I am continuing my journey through the Sermon on the Mount, interpreting it from a nondual perspective. Today I look at one of the most beautiful passages in the Bible in my opinion, sometimes known as the “lilies of the field” passage.
The topic of the section is worry or anxiety. I did an episode entitled “Beyond Anxiety and Fear” immediately before I started this series about the Sermon on the Mount. So I do not want to repeat myself. I will talk about worry, since that is the subject Jesus is addressing. But I am more interested in what Jesus points to in order to help us overcome worry and anxiety.
Right before this section Jesus talked about the danger of wealth and possessions. This time he is delving deeper. He is not talking about unhealthy obsession with money and things. He is talking about the very real and natural concern that many people have of not having enough food to eat - what is called “food insecurity” these days.
That was a very real issue for people living in an agrarian society in the first century. People were completely dependent on circumstances beyond their control: weather, droughts, floods, pestilence, invading armies. Any of these could cause famine, which was a regular and real danger in those days. When you read the Bible, you see that a lot of the Bible deals with that. And lots of people deal with hunger and homelessness now.
Jesus is not telling us how to solve that serious problem, although he already mentioned giving to those in need as a spiritual discipline. Instead here he is addressing any fear that we might have about not having the essentials of life. For many of us this would apply to worrying about how we are going to pay the bills: the mortgage, the rent, the utilities, the grocery bills, and clothing. It is a real concern to people.
You might be worried about these concerns right now. How do we deal with this in a spiritual manner that is consistent with Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom of God, which we also call Nondual Reality? Jesus’ answer is to learn from nature. Specifically he mentions the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, but it is equally true of all types of living things. He says:
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?
Do flowers worry? Do birds worry? I plant flowers around my house. I don’t know much about flower gardening, and could not tell you the name of many of the flowers, but I enjoy seeing them. My wife loves feeding the birds, as well as all the other wild animals that visit our home. So we have opportunities to meditate on flowers of the field, the birds of the air and the animals of the forest. They are our spiritual teachers.
Jesus is directing our attention to these spiritual teachers of the natural world. He points out that they do not worry. The flowers around our house do not worry. The birds do not worry. The fox and bears and possums and raccoons that visit our yard do not worry. The stray cat that comes to our door does not worry. They live and die without worry. We worry. Why do we worry?
We worry because we are humans. We have a personal self-conscious self. I would ordinarily use the word ego here. But I have noticed recently that I am misunderstood when I use the word ego. Even though that term is often used in spiritual conversations to refer to the personal self, many people understand the word in the psychological sense as a particular part of the human psyche. When I use the word ego I am not speaking psychologically. I use it to refer to the whole psyche, which is the Greek word used in the NT for self. Ego is the Greek word for I – myself, the sense of personal self-identity. That is how I use it.
Humans worry because we have this sense of an individual personal identity that is thought to be separate from the world. This self-consciousness is what distinguishes humans from lilies, sparrows and possums. With that separate identity comes a sense of time and the ability to think about the future, which flowers and birds don’t do. With the idea of a future comes the thought that the future may not provide enough for us to live. That brings worry. In short we worry because we are human.
The solution to worry is not to be human. Not to identify with the ego and body. The cure for worry and anxiety is to transcend the human self –the human psyche, the human sense of a personal separate self. This does not mean becoming less than human, but more than human. It means seeing what we really are.
Teilhard de Chardin is credited with the oft-repeated quote: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” First of all it is not clear that Teilhard actually said those words. In any case I would modify it to say: We are not humans having a spiritual experience but Spirit having a human experience.
We are the One Spirit, the World Soul, manifesting as humans. Humans are zoologically nothing more than apes with a slightly larger brain and cerebral cortex, which account for the development of the sense of a separate personal self. But in reality we are the same Spirit that animates all living things, including the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. The key to freedom from worry, anxiety and all the other self-created forms of suffering is to rediscover what we really are. To rediscover what we have in common with other living things.
What we have in common is life. Divine Life. The prologue of John’s Gospel says of Christ: “in him was Life, and that life was the Light of men.” This can be called other names. We can call it intelligence. We can call this consciousness, although I find I am also misunderstood when I use that term. Awareness is another word that is useful in pointing to this. We can also call it the Divine or Spirit.
Call this whatever you want, as long as you recognize what I am pointing to with these words. The Essence of our human nature is the essence of all living things and the Essence of the Universe. When we shift our sense of identity from these little human psyches and bodies to the large Universal Awareness, then worry falls away. Birds and lilies embody this Divine Life effortlessly and without a sense of self to fight against it. That is why they do not worry. Jesus points to our fellow creatures on this planet and suggests that we learn from them.
Jesus ends the section saying: “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
To counter the tendency to worry, Jesus suggests that we seek the Kingdom of God, which is Nondual awareness. He tells us to live in the Now. Live in today and not in tomorrow, which is just a thought in the mind which gives rise to worry. Take one day at a time, he says. Or as my wife said to a young man suffering from addiction which we picked up hitching-hiking the other day: Take one hour at the time, one minute at a time, one second at a time. When we do that there is no time to worry.