Saying For Today: So, you - like everyone else - are before religion, ethnicity, race, color, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, race, color, ...
Rose of Gratitude
Inn Along the Way/Chapman Farm; Damariscotta, ME
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From the point of view of Mother Earth, poison oak and weeds are as wonderful as chrysanthemum or rosemary.
*Thich Nhat Hanh. The Other Shore.
Love all others as you love yourself.
*Gospel of Mark 12.31
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I looked at the note, written quickly, and initially thought I had miswritten. The message to a fellow chaplain about a patient included "she is dear soul." I thought of how I would properly have written "... a dear soul."
Musing on this writing error, I realized it said something profound, even if grammatically incorrect. I recalled how my work had addressed this truth over many years: we are not individual souls - individuality has to do with personality - we are one soul. I had been raised on the teaching that each of us has a soul inside us - meaning, inside the body. But, instead, she is dear soul, and so are you and you and you, and everyone else, too.
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Years later, I again sent an unconventional message, for it contained a like apparent mistake as the one above. After an online meeting with a fellow chaplain, I sent a note. After sending it, I read over it. The message began, "enjoyed ! thanks for you presence". Correct grammar would have "your" as a possessive form. Yet, again, I realized a deeper connotation. We do not have a presence. Why? We are the presence, or we are presence. That day, my colleague had shared not merely his presence with me, he had shared presence with me.
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Hence, our True Self is without the qualities by which we differentiate ourselves from others. Philosophically, those qualities are called "accidents" in the sense of being relative. I often call these accidents decorations.
All forms of prejudice are based not on who others are but on what they are seen to be, what they appear to be to someone else. Therefore, the cause of the prejudice is in the mind, and it is never in the one being esteemed as of less worth, bad, or evil for being different. The True Self celebrates differences among us, while fear of those differences is taught directly and indirectly.
Accompanying ignorance at the root of prejudice is the arising of fear. One fears what appears different from what she is.
But back to ignorance. I will share a time when I acted in ignorance, a false view my culture and religion taught me. In this lack of insight, I acted prejudicially against someone.
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I, from Georgia, was a pastor in a small Southern Baptist church in Mississippi. At the time, I was a seminary student in New Orleans and serving this congregation on weekends. I was in my late 20s. I had been raised in religious fundamentalism, and that is about all the religion I knew.
A couple began attending our Sunday worship meetings. They were of an even more conservative sect called Missionary Baptist. One weekend, they met me at the church building. They informed me their son was gay. They wanted me to speak with him. They had tried to get him to see the error of his way - as they understood it - and had failed. Would I try? I agreed.
At the appointment time, the young man, about age 17, came to the sanctuary. He appeared relaxed in my presence. He knew the purpose of our meeting. I spoke with him about his being gay. I used the Bible to point out his error and its consequences, as would almost any pastor in the ultra-conservative sect. Of course, this use of the Bible was based on the interpretation of the passage taught me. Also, it was founded on the teaching that the Christian Bible was infallible. The scripture, likewise, came from writing ascribed to a follower of Jesus, not Jesus himself (many Christians might be surprised to know Jesus never addressed the matter of persons having diverse sexual orientations, as far as we know ... interesting ... but he did have a lot to say of the evil of prejudice, and he is attributed with saying, "Love others as you love yourselves.").
From socially-sanctioned ignorance, taught me from a small child, I used one passage in the Bible to condemn this young man to eternal damnation, if he did not turn from his sexual sin. He looked downcast, as he sat before me. He got up soon and left after affirming he could not change. Basically, I had just given this guy his ticket to hell for being what he did not choose to be and could not not be.
I wrote of this incident several years ago. For over 30 years, I never had shared about it with a single person. When writing about it on this site, I felt shame. I grieved for having mistreated this man in the way I did. Now, I do not feel that shame. Possibly, writing it was a confession needed for me to forgive myself for what I did in ignorance long ago. Anyway, it felt like a cleansing of this gross injustice. If I knew how to contact this man, I would. I would express how wrong I was and ask his forgiveness, but I have lost contact with him and do not even recall his name. That day was the last day I saw him. Ironically, he was an outcast, and I, later, became an outcast, rejected due to my opening to truth outside the boundaries of the sect's teachings.
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I did not only wrong this man, I wronged myself and everyone. Zen teacher, Brad Warner, begins Chapter 1 of his book, The Other Side of Nothing, with, "YOU ARE THE universe, but you keep punching yourself in the face. So stop doing that." Later, he writes ...
To act unethically is effectively the same as punching myself in the face. Anything unethical I do to someone or something else, I am really only doing to myself. What's more, anything unethical I do to someone or something else, I am really doing to the entire universe.
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Above, I wrote "myself and everyone." This realization arises from nondual awareness. The man I was speaking to about being gay is a fellow pearl. What is that? In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna speaks to Arjuna, saying, "O Arjuna! Nothing is higher than me; all is strung upon Me as rows of pearls upon a thread" (7:7). We are each a manifestation of one Reality, one Beloved. Essentially, there is no straight or gay pearls, white or black or red or yellow or brown pearls, no East or West pearls, no righteous or unrighteous pearls, ... And whatever we do to one pearl, we do to all pearls, for we are each the stuff of divinity, so to speak.
One of my early remembrances, when oneness began dawning on me, helped me make sense of this oneness. The image of my mom making cookies arose. I recall her taking the big ball of dough, dipping her hands into it, and placing it all together on a tray. She would, then, take individual pieces of metal, shaped in diverse animal shapes, and press them down into the nondescript dough. Soon, out of that one dough would be dough animals ready to be put in the oven. As a small child, I was fascinated with this process of creating individual animal cookies. We are individual animal cookies, but we are the dough, too. That is a simple - even if simplistic - metaphor for oneness.
Yet, it is one thing to know we are one, another to know we are one, and another thing to act like we are one. The teaching of oneness, as an idea, prepares us to realize it as an embodied awareness. Oneness is a popular idea in the spiritual marketplace. Yet, we can easily speak of oneness as though it is a something we are talking about; in doing this, oneness remains theoretical. So, I, the subject, am speaking of oneness, the object. That is okay. That is a beginning to realizing the object as subject, so there is only one subject. In a sense, that is what oneness means: everything is the subject. Oneness is not a something you can point to other than you, or outside you. There is no outside. Oneness is you, me, everyone, and everything. All actual meeting is this one meeting this one.
Consequently, one never meets anyone other than herself. Buddhism refers to this as we each being mirrors for each other. We are these mirrors, for we are each other. I is we; we is I. So, you - like everyone else - are before religion, ethnicity, race, color, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, race, color, ... This is so, even as treeness is before oak, pine, apple, spruce, ... Hence, that day, years ago in the church in Mississippi, I was condemning myself to hell - in Warner's words, I was slapping myself in my own face.
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We can no longer base our relationships on the mind, for the mind divides us. The mind interprets differences as absolute: he is absolutely gay, she is absolutely black, they are absolutely Muslims, I am absolutely a democrat, my group is absolutely Christians, ... Such thinking is reductionistic, reducing the other and, so, reducing ourselves. To the extent you deprive someone else of wholeness, you deny yourself - you whittle away a piece of yourself.
Some spiritual contemplatives have spoken of the eyes of the heart. Buddhists refer to this as prajna, or wisdom, insight. The heart is our oneness. The heart only sees oneness, for it only sees itself.
Likely, all of us have brought harm to others and ourselves through injustice and prejudice. Such discrimination is rampant. How do we change this? The change begins with us each. We need to own how we have acted prejudicially - no excuses. When, also, we see a single other to be one with us, we each are part of the change. We can start now and restart however many times we need to reset how we see and treat one person at a time. Our prejudices can be deeply rooted, even unconsciously so, but any progress toward right view is a transforming step for the good of us all. We will find that by seeing more from the heart, we come to see more how precious and lovable we are, too. When I see you as belonging, I see myself as belonging. Hence, how I see others is central to acting ethically, for we treat others based largely on how we see them.
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A meeting with the Sage gives us a good starting point for the ethic of equality ...
A follower spoke to the Sage, "I feel deeply the truth of what you often teach us - that we are all one. But that is not how I truly see others. I see others as objects mostly, only rarely getting a brief glimpse of this oneness. Where might I begin to realize this oneness always?" Replied the Sage, "Begin by acting like you already realize it always. You can act like it, for it is so, whether you realize it or not."
*Bhagavad Gita: Annotated and Explained. Ed. Andrew Harvey. Trans. Shri Purohit Swami. Annot. Kendra Cossen Burroughs.
*Use of photography is allowed accompanied by credit given to Brian K. Wilcox, and title and place of photograph.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
