This by Michael Gungor

Author:Michael Gungor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roundtree Press
Published: 2019-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

7. Forgetting the Ox

THE FOURTH NOBLE TRUTH

The Way

Becoming Free

Practicing Being

Telling Good Stories

THIS Is God

THIS Is Awareness

Maui (2017)

THIS Is Love

The Problem of Evil

Free to Suffer

Becoming Free

“Truly I tell you, unless someone is born again, they cannot see the kingdom of God.”

—JESUS

Enlightenment. Nirvana. Moksha. Freedom. Realization. Salvation. Union. Satori. Samadhi. The Kingdom of Heaven. Call it what you like, but it’s real and almost entirely missing from the Western imagination. The language isn’t missing—I grew up talking about salvation all the time. We were not only “saved,” meaning that we were on God’s good side and the ones who would get to dwell with him for all eternity, but we were “being saved” as well. This meant that we were being purified and made more like Christ while we awaited his final return. In other words, salvation was always about something other than THIS. We would be fully saved someday if . . .

In the same way, people in the West have taken the word enlightenment and used it in ways that the ancient traditions never intended. For a Hindu person, to be enlightened is to have seen through the illusion of separateness and experienced union with the divine. Immanuel Kant’s famous essay “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” more accurately defines enlightenment in the eyes of Western individualism—thinking for oneself rather than simply following another’s direction. In more contemporary language, the term woke, a popular slang word used to denote someone who is awake or enlightened, has nothing to do with waking up to the nondual nature of ultimate reality, but instead is about becoming more aware of the important, relative truths of social and racial justice. Ancient terms like awake or enlightened are so distant from our collective consciousness in the West, that we can’t even begin to distinguish the difference between the unity of ultimate reality that transcends story and the particulars of the relative reality of our stories. In other words, we’ve fundamentally lost sight of our own seeing.

Even before my spa episode, as a “progressive Christian,” words like “salvation” or the “Kingdom of God” had become weak clichés in my ears. They were essentially metaphors for healthy living, and the sort of language that Jesus would use, like needing to be “born again,” had frankly become a little melodramatic. Jesus went around talking about how the sort of life he was inviting us into would cost us everything. It was like a pearl of great price for which you had to sell all of your possessions. Being born again required surrendering your life, even to death. This language made more sense when I was a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, where I might have to become a martyr in the end-times while battling the antichrist or something. But after becoming “enlightened” to Western secular individualism and progressive ideologies that no longer interpreted the Bible literally, all of this “you must be born again” nonsense was a bit extreme and embarrassing.

And then I took magic mushrooms and was born again.

And

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