There is a common misunderstanding about nondual awareness, spiritual awakening, liberation, self-realization, enlightenment or whatever you want to call it. The misunderstanding is that it is cure-all for everything that ails us. That the culmination of the spiritual search is a cessation of all psychological pain. It is not. This episode explores the brokenness of the human condition, even after spiritual awakening, and how brokenness can lead to realization of our True Nature.
There is a common misunderstanding about nondual awareness, spiritual awakening, liberation, self-realization, enlightenment or whatever you want to call it. The terms themselves are misleading because they come with so much conceptual baggage, so I don’t like using any of them. I am talking the experiential shift from a separate dualistic existence to unitive awareness. The misunderstanding is that it is cure-all for everything that ails us.
There is the idea – and that is all it is, an idea that people have – that from some magic moment we will dwell in a blissful consciousness that solves all our mental, emotional, psychological problems and issues and maybe even our physical problems. That hope is what drives a lot of people to begin the spiritual search. They want relief from suffering.
That hope is not entirely misplaced, it is just misunderstood. The Buddha made it clear that the root issue of human existence is suffering. He uses the word dukkha which means off balance, off center, or out of kilter. His way of the Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path was the end of this suffering. It is solved by discovering we are “no self,” anatta, as Buddha put it. We are not a self that is suffering. There is no separate little physical psychological entity that is suffering. That realization is the end of suffering.
But it does not mean this human body will not feel pain and the mind will not have emotion, including negative emotion. The psyche still has emotions, including strong negative emotions, but they are no longer ours. The ego is seen through, but the ego still hangs around like a guest that has outstayed his welcome, and still suffers. The ego does not disappear completely. The ego or psyche is how we function in the world. As long as there is a human body and mind there is a human psyche.
Jesus had a psyche, an ego, a self, a mind. Consequently Jesus had strong emotions throughout his life, right up to the end of his life. We see Jesus crying at the grave of his friend Lazarus. We see emotions on full display in the passion narrative. Jesus is suffering in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before this death, sweating blood. Luke, who was a physician said in his gospel, “and being in anguish he prayed more earnestly and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” Jesus was in anguish. He was praying for a way to avoid being tortured on the cross. He does not want to die that way. That is certainly understandable.
We also see these emotions when Jesus was dying on the cross, when he cried out asking why God had forsaken him. So we see psychological suffering even in Jesus’ last hours of life. So we should not be surprised if this human mind that we tend to identify with experiences suffering – psychological and physical. The awakened life does not mean there is no trauma in life. There is. But it provides a way through it.
This was vividly demonstrated in my life recently. Last Sunday I went to a Baptist Association meeting. I had finished with nearly all denominational meetings when I retired from pastoral ministry seven years ago. But I had accepted the position in our church of Baptist representative to the denomination. I was expected to go to the annual association meeting, so I went. I had forgotten just how badly Baptists can behave when they get together.
At the meeting there was constant negativity, complaining and criticism. One of the first people I talked with was a minister dressed in a coat and tie went on a rant about how all men ought to wear coat and tie to the meeting and to Sunday worship. Of course I was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. Another pastor during the meeting was ranting about how Baptists need to enforce doctrinal orthodoxy. Then the issues of women in ministry and gay marriage were raised. Throughout the meeting was a spirit of judgment toward people who thought differently. It was horrible. It is no wonder churches are dying. I decided right then and there that I am never going back to an association meeting again. I would not attend a church that was like that.
The emotions did not end when the association meeting ended. It triggered memories of my previous church in Pennsylvania, which had burned me out and led to depression and something akin to PTSD because of church and denominational conflict. I was so broken at the time that I ended up leaving ministry for a year and a half to recover. The good thing was that the brokenness started me on the project of deconstructing my Christianity, which led to spiritual awakening.
This association meeting last Sunday brought back those negative memories and the emotional trauma connected to them. I woke up in the middle of Sunday night filled with anger, angst and fear and anxiety. The good news is that I now knew how to deal with and process those emotions and what action I needed to take. That brought an end to that suffering pretty quickly.
My point is that I – the ego - still experience things like that now. Everyone does. Every spiritual teacher has such emotions. No one is perfect. No one is fully realized or fully awake. Everyone is broken. You cannot be spiritually awake unless the ego is first broken and that brokenness leaves wounds. Even the risen Jesus had wounds. And he did not try to hide them. He showed his wounds to his disciples.
Any spiritual teacher who is worth his or her salt will show their wounds and not hide them. Any teacher who implies that they are not still broken in some way is a liar. They are deceiving themselves and others because they think they have to put on the mask of the enlightened spiritual teacher. Disciples tend to deify their teachers. Literally put them on a pedestal and idolize them. They expect them to be perfect. So teachers feel like they need to appear perfect, so they hide their wounds. That is a recipe for disaster.
Life is suffering. That is the Buddha’s first noble truth. As long as we are alive there is suffering. No one is exempt. Not the Buddha, not Jesus. Those teachers who admit their brokenness are the honest teachers. I noticed that Scott Kiloby is teaching this truth a lot now, and I applaud him for it. He is calling it transparency. Justin Foster in his Third Way podcast is talking about this and modeling this truth in all his work but especially in what he is calling manologues. The awakening life involves continually acknowledging, exposing and resolving this brokenness of life.
This brokenness is symbolized in the crucifixion of Jesus. The strength of Christianity is that it embraces this aspect more than many religious traditions. The Cross is a picture of brokenness, and it is the symbol of the Christian faith. Our central image is not Jesus sitting under the Bodhi tree with a serene smile on his face, but Jesus dying on a tree, broken. Because Jesus was broken, we can acknowledge our brokenness.
It is brokenness that allows the Light of God to shine in, and the light of God to shine out until eventually all the broken pieces fall away at death, and we are wholly light, and see that we have only ever been that light and not the cracked shell we thought we were.
In the gospel narrative the story of Jesus does not end with the brokenness of Gethsemane or Calvary. The brokenness of the Cross of Jesus is followed by the tomb of Jesus, which is a symbol of death. It is physical death but it also symbolizes ego death. The ego is a product of the body and dies with the body.
The burial of Jesus is then followed in the gospel story with the empty tomb, which symbolizes emptiness. The significance of the empty tomb is often overlooked. It is not just a prelude to resurrection. It represents the primordial Void, which is the Source of All. It is also the womb from which new birth comes.
Notice that in the gospels there is no record of the resurrection. There are resurrection appearances, but no story of the moment of resurrection. No risen Jesus waking up in the tomb and walking out of the tomb. Instead the stone is rolled away and the tomb empty before women disciples arrive. Or in one important telling of the story, the stone is rolled away in the disciples’ presence and the tomb is revealed to be already empty. The focus is on the emptiness, not the resurrection. The empty tomb points to emptiness, which is the heart of existence.
When the resurrection happens, it is not what we expect. No one recognizes Christ, which is not what we would expect if it was all about bodily resurrection of the physical body. Resurrection is about what happens on the other side of brokenness. The resurrection is the symbol of wholeness. It is a wholeness on the other side of brokenness and the Void.
The death, burial and resurrection of Jesus are symbolic. Exactly what happened on Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday can be debated by historians and theologians and biblical scholars, but the spiritual meaning is crystal clear. It is about the process of brokenness and emptiness followed by wholeness. Wholeness is the end of suffering. The risen Christ is no longer suffering, even though he still has the wounds of suffering.
Our wholeness comes through a process through suffering and dying and emptying. That process continues throughout our physical life, just like it continued throughout Jesus’ physical life. Complete end to physical suffering comes only with physical death. Every one of the great spiritual teachers I am aware of had physical suffering that resulted in death. I am sure that suffering can be lessened through the practice of types of yoga and bodily and mental control, but not eliminated. Only death eliminates it completely.
The same with ego death, which only permanently occurs at physical death. Throughout life there is a process of gradual dying of the ego as we stop feeding the ego. If we feed the ego it remains strong, but if we reckon it dead, as the apostle Paul says, then it slowly dies. I have a niece who had a leg amputated because of cancer. She still has strong pain in that limb even though it no longer exists. Lot of amputees testify to such phantom pain.
The same with ego suffering. The ego is dead and gone, when we see it for what it really is. But there is still pain. The presence of some psychological suffering does not mean we are not awake or awaking. A lot of people think that they haven’t “got it” – nondual awareness - because they still have certain psychological issues. They think that to be awake means to free of any issues. That is a pipe dream. It is not true. The awakening life is a process of living from our true nature and acknowledging that our brokenness is still around for the time being. Brokenness is not a problem; it is a blessing that facilitates the process of awakening.