The Threefold Path of Jesus

I have had listeners contact me when they are at an impasse in the spiritual life, and they ask the question: What can I do? What can I do to experience unitive awareness, to know nondual awareness? What can I do to wake up, to be enlightened or liberated or experience eternal life? In the New Testament the form of this question is normally phrased as: what must I do to be saved or to inherit eternal life or enter the Kingdom of Heaven? 

Many have been on the spiritual path for a long time – for years or even decades - without a definitive breakthrough, and they ask, “What can I do?” It is a difficult, if not impossible, to answer such a question, because in the final analysis it is a matter of grace. 

But that does not mean there is nothing we can do. In this episode I explore what I call the threefold path if Jesus. He said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”  

I also share a bit more about my own conversion to Christianity, my life in Evangelicalism, my journey through the Dark Night of the Soul, and my awakening to Unitive Awareness. 

Transcript

The Threefold Path of Jesus

I have had listeners contact me when they are at an impasse in the spiritual life, and they ask the question: What can I do? What can I do to experience unitive awareness, to know nondual awareness? What can I do to wake up, to be enlightened or liberated or experience eternal life? In the New Testament the form of this question is normally phrased as: what must I do to be saved or to inherit eternal life or enter the Kingdom of Heaven? 

Many have been on the spiritual path for a long time – for years or even decades - without a definitive breakthrough, and they ask, “What can I do?” It is a difficult, if not impossible, to answer such a question, because in the final analysis it is a matter of grace. 

But that does not mean there is nothing we can do. Throughout the centuries spiritual teachers have given their disciples something to do. The Buddha gave his followers the Eightfold Path, which is summarized as right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

My spiritual teacher Jesus is no different. He gave people something they could do. One day a wealthy young man from the ruling class came to him with this age-old question. In the gospels it took this form: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The question itself reveals the paradox at the heart of the question because he calls eternal life an inheritance. There is nothing a person can do to receive an inheritance. An inheritance is a gift. It is about who we are, not what we do.

But like all spiritual seekers, this man needed to do something. So Jesus tells him to obey the moral commandments. What the Jews called the Law and what the Buddha summed up as “right speech, right action, and right livelihood.” The man replied that he had observed the moral commandments of the Torah all his life. Jesus responded that there was one more thing to do. Jesus told him to sell everything he owned and give the proceeds to the poor and come be his disciple. 

In other words Jesus told the man that he had to be “all in.” Hold nothing back in the spiritual quest for the Kingdom of God. The young man was not willing to do that. He was not “all in.” The exhortation to complete commitment was a common refrain in the teaching of Jesus. When Jesus called his twelve disciples he told them to leave everything behind, including their livelihood and family and follow him. He said, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."

It is a common pattern in Zen Buddhism for masters to require their disciples to show their steadfast dedication to the spiritual life by spending years in service to the master before they even began to talk about spiritual matters. It was a way of weeding out people who were not earnest. In the Buddha’s Eightfold path this is called right intention and right effort and right concentration. 

Christ Jesus put it this way. We might call it his threefold path. He said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.”  He taught this in conjunction with a story of the persistent man who would not stopping knocking on his friend’s door at midnight, waking up the owner of the house in order to receive some bread. 

One translation of Jesus’ teaching translates Jesus’ words: “Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.” Jesus’ threefold path is the three related qualities of persistence and perseverance and determination.  I think that all three point to stubbornness or tenacity. 

When people ask me what they can do to find what they are searching for, I tell them to persevere no matter what. Keep on keeping on. It is all a matter of right intention, right effort and right concentration, as the Buddha said. The spiritual life rewards those who will not give up, people who want the answer at all costs. 

You have likely heard some version of this old story about a man who came to a preacher asking how to attain eternal life. The preacher took the man down to the river to baptize him by immersion, like a good Baptist. He dunked him down into the water, but instead of bringing him right up again, this preacher held the man down under the water. The man flailed and struggled to come back to the surface, but the preacher was big and strong and held him under water. When the man was nearly drowned, the preacher finally lifted him back to the surface. “Why did you do that?” The man sputtered, “I nearly drowned.” The preacher replied, “I was answering your question. When you desire God as much as you just desired breath, then you will attain eternal life.”

When people ask me what they can do to see the Kingdom of God – or words to that effect – I tell them it is a matter of resolve. I have desired spiritual liberation more than anything else my entire life. When I was a young man I gave up the opportunity to inherit the family business – a chain of hardware stores – in order to go to seminary and pursue a spiritual path, much to the distress of my business-oriented family. Furthermore I did not go to seminary in order to be trained to get a job as a pastor, which I had no intention of becoming at the time. I went because I figured that was where I could devote myself most fully to the spiritual life. 

I had surrendered my life to the lordship of Jesus Christ at the age of 22, when I was still working in the family business. When I did that, I went all in. I did not stop there. For many Christians, conversion is enough. And they spend the rest of their lives talking about it. For them getting their ticket punched for heaven is the purpose of the gospel, and they are willing to spend the rest of their lives waiting for heaven. 

That mentality is the reason for the spiritual poverty of evangelical Christianity today. For me my Christian conversion was just the beginning. Twenty years later I traveled through the valley of the shadow of death – what has been called the Dark Night of the Soul - to find the fullness of eternal life. Not just the promise of heaven when I die, but eternity now. When I went through that at that time I felt like I died. And I did. It was the death of the ego, although I did not know what to call it at the time. 

There was such darkness and despair and fear at the experienced death of my separate self, that I abandoned the contemplative life for years. For I thought, “Therein lies madness.” As King Lear said, “O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; / No more of that.” It scared me to death and so I retreated into the safety of the evangelical Christianity I had known earlier. Evangelicalism was my escape from God. It was a way for me to hide from spiritual truth into religion. That is why I am so hard on Evangelicalism these days. I know it well from the inside. I know it to be mostly a way that Christians use to hide from the Living Christ and True God. It is a retreat into manmade religion. 

It took another twenty years of persistent peeling back the layers of traditional Christianity to see the hollowness of it. I thoroughly deconstructed my Christian theism. I seriously explored atheism to see if it had the answers. Then I returned to the authentic roots of Jesus’ teaching. Finally when I was at the end of my rope – when I thought I was literally knocking at death’s door – by the grace of God the door opened. I let go of my dead self which I had been clinging to for twenty years. I gave up my life and found Life. I woke up to True Self and to the Reality of who I am in Christ.

From the time I first gave my life to Christ and was baptized to that moment time – from 1972 to 2012 – was 40 years. A nice biblical number. I appreciate now why the number forty is so often used in the Bible, like the 40 days and nights of Noah’s flood, Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness and the forty years of Israel in the wilderness. Through my forty years in the wilderness I kept asking and seeking and knocking, and the door opened. 

The asking and seeking and knocking did not open the door. There is a famous painting by William Holman Hunt, which was later copied by Warner Sallman, of Jesus knocking on a door, representing the door of the heart. In that painting there is no lock and the handle is on the inside. It can only be opened from within. What I discovered was that the one who knocks on the outside is the one who opens the door from the inside.  I was already on the inside. In reality there is no inside and outside. It is all one. 

It took a long time of intentional spiritual quest to see that. I realize now that it did not have to take 40 years. It did not have to take forty days or 40 minutes or 40 seconds. The door is unlocked. It stands open – like the curtain to the Holy of Holies being ripped open when Jesus died. That is the symbolism of that event. The Kingdom of God is here out in the open and has always been here now. All it takes is the death of the self to see the Reality of the unlocked door. 

For some reason to see this seems to require a willingness to give up everything, including our own soul – our own self. We have to be all in. Like Jesus was all in even to the point of death. Like Buddha was all in when sat down under the Bodhi tree and said he would not move until he found enlightenment or died trying. There is no playing at the spiritual life. It has to be a matter of life or death or you might as well forget it. If this is a spiritual hobby for you, a pastime or a bit of spiritual entertainment or recreation, then you might as well quit right now. But if you are willing to spend as long as it takes and expend all the effort and energy that is necessary to find the Kingdom of God, then you will find. 

If you are willing to keep asking and seeking and knocking on the door, then the one inside will wake up and open the door. You will come face to face with the owner of the house and recognize your true face. The face you had before your birth and before the creation of the world. It is you who wakes up because it is you knocking on the door.