Good Friday

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. ~ Rene Descartes

Those who know me may have learned that Good Friday is special to me. Like my favorite holiday. It's not the death that I celebrate because it's often excruciating, but the necessity of the death to bring about the profound change it promises. An addict hitting their rock bottom. The faithful in their deep spiritual crisis. The tragedy that shakes your sensibilities hard enough that the core is finally laid bare and able to actualize. Salvation, however it looks, takes some sort of death, even if it's to the ways of thinking we've held dear.

Having been raised Catholic, the language of Christianity is my baseline for talking about relationship with the divine. But as a science oriented person, I like to translate it into more general terms. As powerful as faith is and as much as it offers adherents, it's a metaphor and surrogate for the reality that's so hard for the human mind to grasp. Like advanced calculus, the longer you spend with it and the deeper you go, the more we understand the complex relationship we each hold with the universe. And taking ourselves out of the matrix constructed for us by society since the onset of our first coherent thoughts needs as much undoing as the original indoctrination. And the gateway is identity.

You've seen the NOTW stickers on the back of cars. And the "world" that it refers to is both the physical realm in which our minds find themselves, and the constructed world of human society that very few of us ever step out of. Our original, innate tendency is to identify with what's in our world. The things, the people, the ideas. We are boys, Americans, doctors, students, etc. To some extent, those identities are as real as we believe they are. And there's nothing wrong with that, but for every identity we assume, and however deeply we choose to identify with them, we are less of our deeper, more fundamental nature as the existential beings that we are at our core. Our soul, to use a common term as a near cognate for my purposes here, has none of these identities.

But for most of us, it's disorienting out there, just you and your universe. We're used to the comfort and familiarity of this assumed belief system -- how could we not be. Like a city boy in the middle of the woods for the first time, none of the familiar landmarks, no electronic or structured forms of communications, no roads or buildings, no other humans...just you and your world. Now take yourself out of the world altogether, and it's you and your quiet self. And the last step, leaving your body. Not literally because our consciousness is one with our nervous system, but un-hitching our sense of who we are in our most fundamental form from the color of our skin and hair, the size of our arms, the pain in our joints. Those, like the earth itself, are our habitat, it is not US. But the more time we spend communing alone, just you and your maker, the more comfortable and the greater ken we develop for it. The idea of constant prayer starts to make sense. (Not an ego prayer, asking favor from God, but the simple act of surrendering this moment to quiet communion.)

So there are a couple pretty amazing things that happen when we decouple from the whole system shebang, the belief system, the dependence on our senses and history. First, we are left with that profound and mystical something that makes people want to be monks, to share the experience to the point of founding religions to honor it. I think it's that experience that Buddha and Jesus and any number of crazies over the centuries have wanted to share with the world.

Now, I don't believe that this state is preferential in an absolute sense. It's been called Nirvana, Enlightenment, The Kingdom of Heaven* Living with a secular center is fine and normal. But secondly, when viewed from that decoupled state, much of Jesus' teachings come into clarity. The rich man getting into heaven -- eye of a needle? Being rich, deeply invested in wealth, it's a lot harder to give that all up than for the desperately poor with less too lose. The comforts of the world are a little addictive. The only way is to take up your cross and follow me . . ., the parable of the pearl. Clear. The pearl is this state of being, and once you've discovered it, there is nothing more important than being able to access that state of mind.

But what holds you to the world is your habit of identifying with things of this world. Your work, your accomplishments, your family, your country, your duty, your religious obligations. The religion was designed to bring you closer to God, and when you identify with the Dogma instead of the target of the Dogma (oneness with the spirit), you miss the point, and again, that might be the closest some people can ever get. But the beauty of religious rite and ceremony, when seen as habits to keep one close to God, to take you out of the rest of the seductive fruits of the social and normal matrix, become purposeful and hold meaning. (In their most corrupt, they are used to separate us from others and exclude rather than bring us together**)

Good Friday is the acknowledgement that the Kingdom of God is available to us all, but takes the ultimate sacrifice: putting worldly things (all the tings we are attached to) second and our relationship with the holy, first. The good things in our lives are merely physical reflections of the goodness of that connection with the oneness that is everything. When we appreciate them as such, we are open to both: the simple and fleeting pleasures of this world as symbols only, and to get the big prize, we have to be fully willing to give them up at any moment. But in my experience, that makes them all the sweeter in the moment, we can really appreciate each moment we are allowed to commune with the worldly pleasures because we are not attaching to them having to be in our lives in the future. Which goes for everything from our eyesight to the taste of a luscious slab of prime rib and a caramel sundae to the tender kisses of our babies. Those will, one day, be only memories, but they were really only little reminders that being alive in the universe and one with everything is the gift. In my experience, with our attachment being to our relationship with the infinite, the nature of pain also changes. "God comes to the hungry in the form of food." ~ Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)

A curious paradox: It's through faith and belief and practice of a religion that one is supposed to reach the Kingdom of God. For me, though, it was through studying my own general learning, personal experience, people in my life, and a few severe trials and hardships that I found what was clearly the state of being referred to by the Bible as the Kingdom of God, and that, then, led me to an understanding of both the Biblical narrative and the beauty and efficacy of the religious ceremony that comprises the faith of my upbringing.

*I believe the biblical references to Kingdom of God, Heaven and other renditions of that thing are really this state, and because the idea is so foreign to most, and because it's so life-changing when experienced, that it was relegated to an afterlife proposition in the major world religions. The idea that heaven is really just that state of oneness with the infinite (or Divine, or the Creator, or the universe, or God) in the here and now is not only more powerful to me, but it brings the parables alive as very near metaphors, accessible to anyone at any time. The crucifixion as a metaphor for dying of this world is literally removing the center and driver of your consciousness (your ego and attention) from the worldly world, and letting it abide in the stark, deep reality of the moment without the judgments stemming from your learned expectations and values. There ARE values down there, but they're not yours. They are of the very fabric of the universe, or the great abyss, or loving bosom of God. Call it what you will, conceive it however your best comprehensions allows you, we are looking at the same state of being. This is the Rome that all roads lead to. Some may only experience it death.

** I listened to Radio Lab tonight and a show that highlighted the arbitrary notion of identity, specifically the separation of the Sunni and Shiite muslims, different sects that, in some places, use their supposed differences to kill one another (doubly ironically, because religions are to support love and bring us all closer to God, and because Islam means Peace/Surrender). It is the basic idea of identity that leads people to exclude, subtly or absolutely by hate and murder, others. Less identity, less exclusion. Or, should I say, the broader the identity, the greater the in-group! So someone who identifies as human gets to love the whole human race as being one with them. Someone who identifies as one with God and everything, gets to love all things, which IS, in fact, the state of mind one feels when in the Kingdom of God. There's could be a little bit of a chicken and egg scenario playing itself out here. Is it the feelings of love for all things that expands identity (or shrinks it?) to encompass everything, or is it the disposal of identity that allows the feelings of love to flow out to everything?