SM: I don't think I could have written that if I hadn't. My own
spiritual path began when I was 22 and studying comparative literature at
Yale. I had the most painful experience of my life up to that point. I
broke up with my girlfriend after two years together. It was my first
serious love affair and it blew up in my face. For the next year I
couldn't find any way to deal with my pain. It was so intense that even
after another love affair nothing could touch it.
I found myself magnetically attracted to the Book of Job as the one
place in Judaism that deeply addresses the problem of human suffering. I
would read the King James version and hear the music of the voice of God,
who appears to Job out of the whirlwind. God gives a gloriously poetic
speech about the natural world and a beauty beyond good and evil, but
nobody has ever been able to figure out how that speech provides an
answer to Job's suffering. It seems to be the most dazzling nonanswer of
an answer possible. Yet I felt whoever had written this had had some
experience I was desperate for. I decided to learn Hebrew in order to go
back to the original and enter that experience completely.
Knowing Hebrew allowed me to get closer to the dark music of the
passages, but not an inch closer to understanding the answer. I'd speak
to famous rabbis and ask them about suffering, but nobody had a due. Then
a friend of mine said, "Why don't you come to Rhode Island and meet this
guy who's supposedly a Zen master who came to America six months ago. He
has no money, doesn't know English, and he's repairing washing machines
in a laundry. I don't know if he's a Zen master, but he has very strange
eyes." So I went to this very funky apartment in Providence and walked
into the kitchen of a man dressed in an undershirt and a sailor's cap, of
all things. I looked into his eyes and I was absolutely certain that he
knew what I needed to know and that if I penetrated far enough into his
eyes, I'd come to the place where I knew, too. So I stayed with him and
did nothing but practice Zen. A year later I found myself in the center
of that whirlwind. I felt I was standing in the place from which God's
answer to Job arose, and I understood that there is absolute justice in
the universe. Anyone who doesn't understand that cannot fully understand
what God is.
PT: What do you mean by absolute justice? Are you saying a thief
who steals a wallet will get his comeuppance?
SM: It's not a moral tally of right and wrong, of reward and
punishment. That view can eventually become very moralistic and punitive.
Justice happens on a far deeper level. When you can hold the greatest
pain and the greatest cruelty of your life with grace and surrender, then
everything becomes light. Light both in the sense of not weighty and in
the sense of the ultimate intelligence of the universe, which some call
God or Tao.
PT: That's a pretty thought, but how does it explain your vision of
absolute justice?
SM: I'm talking about what happens at unconscious levels, where the
root of all experience lies. When people are in great pain they usually
ask, "Why me?" Almost always, they really don't want to know the answer.
They would be scared by it. But in order to transform pain, you need to
become aware of its source. Then you can say, "Oh, this is why I'm stuck
here." And you can change it. My experience in Zen training, where all my
doubts vanished and everything was absolutely clear, is a classic one.
But it's only the first step. What's important is how you integrate that
experience, and how fully you work through your own neurotic
material.
I came to spiritual practice with enormous neurotic material and
had to go through a number of demanding hundred-day solitary meditation
retreats with four hours of sleep each night. That was what was required
for the deep material to float up, very excruciatingly, into
consciousness before it could be transformed.
Even then it can take years. Not long after my wife and I got
together [in 1977] she very kindly began to point out that my money karma
was totally messed up. Essentially I didn't want anything to do with it.
For a dozen years I'd been living on $3,000 a year. She kept pointing out
that aversion is the flip side of desire, and that my aversion to money
was just as unhealthy as greed. I reluctantly began to let that message
in and to work toward changing. It was extremely painful, but I finally
got to the root of it. I had equated earning money with male distance and
emotional absence. When I disentangled the two, I could see that money
was simply energy. If my books were ever going to be accepted by the
public I would need the grace to receive what came with their
sale.
Though I'd gotten to the root of my problem, nothing changed that
year, or the next. In 1986, I accompanied my wife on a hundred-day
meditation retreat, and the insights I gained ultimately inspired me to
do a new, very free translation of the Tao Te Ching with my own
commentary. The book just took off, had huge sales, and the
transformation of my money karma was complete.
PT: In The Gospel According to Jesus you portray Jesus as an
enlightened man, not a god; a brilliant teacher who would have been
appalled at the things later said and done in his name.
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