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This morning our pastor talked about "joy." Coincidentlaly, I had just been reading about the same subject in Thich Nhat Hanh's book about the teaching of the Buddha. And I was interested to note that the message of a Christan pastor and the message of the Buddha were esentially the same.

Hanh states, Embrace your suffring, smile to it, and discover the source of happiness that is right there within it. Buddhas and Bodhisattvas suffer, too. The difference between them and us is that they know how to transform their suffering into joy and compassion. Like good organic gardeners, the do not discriminate in favor of the flowers or against the garbage. They know how to transform garbage into flowers. ... Practice this and you come to the third turning of the Third Noble Truth, the "Realization" that suffering and happiness are not two. When you reach this stage, your joy is no longer fragile. It is true joy.

Nice stuff. The Buddha did not teach, nor did Jesus, that suffering is a required ingredient of life, that we should grit our teeth and bear it in order to be holy. Both Teachers invited us to transcend suffering into joy.

I had a nice image on that subject pop into my head during this morning's sermon. You are no doubt familiar with Pachelbel's Canon, and remember that it begins with a 'cello line, upon which is built a sucession of melodies and counterpoints. The 'cello line continues through the entire piece, never changing, never varying, regardless of what musical events are happening above and around it. I thought, "joy is like that undetone. We may for the moment not be happy, or be ecstatically happy; we may be in pain or at ease; various sorts of storms and events may be taking place in our lives, but the underlying "'cello line" continues unchanged. It is the reality of God in, with and under everything, unaffected by the fuss and feathers happening on the surface."

The concept Hanh mentions that "suffering and joy are not two" is a re-phrasing of the Heart Sutra:
"Form here is only emptiness; emptiness, only form;
Form is no other than emptiness; emptiness no other than form."

Increasingly, I am seeing what ZF has affirmed before on these boards, that all statements of Truth are indentical regardless of what prophet or Teacher spoke them. Clear away the religion about Jesus and the religion about Buddha and the religion about Krishna and the religion about Allah and you have a very luminous body of Truth left. And that body of truth is identical regardless of which "religion-about" it came from. That is, for me perhaps the most liberating realization of all.

JMO
Hare Rama
Art

"...Joy is the undertone... "I like this very much and think in the same way, the heart is the undertone of the human being. In an essay I read called mystic selflessness (can't remember the author)it spoke of reaching this point of Peace or Joy and it wasn't that the waves of life stopped, but that we have a place in us that is like this undertone you speak of that stays stable. It is explained as the hinge on the door. The door swings too and fro, but all the while the hinge stays steady. I think of it sometimes as the teeter totter, where our intellect and our emotions are the ends swing up and down and the middle (heart) is the balancer. So, as you stated ---every teaching, when stripped of all the dressings is the same core truth, so we too as humans, when stripped of our ego and it's dressings are also this same core truth.
When you write of the sameness of suffering and joy, I also think of the yin/yang symbols with the dot of white in the middle of the black and the dot of black in the middle of the white. I think this is the same idea, at the core of yin, you find yang. They are not really two.

Art wrote …

It is the reality of God in, with and under everything, unaffected by the fuss and feathers happening on the surface.

and

All statements of Truth are identical regardless of what prophet or Teacher spoke them.

Just so! If God is all there is (and if God is Infinite, then God must be all there is, or, if you prefer, all there is, is God) then God must be “in, with, and under everything”, including every word that has ever been thought, considered, written, spoken, or whatever.

I just do not see how it can be otherwise.

As for joy, I agree with you completely, that, as you say, joy is the underlying reality of creation, precisely because creation, like everything else (whatever else there may Be), is the Creation of the Infinite God, and therefore it is itself God, and therefore by definition, joyful.

Thus, we might say, joy is not personal. Joy extends beyond “me”. If Stefan says he is joyful, then the condition he is feeling must extend beyond him to everyone and everything else too, otherwise it is not – in this sense – joy, but rather, let’s say, happiness. Thus, Stefan can be happy that, for example, his dentist reports no cavities, but in that context, his happiness is not extended to others.

So being joyful is different from being happy. Happiness replaces unhappiness. Joy does not replace anything. It simply is. Thus, when the dentist says, “Your teeth are riddled with cavities, and I’m out of anesthetic”, we are unhappy. But then, if he says, “Oops, I’m reading the wrong chart. Your teeth are fine,” we are happy again. Notice, however, that at the moment of our relief, our happiness is not marred even one bit by the inevitable unhappiness of the person whose chart the dentist was reading. Maybe later, we might reflect, and think, “Gee, that poor other fellow” but not at the operative moment, for then our happiness is complete. Thus, happiness is personal.

But joy is underlying, and never interrupted. Distracted by all the stuff which is our lives, we don’t see the underlying joy, but it is there. And when, from time to time, we are able to find a little silence, the joy appears, like a clearing in a fog. “Did you see that?” we exclaim. “Yes, I saw it! Oh, if only it would stay.” Well, of course, it does stay; it is we who move on … to care for our stuff.

I think a case could be made that a fundamental difference between a Teacher and the rest of us is, a Teacher has no stuff which he or she claims as his or her own. A Teacher, having no "me, not you" has no "mine, not yours".

Now, what about suffering. Suffering is physical, isn’t it? We suffer when the body or its health or its stuff is threatened. Ordinary mental suffering (by which I mean, not medical conditions) is physical, too, I think. When someone disagrees with us, do we suffer because our ideas are rejected, or is that we feel factored out of the herd, and therefore physically threatened (more vulnerable to predators)?

So, here too, the opposite of suffering is not joy, but, well-being, comfort, ease.

Anyway, a lot of unnecessary words to say, I agree absolutely!

I agree greatly with both of you Art and Stephen with the idea that Joy is above happy/unhappy...it is not of the dualistic world. This is where I have had trouble since first reading on this forum. We give the attribute of infinite to God and yet this has an opposite, finite. Is it possible that there is a better way to explain God that we are missing? I'm just stumbling over this and throwing it out.

jenjulian, this is a question which I expect every seeker wrestles with. It’s what I call the Sacred Riddle: How is it possible that if God is Infinite and God is all there is, that I am not infinite? And the answer is, “You are infinite, just in a finite sort of way!”

To which our immediate response is, Huh?

Here’s the thing. The Teachers all tell us that, in fact, we are not finite, we only seem that way to ourselves. Indeed, they say, not only are we not finite, we do not exist at all, at least not as we seem to ourselves. "Thou art not thou, thou art He without thou."

Our apparent separate and separative existence depends on our willingness -- (actually, on God's willingness) --- to seem (to Himself) to be finite. If I want to have a “me” that is not “you” (and if I can’t claim that, then what’s the point of being “Stefan”?), then I have to have a limited (finite) body that is “mine, not yours” which lives in a limited, finite world, some small piece of which is "mine" and "not yours".

In Genesis (and undoubtedly similarly in all other scriptures), we are told that God gave Adam and Eve the “knowledge of good and evil” (by way of the apple, the tree, the serpent). Actually, as I suggest in In The Beginning, what the Infinite God did was give to himself the “knowledge of and”, which instantly created the reality you and I think we live in. To the Infinite One, of course, everything is One and the Same One; but the "knowledge of and" creates the appearance of this and that, up and down, tall and short, now and then, here and there, and so on, including of course good and evil, not to mention infinite and finite.

Somewhere else (in Take Off Your Shoes, I think), I coined the term “the prism effect” to describe this phenomenon. Think of the Infinite One as white light. Now, shine it through a prism. Out comes the full spectrum – red, yellow, blue, green, etc. etc. – a whole spectrum of “finite” colors. They appear to be separate and distinct from one another, but in fact they are simply the one color white seen differently. Nothing has changed, the infinite (white) is still infinite (white), and the separate-ness of the colors is just a, what, an effect? And it all depends on where we are looking at the white light from, on this side of the prism or that side of the prism. Consider the prism as the infinite-separating knowledge of and, also known as the ego?

We routinely do the same thing without a second thought, except in the other direction, you might say. In a movie theater or at home with a television set, we observe flat, lifeless images projected onto a flat, lifeless screen, and in our mind we convert them into three dimensional living persons, and so real is the conversion that when one of these flat, lifeless images “dies” (say, in a tear-jerker movie like “Terms of Endearment”) we cry, or when another of these flat, lifeless images ends up happily-ever-after (like in “French Kiss”), we applaud. Flat, lifeless images turned into multi-dimensional, living beings, or infinite being perceived finitely. What's the difference?

Or so it seems to me.

Stephan---I've read the passages from your website that you talk of. I guess I'm looking at it a little differently still. I'm thinking of a discussion I was in once about whether the human mind can even understand what Infinite is. The only way I can is by thinking of numbers that keep going forever, but I don't think this captures what Infinite means. So, what I'm suggesting is that the reason there is a riddle is because when we speak of Infinite, we are still trying to describe God in dualistic terms, Infinite/finite, because that is the best the mind can do. Maybe we are again against the same wall of God is not something that the human mind can capture.

"...when we speak of Infinite, we are still trying to describe God in dualistic terms, Infinite/finite, because that is the best the mind can do. Maybe we are again against the same wall of God is not something that the human mind can capture."

Yes. I find the same, especially when reading some of the stuff written by Hawking and Sagan. The very concept of there being 100 billion galaxies, each of which contains 100 billion stars -- and also 100 billion planets -- boggles the mind, numbs the perception and causes a massive headache. And that is only with reference to the finite universe.

I suspect that the reason we have such a problem "mentalizing" such figures, and such ideas as "no beginning/no end," is that we are trying to perceive these things as outside of ourselves, outside of our minds, and that is not where they are. ACIM, along with every other spiritual discipline, seems to be trying to tell us that that is "upside down" thinking. Nothing we perceive is outside of us. In order for us to think about it, it has been transformed into symbols in the mind, and that is where it remains as we think about it. Both Ernst Cassirer and Suzanne Langer have done extensive writing on this concept, and I think it is valid. We are connected to all we perceive as the wave is connected to the ocean, and once we see that, the headache goes away. I need only be the right wave at the right time and let the ocean take care of its own vastness. Buddha stressed over and over the need to be in the present moment, for the simple reason that neither the past nor the future exist. Only the present moment and the present location has reality, and even the present moment becomes the past if we try to cling to it. Maybe the only question that has meaning is, "Who am I now?" Because if I succeed even instantly in being absolutely in the NOW, I will automatically encompass all past and future, all infinity and all eternity, because all of those things are nowhere else but NOW. I will, as ACIM puts it, "see." God's name is not I WAS or I WILL BE, but simply, I AM.

Well, it makes sense to me...

Hare Rama
Art

This is good stuff.

How about the following as a construct or a model for consideration – on the understanding that we are not disposing of our erasers, not pouring concrete.

Can we think of reality/Reality as consisting of three apparently separate and distinct levels, more or less as follows:

1) What each of us individually calls “the world” or “my life”. Here, we are convinced of the truth of separation, of our separative nature. That is, I am convinced that I am “Stefan” who, to me, is “me”, and that you are “you”, and that the two are unavoidably and indelibly two separate, unique, and different beings, each of which has its own life composed of its own stuff, and that the same is true of everyone and everything else.

With varying degrees of intensity and conviction, at this level we talk about “unity” and “union” and we say things like “we are the world”, but we recognize that, desirable as may be the condition they describe, for the most part they are pretty much just words.

Here, we are in fear much of the time: fear of loneliness, fear of insecurity, fear of pain, fear of death, even fear of God, who is, like everyone and everything else in what each of us calls “my life”, an other. To be sure, we might say that God is “within”, that we and God are one; but mostly at this level, when we think of God, when we pray to God, we perceive God as an other, as other than “me”.

In the language of religion, would we say that here we are “lost”. Maybe there is a better religion-oriented word for this position.

2) “The Real World” – here we are seekers, beginning to understand that “the world” is an illusion. What’s more, we are coming to understand that the source of the illusion is us ourselves, the ego effect or what I have called the prism effect: our perceiving the One as many.

Thus, here we continue to perceive ourselves and everyone and everything else separatively, but now we understand why we are doing so. We may still not fully understand what all of that means, but increasingly we are coming to accept it as true.

Fear is still present, but it is beginning to lose its hold on us.

We are beginning to know – not just believe or hope – that we are one with God, that God is ever-present, thoroughly pervasive, that the “body” of God is ourselves and the world (collectively and individually) – as has been written here, that we are waves on an infinite ocean, waves which are not in any way separate or apart or distinguishable from the ocean.

Our recognition of all of this fluctuates; it has not yet fully anchored. We are frequently distracted – by good times and bad times – from remembering what we now know to be true. Sometimes it is clear as crystal; other times it is fuzzy; and still other times it is absent altogether.

In the language of religion, we might say that here we are “saved”.

As seekers, we spend what appears to us to be a long time here. We read and study and practice and adopt and adapt a lot. At first, we absorb the new stuff like a sponge. Over time, we come to realize that all the books, all the postures, all the chants, are the same, absolutely identical, that every one of them is a product of the very same source, that every one of them is designed to generate the very same result.

Up until now, we have been convinced that the spiritual process was about us, about how hard we worked, how passionately we devoted ourselves to the process. Now, we are coming to realize that, while all of that effort was necessary, it can accomplish nothing. As we are God-being-us, the initiative is all God’s, and it always has been.

With all that we have learned, we begin to come to realize that we know very little. But at the same time, we come to know that it is okay.

We realize that now we have simply to wait, to mature on the vine, to ripen on the branch.

3) Self-Realization, Buddhahood, Christ Consciousness. By Grace and Grace alone, the ego is extinguished, the prism lifted. The event – if event it is – is totally unpredictable. It comes in its own time, on its own terms, in its own way.

Here, we see only One. We know that we are ourselves That and so is everyone and everything else. We cease to exist as “we” or “me”, and recognize that we never ever existed as we thought we did, that there never was a “we” or a “me” or a "they".

There are nowhere any boundaries, no lines of demarcation of any kind.

Our minds are empty. We know whatever we need to know whenever we need to know it.

The question of who God is, what God is, where God is, does not arise.

Then what, Stefan?

Quote: Sometimes it is clear as crystal; other times it is fuzzy; and still other times it is absent altogether.

And sometimes, something seems clear as crystal when it is actually muddy as a California hillside. I find that I am quite capable of convincing myself beyond a doubt of something I think I "ought" to believe, diving into it headfirst, and finding out that "it ain't necessarily so." This can be an impediment to progress on the road to enlightenment. Or is it simply another stage of the journey?

I'm thinking of the last 4-5 years. I can see in retrospect how much effort I put into being a "good fundamentalist Christian," committed to "orthodox" doctrine (i.e., whatever Paul believed). I became rather an expert at proving the oft-quoted definition of faith: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so." It's really hard work trying to squeeze God down into something that fits into a creed (open box: insert God; close box; cease thinking). When I sat down and took stock, asking myself what I really believe, I found it quite different from what I thought I "ought" to believe. Orthodox Christians are followers not so much of Jesus as of Paul, and once one feels free to disagree with Paul one can pay serious attention to what Jesus Himself taught. And it turns out be be the same luminous truth one finds underneath all of the trappings and appurtenances of any and every religion.

I suspect, however, that those years were not wasted: now they simply become part of who and what I am today, "another brick in the wall," so to speak. My life to this point has been like going trick-or-treating in the universe and coming home with a basketful of religion. I know religion is not any better for me than sugar-laden candy, but now I have lots of it at my disposal if I happen to be having a really weak day and need some of it to sustain me.

I agree with what you have written, Stefan. I see the pattern you describe in my own experience. And I see it in ACIM, too. It's a good summary of the way we are. We know not yet what we shall be, but we're getting some good previews. It's quite an adventure.

Hare Rama
Art

Orthodox Christians are followers not so much of Jesus as of Paul

I sat in Biblical courses and thought this exact thought and kept waiting for the professor to address it, the group of Christians in class to address it or the philo students to. No one did, and I thought what is wrong with this picture? I think you have stated it so well here.

and this statement....

and coming home with a basketful of religion

HA!!! that is truly funny!

My former guide, teacher of the triadic universe would love your three levels, Stephen. From what I have experienced, I think you are right on. I also like the way you stated---I'm throwing this out and it is not set in stone. This is in the spirit of how I have been taught to 'unlearn what I've learned.' (which by the way, all of you on this forum and my current guide/teacher are pushing me to my limits on this...)

S Weil wrote alot about waiting, I'm reading DaDaji right now, he talks about waiting too.

I just thought of another thing I was taught. That to start approaching Truth, you have to first become comfortable with doubt. I think the philosopher CS Peirce wrote of this. When I started looking at this, I realized how uncomfortable sitting is doubt is. I think religion is our escape from this uncomfortable spot. It is so refreshing to be in contact with those that are brave enough to embrace and swim in it!

sayso asked "Then what, Stefan?
"

Maybe there isnt a then then?

Yes, Neo, I agree with you, there is no "then", that's exactly right, seems to me.

The problem is always the mind - the mind is the trouble-maker. A questioner, whenever a question is asked, does not want the answer, because that is the end of the mind. A questioner wants to ruminate over the question, and if the question seems to be answered, it asks another question. This is not to be taken as a personal reference to Ihavesaso, since each of us questions all the time, I refer to a questioner in the generic sense.

To stand in the position of not knowing is to stand in the position of non-dualism. To stand in that position, is to be without boundaries, because boundaries are created by mind. To "not know" is to stand in silence, and if extended, which it seldom is, is to be liberated from the mind. To the mind, silence is death. And yet, in deep sleep, we are silent, and we all look forward to that "experience", that time when we are no longer "me", but existence itself. It is only the mind that scares us with fear when we approach silence, and the mind swoops in to fill that silence in an effort to avoid its own demise. We are dominated by the mind, wherease, instead, we should be in charge of the mind. (Bet you the first question that comes to mind! is "who is "we"?")