I have been reading a book over the past couple of weeks which has been intriguing. It is called Christ: The Eternal Tao by Hieromonk Damascene. Damascene is an Eastern Orthodox monk who has made his home in both California and Alaska. The book is an apologetic to Taoism, which, if I am not mistaken, is closely related to Buddhism. This book sets forth the Gospel to the Taoist mind, specifically to those who have been captivated by the ancient wisdom of a man called Lao Tzu.
I am completely ignorant of the writings of Lao Tzu; and I have been only marginally familiar with either Eastern Catholicism or Taoism. I have been informed that the Buddhist -- and perhaps also the Taoist? -- strives for Nirvana, which I had always heard described as the "state of perfect nothingness." According to Damascene, nothingness is not to be conceived in the Western sense, as cessation of existence; rather, it is more subtle than that, and could be referred to more accurately as selflessness, or as self-emptying, or what I would call complete and total self-denial. H. Damascene calls it a return to a "pristine simplicity," to a truly childlike heart and mind, to the state of the spirit prior to the fall, to the place where the spirit's sole focus is God and the indwelling reality of His Logos, or the reality of His uncreated Word.
I have not yet finished the book; but I am being challenged by it a bit. The way of return to the simplified state is the cessation of all false desire. It is the cessation of all striving to be God, or to play God, or to set oneself up as God, or to somehow manipulate and / or connive, or to arrange circumstances in order to realize the agenda of God. The way back is repentance, it is the acceptance of suffering, it is learning through suffering to give up our own self-worship and our pursuit of our own desires. This would include our pursuit for self-gratification, for pleasure, for materialistic attainment, or for any other means or mechanisms by which the self rules over the spirit, which, in the Eastern mind is the means of ascent toward God.
This is the way of the mystic. In my way of thinking, it is the way of mind over matter. Damascene might actually argue that it is the way of the cessation of the mind; the whole world of perpetual thinking, with its many distracted and conflicted thoughts is part of our bondage, it is part of the rebellion which rules us, and which keeps us from the Way, or the Tao, or in the mind of Damascene, it keeps us from the Way of the Christ, who is the Tao born into this world as a human.
I do not even pretend to understand the Eastern mind. Yet, I fully understand the world of thought, with all it distractions, and its contradictions. And Damascene is right; it is this world of thought which forms the basis for the world of struggle, for the world of rebellion, of manipulation and conniving, of self-ascendancy, of self-assertion, of avarice, and of greed. Damascene's writing prompts this question: how well do we Westerns actually rule over ourselves? Or are we actually ruled over by our desires, by our lusts, and by our grandiose self-assertions? I would suggest that we are; in fact, the more that I think about it, this might be a part of the essence of what the Bible means which it that we are held in bondage by our lusts, or when it says that we are slaves to sin.
One of my final Seminary papers was written on the subject of desire. I proposed that the root of original sin was desire. I found an affinity here, in the writing of H. Damascene. Desire propels me out to where I should not go, past the barriers, past the boundaries, into the sea of myself, where I am master and where I alone am the king. And while I do not see the solution to this dilemma in the cessation of desire, but rather in the cultivation of godly desires; I am convicted by the writing of Damascene as I do think that the Eastern mind understands something that the Western mind tends to overlook.
This factors into this discussion of authority and rebellion. How much of the goal of our desires pushes us out beyond the boundaries of where authority would have us to go? I mentioned above that the rebel is never satisfied, that he will not stop at the overthrow of the restriction, but will try at a later date to overthrown the new restriction as well. That is because in the soul there is a thirst which can never be filled, until of course, one drinks from the fountain of an everlasting supply, that fountain which we know to be the Lord Jesus Christ.
A doctor friend of mine put it this way. We are consumers by nature; and we will perpetually consume until we run out of options and are forced to turn in on the self. He stated that in much of his practice, self-consumption would be the correct diagnosis. It is interesting that so many of the diagnoses that doctors prefer now were once lumped together under the head of "consumption." If consumption is the unending desire and quest for "somethingness," then, perhaps nothingness is an adequate goal for return.
Suffice it to say that there is a restless creature inside all of us which is perpetually attempting to bring us into its grasp and its clutches. Freedom from the monster only lies in the Lord Jesus Christ who was attacked by this monster Himself, but wrestled it right to the ground. In His death, He triumphed over it, nailing it to the cross, and rising again for our liberty and justification. In Taoism, it is the Tao that is present which will set one free. H. Damascene argues that the Tao of the Taoist is actually the Lord Jesus Christ, who is Dynamic Energy personalized, the Dynamic Energy of God which sets people free. I shall read to the end of the book and see where it goes. Perhaps the Eastern mindset through the eyes of the Eastern Church will one day make more sense to me.
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