christ loves the sinner with a love so fierce it makes impotent and flimsy the most violent storms of which human kind is capable. Nothing on heaven or earth is as violent or as ferocious as Christ’s love. Truly in its presence, we lay down our weapons, we lose our nerve, we are brought halt and lame and stupid before the living word, before the new and everlasting covenant.

A man may perform many wonders, preach with the voice of angels, have an understanding of theology beyond all others, and be conformed, not to the image of Christ, but of Satan: for Satan comes as an angel of light, with eloquence beyond all others. Satan knows the law better than all but God, and is its chief prosecutor (the accuser). Satan can grant power in the world, riches, and marvels. He can levitate, read hearts, do all the tricks by which saints are appraised. Satan can even conform, which is why he is a great champion of moralists. The only thing Satan cannot do is obey.

And so when we come to Cupertino, this “stupid” man, this scandal, the oaf, this “ass,” we must not be overly impressed by his signs of sainthood. The greatest sign of sainthood is obedience: not conformity, not moralism, not wonders and miracles in their most apparent sense, but obedience. And this leads me to my last characteristic of obedience:

7. Though obedience is never to be confused with conformity, it is ordinary: salt and light and dirt. It is humble in this sense: that it does not see itself as anything special, or worthy, or beyond the pale, but rather as lowly, unworthy, at the service of all who encounter it. It becomes last in order to be first, dies in order to live, and serves in order to rule.

In all these characteristics of obedience, St. Joseph of Cupertino triumphed, or, rather, God triumphed in him.

Meditation and prayer are dangerous. The more I try to empty myself, the more corpses I to find in what I considered to be my Self. My Self is in fact not alive at all, but is a pile of rotting corpses. Certainly, it moves – it has maggots – and it is strong – rigor mortis – but it is certainly dead. My “I” is the demons who cried out to Christ, “I am Legion.”  We have no need for Satan himself: it is our self that is Satan!

As I have been thinking in terms of peace, non-violence, self-abnegation, and God, I have uncovered a visceral lust for power (libido dominandi) which is inexplicable and coolly impersonal. This could be explained in simple psychological terms, honestly: as I consciously explore the unknown depths of my mind, my unconscious desires burst forth forcefully from below the surface. Or, as I suppress certain elements, they emerge all the more viciously. These unholy impulses manifest themselves in violent bouts of rage without an object, lust for demonic power without purpose, and a poison I didn’t know existed.

I’d been reading St. Benedict and Thomas Merton about the struggles of self-emptying and thought of them as somewhat overblown, but they are not. The more I seek to empty my Self, the more I find needs to be cremated. Every so often, the stench is overwhelming. Other times, the horror is so poignant that I almost declare, “It is me! It is me!” to the corpse I unearth.

None of these corpses are me, but my false-ego. In fact, my true Self is not what I consider to be me. My true identity is in God. Yet the faces I recognize disturb me. It is not just the anger or the egoism that rushes at me that is disturbing, but the dreadful familiarity of it all – and the recognition of my reflection in every grim face. Kenosis is a dangerous activity, for it is like digging out a graveyard: as the shovel sinks into the soil of one’s Self, one finds that it is not a plot of good earth to be turned effortlessly, but a black quagmire filled with corpses and will-o’-the-wisps. It is no singular being but a graveyard of entities, each dead. My “I” is, in fact, no one at all.

The process of emptying myself is not one of ignoring myself, but encountering myself head-on: to turn my mind inward against itself in order to be open to God. The faces I see are horrific because they are mine. Each of the contradictory wishes, hatreds, and lusts for dominion are revealed if I manage to dispose of any bodies at all.  We are each a villain with a thousand faces.

In Jungian terms, I uncover unconscious elements always alive under the surface. This is not psychosis, where the border between conscious and unconscious is obliterated; nor is this neurosis, where the border between the two is lowered.  Kenosis is the Self turning against its whole being, so that one looks past consciousness and unconsciousness to the universal ground which supports all things. One faces one’s Self and declares, “This is not me.” It is the task of Christ to send one’s myriad demons out into swine. Facing oneself is facing the maw of hell itself, for what burns in hell is the false self opposed to God – the chaff we should have burned off in life.

Only when our last mask is torn away do we find our true faces, which are so strange and wonderful that they will not seem like ours at all, and yet that novelty and wonder will be permanent.  This is constant progress (epektasis, “stretching forth”) an infinite process of drawing nearer to the Source; this is Union with God (theosis) which is something ever to be perfected.

There is a great danger in emptying – not of seeing the face of God, but the face of the Devil himself: You. As morbid as that encounter may be, what is worse is that we often choose to put on the old man once again like finding a favorite sports coat: “Oh, but doesn’t this fit wonderfully?” And as the Kingdom of God is within us, so too are the Powers and Principalities: we wage war against Legion within our souls. We stray terribly when we think it is our duty to force the righteous to be more righteous. It is our task to care for the sick and to see that we have been cured before we infect others!

There is no such thing as arriving when it comes to emptiness. Only a perpetual (almost monastic) effort can place us where we should be. But all of this is asceticism (askesis, “exercise, training”), a practice which has been much slandered, partially due to the extreme nature asceticism took historically. But asceticism is nothing more than training towards righteousness. Moderation is itself training against extremes – something asceticism forgot at one point! Any moral structure is ascetic: it involves training to follow certain regulations. Self-abnegation is only accomplished by saints, and even they would likely say they are too selfish.

The final peril of self-emptying is seeing your face and loving it. This is why some of the greatest monsters can come out of a false determination. If my wish is only to have greater selfish knowledge, then I will find a death mask and wear it proudly as if it were the face of God Himself! The danger is not that we will reach perfect emptiness, but that we will believe we have arrived. By thinking we have arrived, all possibility of progress withers.  In order to find the face we had before we were born, we must lose the face we know and seek one that is radically new.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

–The Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”, V.

Creation accompanies destruction. As something old dies, something new is born. Even Scripture attests to this, saying, “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” The view of a rebirth or being “born again” is not unique to Christianity. “For groups, as well as individuals, life itself means to separate and to be reunited, to change form and condition, to die and be reborn.” The process of rebirth is that of reincarnation or reincorporation. Eucharist itself is a rite of incorporation, simultaneously an incorporation into the world of the Church and separation from the secular world. The perpetual return to these acts of incorporation lies at the heart of the human condition.

Cyclical time best shows incorporation and reincorporation. With a linear view of time, less has changed than one might think. Man, modern or primitive, is a creature of habit. Years, months, weeks, days — each of these compose part of a forgotten liturgy. The perpetual cycles of time exhibit the clearest examples of the creation-destruction relationship in the concept of rebirth. A pagan conception of cyclical time posits the rebirth of the universe after an inexorable death — everything born must die, but then everything dead must be reborn. In Stoicism there is a “final conflagration of all things.” Tied up with this “end of the world” was the archaic concept of the mortality of the gods. Originally, Zeus himself had to be protected from Saturn. Only with the introduction of philosophy did the Greek gods lose their mortality. As recently as the Iliad, the gods were subject to physical wounds, as in the case of Diomedes, who injures both Ares and Aphrodite. Through history and philosophy the gods eventually became the immortals.

The mortality of the gods is maintained in Teutonic mythology. Though they live perpetually, they are susceptible to death, and given a long enough time-line, they are fated to perish. But the death of the gods and their world is not the sacred moment, but the birth of the world in the cosmogony. Much of this primordial affinity for the Beginning and prophecies of destruction are apparent in Christianity itself. The Revelation of St. John shows the world torn apart before its regeneration: “And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.” Whether literally fire or not, the heavens are torn asunder and heaven and earth are both destroyed and recreated. We have hints of what the next life might be like, specifically the Beginning. In religion, the “Future is behind us” — the paradisaical Garden of Eden is the “sacred time” towards which liturgy looks and history progresses.

Even with the advent of linear time, liturgical time has persisted. Liturgy seeks to return to “sacred time” and to dwell in the holiest moments of history. The most blessed moments of the liturgical calendar are those of regeneration: Christmas, Good Friday, and especially Easter. Christmas marks the birth of God, Good Friday marks the death of God, Easter marks the resurrection of God. The liturgical calendar reenacts the historical events of faith: the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.

Sunrise Silhouettes by Dez Pain

Before each regeneration, there is a corresponding degeneration. Before Lent, there is Mardi Gras; before All Saints Day, there is Halloween; before the rebirth of Easter, there is the darkness of Good Friday; before a wedding, there is a bachelor’s party; before the new year, there is New Year’s Eve. Though these are rarely endorsed by religious authorities, they remain ubiquitous. In some cases this “degeneration” is the pacification of demons or “Satan,” but whether this behavior is “right,” it is a pervasive phenomenon. Modern man continues to act mythologically even though he has forgotten his myths.

If the year is a microcosm of the cosmos, then the week would be as well. “Saturday” is most commonly attributed to the god Saturn, but according to Jacob Grimm arises instead from Saeteres-day, “the day of the insidiator.” This is a title of Loki, trapped until Ragnarök when he is freed and the world is consumed in fire. Thus, Saturday is the “mischievous” day of the week. The habit is maintained without the mythological context, even though “It’s a new week” is still very much employed. This is the source of “Sunday-morning Christians.” The new year and the new week, are both “fresh starts” and still experienced as special (if not “sacred”) moments by the most secular of modern men. The weekend remains a goal even to the most apostate: respite from labor and the beginning of a new week. The Sabbath as the day of rest establishes the new, pure, sacred time.

The holy moments of generation (and regeneration) are relived in the Eucharist, Christmas, and especially Easter. Cyclical liturgy seeks to inhabit Being itself, drawing as close to God as possible. The yearly cycle is part of this impulse which pervades all religions. Even the seven-day creation in Genesis leaves the Sabbath as an open day; unlike the others, it is given no end. Today is the Sabbath itself; Sunday is a microcosm of that cosmic Holy Day. “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.” As man was not made for the world, but the world for man, so too was the sabbath made for man. After the process of creation, God rested — this is now. In Judaic tradition, the new day begins with the previous night, as the universe began with darkness. The new moon too begins with darkness, out of which light then proceeds. The entirety of human existence is the Seventh Day; the Eighth Day is the end of this world and the beginning of the next.

Reliving the cosmogony continues as attempts to live close to God. People have the propensity for reliving holy moments as mere memories (memorials) but also as participatory events (commemorations) such as new year’s celebrations of rebirth, seasonal changes, fertility rites, rites of passage, etc. The desire of human beings is the calm rest of Innocent Being, which can never be obtained fully in this life. Instead, the world follows the Heraclitean doctrine of “perpetual flux” or Siddhārtha Gautama’s “Fire Sermon” — always turning, always changing. The continual flows of the universe are perhaps the most frustrating aspect of human life. The static ecstasy (Becoming) of the human condition longs for reconciliation with ecstatic stasis (Being): “Everything is a Becoming, a flux without beginning (first cause) or end; there exists no static moment when this becoming attains to beinghood — no sooner can we conceive it by the attributes of name and form, than it has transmigrated or changed to something else.”  This is the ultimate goal of all religions and the meaning of the image of the Phoenix: rebirth through fire, a return to Innocent Being.

The fires of eschatology are purgative flames which cleanse and regenerate degenerate beings. “Every man’s work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man’s work of what sort it is.” As fire destroys, it simultaneously creates. The destruction brought by God is not simple destruction but rather a creative destruction. The ultimate goal of the violence of God is true peace. To put it in a more shocking way, violence is the double aspect of peace. Hate, too, is the double aspect of love. If God did not love us enough to hate that which harms his loved ones, would that be love at all? Against a violent world, the Prince of Peace returns at the head of an army to judge the living and the dead.

Transfiguration by Alex Grey

The entire world of beings suffers from “original sin” — the diffuse “guilt of Becoming weighs equally on men and gods, understanding and compassion must be extended to the blessed as well as to the unfortunate.” Existence itself is grace, perfectly unmerited since “merit” requires the prerequisite of existence. The gratuitousness of existence comes from Being, the gratuitousness of Being comes from God. As a gift obligates gratitude, so too does existence itself obligate gratitude to Being. Martin Heidegger claims that man is the “shepherd of Being and therefore waits on Being.” How much more should we not wait on the source of Being itself?

The ethical obligations of grace are the essence of dwelling in the world. Forgiveness itself allows rebirth by suspending judgment of actions and ending their consequences. By foregoing sins, we nullify them, allowing rebirth to those whom we love. The universal gratuitousness of existence should obligate universal love for all beings. The response to the gratuitousness of existence is not license to misuse it but liberty to use it with great care. It is not a matter of the “will to power” but rather the will to let things be as they should be. An abused gift is an insult to the giver and is both ungrateful and ungracious. The image of the Phoenix reveals the possibility of grace in forgiveness — and such profound grace deserves profound gratitude.

If all existence is universal grace, our forgiveness of others should be universal too: “Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.” Seven is a Judaic number of completion, and Christ says that we should not merely forgive every time, but universally every time.

Seven marks completion, but the eighth day marks a new beginning. Eight marks the newness after forgiveness, and the grace of Innocent Being. The days of the week are seven, but beyond time is the Eighth Day, the recreation of heaven and earth by fire. The separation of the wheat from the chaff is also the incorporation into the body of the Chosen People. But incorporation is also separation from all other bodies — wheat from the chaff. Infants are circumcised on the Eighth Day, marking the covenant (Hebrew, berith, “cutting”) which incorporated children into the chosen people by separating them from the rest of the world. An octave begins again on the eighth note, a new week starts on the eighth day. Dying to the old man in order to give birth to the new man is a process of incorporation and is reflected in the image of the Phoenix. Baptism serves a similar role, revealing the symbolic union of the individual with the Church body and mirroring the cleansing of sins. Though elemental opposites, fire and water both bear this atoning significance.

The ultimate atonement to Innocent Being is union with God or theosis. But this is not merely a final “state” but an unending process. Theosis is the telos of man, but it is not a static state, but rather an ecstatic state. Man arrives at union with God and then proceeds to learn ever more of his maker. Man’s perfection is to progress in the perpetual process of always drawing nearer to God. Theosis is not heaven, it is now. Time need not be anything more than the unfolding of eternity, perpetual, unending. In the richness of our ignorance is the beauty of the possibility of the perpetual revelation of God, drawing us always to greater appreciation. Only through process is progress possible. The process of time is required for the progress of Being.

Burning Embers

The discomfort with the “infinite” (or Becoming) is the discomfort with our own incompleteness and also the indescribable Being of God. But this is the entirety of the human condition, on earth as it is in heaven. Theosis is both the state of union with God and also the ecstasy of always drawing nearer. Death marks a threshold at which we see God face to face and are reborn.

Birth, life, and death is the natural life cycle. The resurrection marks not merely birth (natality) or the denial of death (mortality) but rather the fullness of life (maturity). As Adam was born a mature man, so Christ was resurrected a mature man. The pediatric and geriatric stages of life are merely part of the life cycle. The promise of the Phoenix is not the “new child” but the “new man.” The reborn Phoenix does not learn again how to fly, but leaps instantly into heaven blessed with a body glowing golden, transfigured by the very flames of death which destroyed it. While death destroys the “old man” once and for all, it creates the “new man” once and for all. The fires of death are the very radiance of the Phoenix’s new life. The Phoenix marks our re-incarnation in the new heaven and the new earth, the atonement to Innocent Being.

Originally posted on Front Porch Republic.

Sit down sometime, and watch a child playing. Assuming the child’s innate creativity hasn’t been burnt out of it by the drugs and television prescribed by our modern seers, you’ll notice something interesting. The child’s imaginary world is very different than the one he actually lives in. In the imaginary world, animals talk, kings and queens live in high castles, cars and trucks move at his command, and, of course, dinosaurs rule the Earth. Adults do this too, though perhaps not so consciously. We, too old for playing with plastic dinosaurs (or so we think), enter the imaginary worlds of others: we are riding through an unspoiled and expansive Old West desert; we are normal-seeming citizens with great hidden powers; we are lone survivors struggling heroically against a dangerous and visceral world; we are kissing in the rain; we are Jack’s burning rage against the system. Why are the Harry Potter books so popular among adults if not to let us think that just on the other side of a mundane normalcy is a world full of magic, strange creatures, and life-and-death battles? What are our design mock-ups and finance reports, after all, when compared to the War with Evil?

On a more practical level, those imaginary worlds also cause us to make changes in the real world. The imaginations of an ordinary mind, of a bigger paycheck or a new romance, might lead us to apply for a job or talk to a woman. The imaginations of a great mind can and do change the world. But with that power of imagination comes a near-universal inability to accept the world we actually have. It can’t have always been this way, we think; even if the grass isn’t greener in our neighbor’s yard, surely it was in his grandfather’s. America, say the old, was better off sixty years ago when people still had morals and young people respected their elders. America, say the young, was better off six hundred years ago, when white people were still stuck in Europe and the Native American lived at one with nature, likely spontaneously bursting into song when confronted with fluffy woodland creatures.

And at the dawn of time, Eden. Perfection, or so the Christians tell us. Man without sin, without want, at peace and innocent. In that garden there was only one rule: to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve, being somewhat naive (not outright rebellious like her predecessor), believed Satan’s claim that the knowledge would make her like God, and ate. Adam, being a good husband, did what his wife told him and ate likewise and, rather than becoming gods, the couple was cast out of Eden and cursed to mortality and the working of the ground.

Compare this to another creation myth: that of Prometheus and Pandora. In the Greek version, Prometheus gives humanity the gift of fire. Their eyes follow the smoke from the ground up toward the stars, and they become separate from the animals; they are mortal, but possess the fire of the gods. Zeus punishes Prometheus for his gift, and to punish the humans, he sends them Pandora: a woman, like Eve, who touches something she shouldn’t and thus brings evil, pain, and torment to the entire future of the human race. At the beginning of both of these myths, humanity exists in a state of innocence. Like the animals, they lack knowledge, and thus can only act according to their nature; the only sin they can commit is to seek to become like gods.

In Eden, humans are immortal within the garden; in the Greek myths, humans are eternally cyclical, as there can be no names, stories, or remembrance of death. But then the humans reach out and take something forbidden: the knowledge of the gods. With that knowledge, they become self-aware, symbolized in the Greek myth by looking at the stars, and in the Eden myth by the realization of nakedness. To be like the gods, though, is not free. In both cases, knowledge grants to humans the ability to choose, a free will that can knowingly take a good path or an evil one. This awareness of self, perhaps brought on in actual history by the development of language, gave humans a concept of evil and good, and the awareness through experience that one day they would surely die. With knowledge came the potential for evil. Sin enters into the Christian’s world, Pandora opens her box, and (lament the storytellers), man is doomed to a life of work, a struggle towards an impossible perfection, and responsibility for his actions. An angel is set at the gates of Eden, and Prometheus is chained to a rock for the rest of eternity.

The Greek empire and its accompanying mythos are now long since gone, but the concept of Eden and the fall of man is still very present in the western world. We yearn for lost perfection, for peace, for security, for the assurance that we will never die. We are like infants newly born, bawling for the comfort of the womb. But let us ask ourselves: is the fire of the gods worth the evils of Pandora’s box? It is interesting to note that the name “Pandora” in the Greek means “all-giving”, and that the forbidden fruit contained the knowledge of good as well as of evil. Prometheus and Eden are not stories of the birth of evil; they are stories of the birth of self-awareness and the responsibility that comes with it. We cry out for Eden because we can’t see past the blisters on our hands and the gravestones at the end of our lives. Like little children with bruised knees, we run to the divine, crying for safety, for perfection, for a world where everything will be all right, where daddy will take care of everything.

Enough childishness. Bruised knees and blisters are part of growth. Sooner or later we have to dry our tears, grit our teeth, and shoulder the responsibility we have been given. And, as we sweat out our Earthly toil, we may begin to realize the gifts we have been given. There is no value in accomplishment without struggle, no value in possession without sacrifice, no value in love without loss, and no value in good without evil. Our metaphorical exile from Eden was no more a curse than the a young bird’s first push from its nest. We have wept for far too long. It’s time to grow up.

This post originally appeared on: