Kuan Yin stops by

Last year somehow Ti Kuan Yin Tea from Prince of Peace became my favorite tea, and then, in the fall, a Chinese student showed up for my Sunday afternoon Course group at St. Helena's church. She had just emigrated from China and was studying English at Columbia University. She had inquired from the university if they taught classes in A Course In Miracles, based on the ostensible logic that Helen and Bill had been professors at Columbia-Presbyterian, but evidently, much to her surprise, the Columbia did not. Eventually, she found my class in the Bronx, which suited her schedule.

About nine months before I met her, in the fall of 2016, she had started studying the Course in Chinese, and she came equipped with a Chinese and an English version of the Course. Early on, she stumbled across some difficulty with the translation, which all boiled down to a matter of content over form, of translating the meaning versus translating the words.

Fortunately, I was able to ask Chiao Lin Cabanne, the Chinese translator, and it turned out her response was exactly what I expected:

Dear Rogier

Ha! ha!  I can guarantee that my Chinese translation means exactly as you explained.

After years' experiments, the Foundation decided not to take "literal translation" approach. Many Chinese who doesn't have Chinese literary training expect the Chinese Course should be word-by-word exactly the same as the English sentence structure.

I usually don't respond to those questions. I know that their problem is not about the " words" but something else. l just encourage new students to follow whatever interpretation they feel comfortable with.

We have educational websites if she wants to know more.

http://www.acimtaiwan.info/

Chiao Lin

The student proved to be a quick learner and here was her response:

Thank you for your email ! And thanks for asking Chiao Lin !

When I read the text book again . 

           2 Nothing real can be threatened.

3 Nothing unreal exists.

4 Herein lies the peace of God.

And it's Chinese translation:

凡是真实的，不受任何威胁 ；

凡是不真实的，根本不存在。

上主的平安即在其中。

I love the Chinese translation. I am also have a strong feeling to regard the word  "herein" as the Chinese word  "当下＂

Thanks

 So, for a few months, we ended up doing ACIM classes combined with ESL for Chinese. The student always asked lots of questions, and we joked about it a lot because her one question would end up being ten. Somehow we stumbled upon Kuan Yin along the way, and I basically said that Kuan Yin in Western terms should probably be understood as either Jesus or Mary, the symbol of Compassion, and Love.

Before Christmas time we ended up reading the introduction to the Workbook. We had been talking about the idea that there is only one Mind, and one Holy Spirit, and one ego, but that we could each hear the Holy Spirit according to the conditioning of our hearing, be it in English or Chinese. Next, we stumbled upon these lines:

The only general rules to be observed throughout, then, are: First, that the exercises be practiced with great specificity, as will be indicated. 2 This will help you to generalize the ideas involved to every situation in which you find yourself, and to everyone and everything in it. 3 Second, be sure that you do not decide for yourself that there are some people, situations or things to which the ideas are inapplicable. 4 This will interfere with transfer of training. 5 The very nature of true perception is that it has no limits. 6 It is the opposite of the way you see now. (ACIM:W-in:6)

 And I saw her stumble over line three. She said, I have a question, and I found myself silently praying to have a simple answer so we would not stumble over translation problems, and what occurred to me was simply this: that the whole is 100% and that 99% is not 100%. Next, she said: maybe my question is not a question, but a statement: "It's like 99% is not 100%, only 100% is 100%." I shared with her that I had been thinking of it in the exact same terms, which was almost a live demonstration of what we had been discussing earlier, that the Holy Spirit speaks to each of us in our own language.

She recently came to visit for my birthday, and that's when she told me that at that time, she had had a strong experience of Kuan Yin being in the room with us during that exchange. This brought back to me that Kuan Yin was an important figure for me for a long time, because one of my early teachers (from ca age 15 to age 40), always had a little Kuan Yin statue on a chest of drawers in the living room of his apartment in Amsterdam. Finally, today, I suddenly realised that most of the last year I had been drinking Ti Kuan Yin, and it had become my favorite tea.

I've been reading a lot on Kuan Yin again, lately. I found this site, which offers some wonderful and concise information about Kuan Yin (She who hears the cries of the world), and it is very worth reading. It is fascinating to see how the Buddha Avalokiteshvara morphed into Kuan Yin in China and became an enduring symbol of compassion the world over. Clearly, for many, a female figure is often easier to relate to than a male so often times Kuan Yin is to Buddha or Avalokiteshvara as Mary or Mary Magdalen were to Jesus, symbols all of the Love of God, simply in whatever form is easiest to relate to, reflecting that basic teaching of the Course that the Holy Spirit will speak to us in whatever form is most readily acceptable to us.

All the Dumb Questions

Once when Krishnamurti was asked by a reporter what he would think of when the same question was asked for the umpteenth time, he said "tennis." This was late in his life, he might have been ninety at the time. By this time also he felt at times at least, that for all his sixty years of teaching, and God only knows how many books, no one or nearly no one had ever truly understood him. Dr. Helen Schucman, who was the scribe of A Course in Miracles had similar feelings at the end of her life. The Thomas Gospel talks about "hidden sayings" (Logion 1). None of that is elitism, though it has often been misinterpreted in that kind of light. The simple truth is that very few people really want to be bothered with the wisdom of the ages. Too much hassle. As the Romans knew, the people want bread and games (panem et circenses). Don't bother me with the Truth. No need today.

In the Gospels the scene at the end of Mark, when Mary Magdalene tells the other apostles of the resurrection, is priceless. The arguments that followed are equally telling, including the endless disputes of whether the resurrection was of the mind or of the body. What became Christianity adopted the latter position, though some other schools toyed around fairly seriously with the notion that the resurrection was of the mind. Certainly with the advent of A Course in Miracles it could not be clearer that this is the only way that the story makes any sense at all. But again these are concepts which we don't know right away what to do with, since on the face of it we seem to be a body that has a mind, whereas in the Context of such teachings as A Course in Miracles, it is clear that we are a mind projecting a body, and watching the experience of "My life," which is one of many thousands we could have ordered from Netflix, or picked up at Blockbusters. The main thing is we get so engrossed while watching, and we identify with the hero of the story, we end up completely believing we are him or her, oblivious to any other way of looking at the story. The Course however does tell us to learn to look at things from Above the Battleground:

     Those with the strength of God in their awareness could never think of battle. What could they gain but loss of their perfection? For everything fought for on the battleground is of the body; something it seems to offer or to own. No one who knows that he has everything could seek for limitation, nor could he value the body's offerings. The senselessness of conquest is quite apparent from the quiet sphere above the battleground. What can conflict with everything? And what is there that offers less, yet could be wanted more? Who with the Love of God upholding him could find the choice of miracles or murder hard to make? (ACIM:T-23.IV.9)

In short, whenever you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, you may remember this kind of advice. In Logion 42 of the Thomas Gospel Jesus expresses the same idea with fewer words: "Be passersby." Learn to watch what you're doing, observe it, don't identify with it and lose yourself, for that leads you to the way out.

It is only when we don't really like the story any more (our own damn fault for taking out a tragedy, when we could also have picked a comedy for the same price), that we begin to look at things a different way. And then when we find a teacher, like Jesus, Krishnamurti, or the Buddha, who hangs out not where the crouds are, but "in the wilderness," or "the desert" etc. this means we're now turning away for a moment of our ego's bread and games, and we immediately start having questions. This is what I read, when I look at the stories of the apostles, when I read the transcripts from Krishnamurti workshops/lectures, when I listen to tapes of workshops of the foundation for A Course in Miracles. These people are all asking all the questions that we all want to ask. Sometimes we haven't realized it yet, but if we haven't yet, we will realize at a later point that we're asking a question we heard somebody ask at a workshop, etc. Ultimately what will answer the questions however, is if we do so through our own experience, as long as we stay stuck in answering questions, we are really throwing up roadblocks against the experience that part of us wants, and part of us is deadly afraid of. Ultimately this is the type of reasoning which Jesus offers in ACIM: if you're in doubt if this is for you or not, try it for a while, and see if you like it. The great big risk is that you might feel more peaceful. Another important clue is in Logion 108 from Thomas, "Whosoever drinks form my mouth shall become like me. I myself shall become that person, and the hidden things will be revealed to that person." As usual this should not be read literally but figuratively. It is about sharing his experience, and becoming one with him on an experiential level, for only the experience will tell us where words fall short. It is not about the words, it is about a willingness to have the experience, and that means giving up on the ego's next ride (because we already know to expect the same old result from the same old actions), and following him in deed, not in word, and the means for that, as they appear in the Course are the practice of his forgiveness practice, which are a way of switching from the way our ego sees the world to the way Jesus sees it. A way to get out of our bad old habits which are making us miserable. And while we are at it we can listen to all the dumb questions, or ask our own dumb questions, which will only fade away when the experience catches up to us and we finally realize what he was talking about. As I pointed out in an earlier post, in Gary Renard's books he is really asking all the dumb questions for us, AND his teachers help him to experience the answers as much as answering him in words, so vicariously through him, we get the point that it is about opening ourselves up to the experience, instead of closing our minds, thinking we have all the answers.

Role Play, Empathy

I talked about role play in my last post, but there are many ways that we can engage in this, and you don't always have to act it out. One of the simple ways is empathy, truly allowing yourself to be in someone else's shoes, which I assure you will change your outlook on other people, and make you a lot less judgmental. And simply, we also enrich our experience. For one thing I had this strong feeling with Plato, in the times when I was actively reading him, it was as if I was at times transported to Athens to his academy, and of course many themes that are discussed in the dialogues are truly perennial questions of human life.

One of the fascinating exercises in this regard for me has always been to empathize in this fashion with the twelve apostles, being around Jesus. Once you break the mold of the dominant Christian interpretation of the New Testament, and bypass the judgment of many of the apocryphal materials as somehow irrelevant, and you just begin to read for yourself, I think the one issue that stands out the most is how the apostles were attracted to Jesus and his teachings, but in truth none of them understood him completely. This makes complete sense also with the comments that Gary Renard's teachers make in his books, namely the apostles mostly experienced another twenty or so lifetimes prior to enlightenment. And look at the stories, these guys are stumbling around, mostly not getting what Jesus is saying, yet listen again and again and again, and somehow in  their own way after he dies, they seem to know that their time with him was their greatest time ever, and it changed their lives.

These stories are no different from e.g. the relationship of Krishnamurti with the people around him. Nobody got him either. And of course it is always like that, which is why it's true as so many people have said that if Jesus just showed up one day, he would not be recognized, and possibly locked up in an asylum. And mentally we lock him up all the time. As long as we make the crucifixion the main event, in lieu of the resurrection, we in effect confine him to the historical role of the body that played him two thousand years ago in Palestine. If however the resurrection is the main event, then he is still with us now, (and we're still not getting what he says). We want most of all for this world to be good and real, and we don't really have ears for his Kingdom not of this world, that is, not until we are sick and tired of being sick and tired. And maybe just maybe, then we tune in to him, and like the apostles, we may not know what to make of him, but we know something sounds damned good and convincing.

A Course in Miracles makes it clear why we eventually listen. The point it makes is that even at the worst of times we are never quite one hundred percent crazy, for the mind that was in him is also in us, and one day we'll start paying attention to that little spark. Jesus' teaching of forgiveness is the method to allow that little spark to grow, until it can shine away the dark. When first we recognize it, a little child is born in us, and the more we can refrain from telling it who it is, but listen to it as it is teaching us, the better off we will be. And so we will humbly empathize with the apostles, who were only dimly getting who Jesus was, but they hung in there, for they did not doubt he spoke the truth. Now it is also no longer a problem that there are so many versions and stories about him, which contradict each other on many points. Not one of them has the whole story, they all merely reported it as best they could. Logion 13 in the Thomas gospel is very cute on this point, for it raises the issue loud and clear that the world is not ready to hear what Jesus really has to say. That is as true now as it was then. The only one who maybe got what Jesus was saying, Mary Magdalene, his wife, seems to disappear from the scene after playing her role as "the apostle to the apostles." The boys ignore her, and start founding religions, and schools, while she, the only one who maybe did get it, seems to wander off and not leave much of a trail. And as always the religions accomplish only one thing, namely we stop listening to the teacher, since we end up thinking we already know, so now we're telling him what he told us, instead of listening to him. Buddhist tradition has a wise saying about this: "What's known as the teachings of the Buddha are not the teachings of the Buddha." Realizing this, you leave yourself a chance to actually listen when you finally do meet the Buddha. By the same token, if we identify with the apostles in their failure to understand Jesus fully, perhaps we would keep our ears open as well. It might inspire some humility to actually listen. To me, that's the value of those stories. In short, this was not "50 way to leave your lover," but "12 ways to misunderstand Jesus," and, if we empathize with the characters, we may understand our own resistance to understanding what Jesus is talking about, and that is surely the beginning of wisdom.

Monty Python's Life of Brian

My friend Annelies reminded me that it was time for some serious fun and sent me this youtube link from the end of Monty Python's Life of Brian, which has to be one of the most delicious spoofs ever. It's the song Always Look at the Bright Side of Life and it sure as hell is a solid antidote at any time if you're at risk of taking life too seriously.

It always reminds me too of the work of the very serious gnostic teacher from the second century, Valentinus, whose school believed that during the crucifixion the real Jesus was looking on watching the crucifixion from under a tree, and smiling, in a manner not dissimilar to Buddha's meditation under the Bodhi tree, where you see him being attacked by angry demons, except he isn't there, it's just the empty seat, for the Buddha knows like Jesus knows that even the worst attack the world can make is pointless, because it is completely meaningless, not to mention not real. This of course is just another way of expressing the notion that the crux (pun not intended) of Jesus' teaching surely was the resurrection, and not the crucifixion.

And so, when we take the world too seriously, we can always be reminded of this and ask these great teachers to show us a better way of looking at things, after all, even in the face of death, what are you going to do? Die five minutes later? We knew going in what the deal was, we were going to die sometime, so what's a few minutes between friends? What's the difference, so the only things that are frightening in this world are so only because we believe they are, and if we change our belief, they can no longer frighten us. This is no different than a little kid who is afraid of the monsters under his bed. You help them change their belief system, and that's what Jesus or Buddha are there to help us do, because they fully realized the knowledge that the world is not real, and there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

In the Thomas Gospel it is amongst other things Logion 42, Be passersby, which reminds us of the same wisdom. Don't take life too personally, for it will kill you With that thought, I've gotta get back to work now.