|
Scripture
9His wife said to him, "Are you still trying to maintain your integrity? Curse God and die." 10But Job replied, "You talk like a godless woman. Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?" So in all this, Job said nothing wrong. (Job 2, NLT)
Commentary
Job suffered immensely, for God allowed the satan to test him, taking away practically everything dear to Job and leaving Job with a serious skin disorder. Job was ugly and disdained, but more, he was esteemed by others as cursed for his sin. His wife gave him a way out, which amounted to God-assisted-suicide. Job responded with a profound theological insight: Should we accept only good from the hand of God and never anything bad? That word bad can be rendered from the Hebrew “harmful, hurtful, disastrous, evil.”
Job including both the “good” and “evil” in the Providence of God provides an introduction to the practicality of the Nondual in our daily lives. Surely, we face, daily, both “good” and “evil,” both within and outside.
Bernard Glassman and Rick Fields, in Instructions to the Cook, a book based on an ancient Japanese treatise of the same title, writes, “Cooking, like life, is about transformation.” But how is cooking about transformation? Well, cooking is not only about transformation, cooking is about the practice of the Nondual. How is that so?
Sadly, many persons are brought up into a dualism that leads them into being a divided self. They see the world as in fragmentation between “good” and “evil,” “right” and “wrong,” “true” and “untrue,” “beautiful” and “ugly,” “insightful” and “ignorant,” … In the narrative of the Garden of Eden, this consciousness is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; that is, dualism. The Genesis narrative shows the recurrent experience of dualism as passed generation to generation. We, according to that story, which agrees with other religious stories over many centuries and throughout the world, have lost our primal simplicity, which entails the realization of the oneness of all.
Ironically, the cross of Christ, being the center of the opposing directions, vertical and horizontal, speaks of the death that ushers us into a Resurrection into the consciousness before dualism and into what the New Testament calls salvation, wellness, or wholeness. Through this mystical entrance into the cosmic sacrifice of Christ, we enter into the Nondual.
|
|
Glassman and Fields write, “The accomplished Zen cook is something of an alchemist. He or she can transform poisons into virtues.” Origen, one of the Early Church Fathers, likewise declared that even Satan would be converted to God. Mystically, that is saying that the worst harmfulness will be transformed into the most profound helpfulness: the Good. That would be somewhat like saying an Adolph Hitler will be transformed into a Teresa of Calcutta.
When we see with a single eye, we begin to notice where to find the ingredients for our spiritual formation, including our Practice. “We simply open our eyes and look around us,” observes Glassman and Fields. And what ingredients do we see? … our jobs, our relationships, our neuroses, our psychoses, our mistakes, our successes, our love, our family, our good memories, our bad memories, our hopes, our fears, our wealth or poverty, our friends or foes, sickness or health …. Essentially, there is not a single thing a part of you, within your internal or external environment, not useable toward your transformation.
Glassman and Fields, however, note a common problem, leading to failure to use these ingredients. “We usually,” they note, “create our own boundaries, our own small view, our own territory, and that’s the only place we look.” But, “with practice, our territory expands, and all the objects of the world become our ingredients.” Indeed, “every aspect of life is an ingredient of the supreme meal.” This would be like a wise Cook never throwing any ingredient from the kitchen but finding some way to integrate it with other ingredients into a meal.
This Nondual way we learn in meditation. We enter meditative prayer and our anger at someone arises, then, an overwhelming love for another person arises. During one meditation we are captured by fear, in another meditation we are so drowsy that we go to sleep, snoring like thunder. In meditation we might experience deep peace and, then, deep disturbance. One day we might be impatient and the forty minutes of prayer seems like much longer, the next day the forty minutes might seem like a few minutes of deeply, satisfying relaxation. One day we might rejoice to hear the clock ring to note the end of the sit, the next day we might be saddened to have to leave our sit to get ready for work. We experience polarities in meditation, but all these are the ingredients of transformation, if we use them, wisely.
Continued... |
