Two of the most meaningful books I’ve ever read are Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Living Buddha Living Christ. I discovered Mysticism the summer after I graduated from High School, when a friend gave me a copy after I had an unsettling, but deeply spiritual, dream (I recount this story in my book Unteachable Lessons).
Underhill initiated me into the mystical tradition within Christianity (although she also threw in a few non-Christian mystics as well, from Pagans like Plotinus to Sufis like Rumi). She gave me a language for my own impossible-to-put-into-words experience of the mystery we call “God” and introduced me to so many of the great mystical writers who I continue to cherish to this day: folks like Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, Meister Eckhart, John Ruusbroec, and so many others.
Here’s a quote that really captures Underhill’s wisdom: that mysticism is more than just a theory, but an embodied, experiential reality:
Mysticism, in its pure form, is the science of ultimates, the science of union with the Absolute, and nothing else, and that the mystic is the person who attains to this union, not the person who talks about it. Not to know about, but to Be, is the mark of the real initiate.
Sixteen years or so after discovering Evelyn Underhill, another friend in a different city suggested I read Living Buddha Living Christ. It was a time in my life when I had spent a number of years exploring Neopagan spirituality, and knew I was interested in Buddhism, but I remained deeply in love with the western mystical tradition that Underhill represented. I didn’t know how to put all those pieces together, and barely had anyone in my life with whom I could talk about such things. So along comes Thich Nhat Hanh. It was the first of his books that I read, although certainly not the last. Unlike Evelyn Underhill’s rather intellectual approach to her subject, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote straight from the heart, not bothering with all the philosophical and theological arguments that can e bandied about to affirm (or deny) a bond between the two great world teachers. Here’s just one example of the crystalline clarity of his deeply compassionate vision:
We can touch the living Buddha. We can also touch the living Christ. When we see someone overflowing with love and understanding, someone who is keenly aware of what is going on, we know that they are very close to the Buddha and to Jesus Christ.
Obviously, there have been many books that have made an impact on my spiritual life; a few others that come to mind include Margot Adler’s Drawing Down The Moon, Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything, Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Heart of Centering Prayer, Ram Dass’s Be Here Now, and (for all its many flaws) the anonymous Meditations on the Tarot. And that’s just a start — this list doesn’t even begin to include the great mystical classics of previous centuries! But I think Evelyn Underhill and Thich Nhat Hanh remain two of the most important books in my journey, because they represent the two vectors of my own spiritual path: mysticism and interspirituality.
I wrote The Big Book of Christian Mysticism, in part, as a love letter and thank you note to Evelyn Underhill. So I was wondering the other day, if I were to write a similar “thank you” book in response to Thich Nhat Hanh, what would I want to call it? Naturally, I could just echo his book with a title like “Joyful Buddha, Healing Christ” — embodying two qualities that I believe belong to both of these wisdom teachers, but of Jesus has a particular reputation as a healer, while so many artistic depictions of the Buddha show him smiling or even laughing: hence, joyful.
But I realized I couldn’t stop there. For me, my love for western wisdom is encapsulated in my appreciation of Jesus and mysticism, while my love for eastern wisdom is signified by the Buddha and meditation. But I also have a long appreciation for indigenous, shamanic and pagan spiritualities. And those traditions all seem to have a common appreciation for spirituality as embodied and earthy. and holding all this together: eastern, western, and primal traditions of wisdom — is the heart, increasingly recognized even by western science as a center of intuition, knowing and even cognition that may not have the same kind of neurological density as the brain, but serves as our embodied “center” for deep wisdom at a level beyond mere language and logic.
So suddenly my title is up to five elements: “Joyful Buddha, Healing Christ, Singing Heart, Thriving Body, Living Earth” — whew!
It may not work as a real title for an actual book, but now I was on a roll. Once we weave together the compassionate wisdom of both Jesus and Buddha with the deep knowing of the embodied heart and the stable foundation of the good earth, the natural question (at least for me) is: how do we live such wisdom? And so I found four other principles emerged: “All are One, That You Are, Love is Real, God is Love.”
- All Are One: the experiential reality of mystical non-duality: we are not separate from God, nor are we separate from one another. The wisdom of deep silence reveals to us that we are all related, and we are all indeed one.
- That You Are: this classic affirmation from the Chandogya Upanishad is the foundational expression of mystical union or radical non-duality: oneness is not just some abstract philosophical principle, it is a lived experiential fact. All things are one with God, and that you are as well: right here and right now.
- Love is Real: What do we believe is the moral principle that organizes all things: is it love, or is it power? We know what the likes of Machiavelli and Nietzsche would say — and frankly, the cynicism that thinks love is not real but only power exists is far too prevalent in our culture today. Love understands that sometimes powerlessness is the way to truth, to healing, and to life. But power will never understand this, and to anyone whose life is only about power, love seems to be an illusion: powerlessness, vulnerability, and gentleness are rejected merely as the weak absence of power. But if we give our lives to love, we know that love is real, and we know that love gives us a power that is deeper and more real than the dualism of power and weakness.
- God is Love: What does it mean to believe in God? Talk about a question with endless possible ways to answer! But I always go back to the one time in the Bible when God is defined: “God is love.” When we affirm love, we affirm God. Of course, whenever we try to make God into anything other than love: the God of wrath, the God of punishment, the God of fear — we reduce God into an idol of power. Only the God who is love — vulnerable, gentle, yielding, generous love — is truly God, and truly real.
So there you have my admittedly long-winded response to Living Buddha, Living Christ:
“Joyful Buddha, Healing Christ, Singing Heart, Thriving Body, Living Earth, All Are One, That You Are, Love is Real, God is Love.”
It may not be great poetry, but it’s a way to integrate mysticism and interspirituality. And that’s good enough for me.
