The mind can be said to have four characteristics (look at your own mind right now to see this). One, it is a Mirror; it reflects whatever is placed in front of it. Second, it is the Sky; it is a spacious opening or clearing through which thoughts and feelings and experiences come and go like clouds. Third, the mind is Light; it illuminates whatever it touches just like how the sunlight illuminates whatever it touches. Fourth, the mind is Awake or is Wakefulness; it is awake to whatever is present.
Bringing attention to any one of those characteristics involves a very real kind of liberation. For any one of those qualities--Mirror, Sky, Light, and Wakefulness--contains extraordinary qualities that are normally overlooked in everyday experience. Qualities that are unmoving, unchanging, spontaneous, and mysterious. They are also qualities of buddhas, and they are as easy to spot as the surface of the mirror is to spot in the bathroom. Just look past or within the objects and see clearly the nature of mind.
As Gautama Buddha pointed out, “We are concerned too much perhaps with what we are conscious of, and forget the miracle of consciousness itself.” We see all these objects in the mirror, including our own self, but forget to acknowledge the surface of the mirror.
“Although philosophies come and go, and intellectual answers rise and fall, they are transient, distracting, and do not lead to any kind of satisfactory or worthwhile understanding. Rather, genuine knowledge and its resulting liberation arise from simply observing the mind and body and the energy of which they are composed to identify the mirror condition beneath.” Namkhai Norbu
So, can we relate that to Christian mysticism?
Meister Eckhart, the great Catholic mystic alive in the 13th century, describes three distinct stages on the Christian path. He says: "First, “Be asleep to all things”: that means ignore time, creatures, and images. And then you can perceive what God works in you…Second: “Concern yourself with all things.” This has three meanings. That means, first, seize God in all things, for God is in all things. The second meaning is: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” If you love one human being more than another, that is wrong. If you love your father and mother more than another human being, that is wrong. And if you love your own happiness more than another’s, that is also wrong. The third meaning is this: Love God in all things equally. For God is equally near to all creatures. And among all these creatures God does not love any one more than any other. God is all and is one. All things become nothing but God."
When I first read that I was immediately shocked at the similarities between Eckhart's three stages in Christianity, (namely: be asleep to all things, be concerned with all things, then see god as all things) and the three main stages of Buddhism: the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana. In Buddhism, the stages are first the path to formless nirvana or the formless awareness within, then the path of compassion and the bodhisattva, and then it is the path of Tanta or a nondual embrace and delight of the world, seen as identical to emptiness, and as a mysterious miracle. This third stage also now recognizes all forms as identical to the emptiness or the timeless, radiant Spirit.
This last stage is also known as completely uniting wisdom and compassion. In Buddhism, wisdom is the knowledge that behind the “many forms” is the “one emptiness.” Very wise. Behind the world of shifting, impermanent form is the vast, empty formless. Wisdom sees that beyond and within the seemingly separate phenomena and the mental objects lies the one Light, the “self-luminosity of Being.” It sees that form is actually emptiness, is actually dream.
And when Wisdom really sees this truth, that the Many is the One, Compassion sees that the One is the Many, that the One Being or Emptiness or Spirit is expressed equally and fully in each and every being, (like an ocean imminent to its many, real waves) so that each is treated as the One, as the Spirit, as the Divine. This is true compassion, the compassion Eckhart points to, for it does not segregate. Nor does it care about others in a kind of condescending way like pity. Rather, this mind cares in a fully embracing and honoring way because it sees each being, exactly as it is, as a perfect expression of Spirit, of the ocean of Emptiness, of the Self.
Wisdom sees that form is emptiness. Compassion sees that emptiness is form. Wisdom and Compassion united is Enlightenment. Wisdom is also considered the Male element, and Compassion is the female, and in the art of Tantra, they erotically embrace and fuck to infinity.
I love the 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s definition of compassion:
“The sort of act that I am here discussing is…compassion, which is to say: immediate participation, released from all other considerations, first, to the pain of another, and then, in the alleviation or termination of that pain, which alone is the true, ground of all autonomous righteousness and of all true human love. An act can be said to have genuine more worth only in so far as it stems from the Source (the common Self); and conversely, an act from any other source has none. The weal and woe of another comes to lie directly in my heart in exactly the same way—though not always to the same degree—as otherwise only my own would lie, as soon as this sentiment of compassion is aroused, and therewith, the difference between him and me is no longer absolute. And this really is amazing—even mysterious.”
So, it seems to me, that first you celebrate and sing songs of praise and worship to the One, the Spirit, the Single Being of beings, the Transcendental Love and Light and Truth. Then, upon direct experience, you see that the One manifests in and as all things, so that now a love for the many bursts into bloom. So first, as Jesus put it, you Love the Lord (the one beyond the many). Then, you love everyone as an expression of the One. In fact, the way you actually love the One is to love the many. An interesting paradox. We could say that as you ascend into direct union with the one reality, you embrace more and more things. The One is the only presence able to embrace everything equally. Abide as the One, embrace the Many. Embrace the many, and see yourself ascend into the One Overmind and Godhead. Abide as Heaven, embrace the Earth. Abide as Emptiness and embrace all Forms. So, as your loving embrace descends more and more to forgive and care for more and more of yourself and your environment and your fellow sentient beings, your identity or sense of self ascends higher and wider to embrace more space and more light and more perspectives and more freedom and more room. More room for all your dream friends to come in and dance.
Stay with yourself. Be with all your insecurities, rehearsed personalities, shame infested loneliness, lust, anger, hatred, jealousy, greed…be with all your thoughts and feelings fully. Befriend them, invite them in, “and line them up for a family photograph.” as Ram Das would say. Only then can you transcend them or go beyond them. And only then can you be with other people fully, inviting them in for a family photo, and giving them an opportunity to befriend all aspects of themselves. What a great gift we can be to each other.
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