MIND
by Jan Carlsson-Bull
July 20, 2003
It was summer, and I was a green-behind-the ears seminarian in my first day of what is called Clinical Pastoral Education. It’s that part of our education that offers an intensive introduction to pastoral issues in a clinical setting, usually a hospital. You could call it Life and Death 101. Now women were still in the minority in our seminaries, especially women preparing to be ordained ministers–of course, many of you know how many years it took me between seminary and ordination, but that’s another matter. I relished the opportunity to do my Clinical Pastoral Education–CPE as we call it–at one of our nation’s largest and most prestigious hospitals–Massachusetts General, in Boston. There I was, in a comfy meeting room in the innards of Mass General sitting around a table with eleven other seminarians from all over the country and all male; and there was our supervisor, looking intent and purposeful and ready to set forth the basics of what we could expect that summer. My 22 year-old ears perked up.
"Until now," he began, "you have been in academic climates that have downplayed feelings. You have exercised the muscles of your intellect at the expense of your emotions. Here we will reverse that. We will talk about, deal with and focus on our feelings. Any comments?" A few moments of silence. "With all due respect," I began to stammer, "I don’t just think." He cut me off right there at the pass, between the rock of mental activity and the hard place of emotional bewilderment. "Okay Jan, whatever you’ve done in the past, that will change." His pronouncement came with the no nonsense of boot camp.
How I emerged from that summer, I owe to my wonderful male colleagues, wherever they might be today, supportive as they were during that long heated summer. I do not owe it to my then not so bridled inclination for stubbornness. It’s taken me a few more years to learn to negotiate discreetly and strategically with an authority figure with whom I disagree. I passed the seminar, by the way, which is simple proof that there is a special God for insurgent seminarians.
What perhaps counted more than simply passing the seminar was a growing clarity that I think with my feelings and feel with my thoughts. I’m intertwined, like an interconnected web of mind and heart. Does this mean that I’m never more bound up with the activity of emotion than the activity of reason? Of course not. I’m a woman, and I like to live up to whatever positive stereotypes accrue to me. Kind of like someone saying, "You throw a ball just like a woman." To which the appropriate response is, "Thank you!"
Reason, thinking, intelligence, mind. All are the subject of the most intense scrutiny through the lenses of psychology, epistemology, medicine, anthropology, literature, and oh yes, religion. When I first heard our liberal faith described as "the thinking person’s religion," I bridled in a reflex that would have warmed the heart of that resolute supervisor at Mass General. Whoa! I thought, it’s not just a path of rationality or reason. It’s a path full of heart.
Again I reach into the annals of Emerson, who in his essay on Friendship, declared, "The heart knoweth." Not the heart feeleth or emoteth or gusheth. The heart knoweth. I wonder if he would agree with the inverse of that statement and affirm that the mind feeleth and emoteth and hurteth and exalteth. My mind does all this. And look at those banners out in front of this sanctuary. Open Minds & Open Hearts. They must have something to do with each other.
Whenever I enter one of these seeming quagmires of either/or, both/and, I turn to Buddhist thought. Our Buddhist friends have a way of plumbing the depths without seeming to need scuba gear.
Sogyal Rinpoche reaches me. Born in Tibet, he now oversees an international network of Buddhist groups known as Rigpa, In Tibetan, Rigpa means the "nature of mind". Rinpoche recalls a pivotal moment when he was about nine years old. He was still living in Tibet. In fact, he was on a pilgrimage through southern Tibet. He and his companions had entered a cave where the founder of Tibetan Buddhism had once meditated. The young boy’s spiritual master, Jamyang Khyentse, sent for him. Now I know that the idea of a master of anything goes against the grain of our freedom loving souls, but Tibetan Buddhists do have masters whom they revere and whose teachings they heed with astonishing attentiveness. So the young boy responded obediently and went and sat before his master. Khyentse declared that he was going to introduce him to the essential "nature of mind." With his bell and hand-drum, he began chanting the invocation of all the masters of their tradition. Then, with no warning, he gazed into the eyes of the young lad and sprang the question: "What is mind?" Rinpoche was flabbergasted. "My mind shattered," he recalls. "No words, no names, no thought remained–no mind, in fact, at all."
Jamyan Kyentse had burst through that tiny gap in the child’s fleeting and fluttering thoughts. "In that gap," Rinpoche recalls years later, "was laid bare a sheer, immediate awareness of the present, one that was free of any clinging. It was simple, naked, and fundamental."
Buddhism, as recounted by Rinpoche, recognizes two facets of mind, two of the many facets of mind. There is "ordinary mind," the mind that discriminates and analyzes and distinguishes, the kind that affirms the "I’ and the "other" in a dualistic universe. It is chaotic, anxious, and restive, vulnerable to all the whims of circumstance. Then there is the essence of mind, the nature of mind, again, known as Rigpa in Tibetan. He describes it as the "knowledge of knowledge itself". Its scope is universal, for it is not exclusive to any one of us but right there at the root of everything.
Rinpoche links the nature of mind with the constructs central to so many languages of faith.
"Christians and Jews call it ‘God’; Hindus call it ‘the Self,’ "Shiva,’ ‘Brahman,’ and ‘Vishnu’; Sufi mystics name it ‘the Hidden Essence’; and Buddhists call it ‘Buddha nature.’" (Rinpoche, 49)
Buddha is simply anyone who has awakened to her or his vast potential for wisdom in shedding the dross of ordinary mind to free the nature of mind.
It is not a dramatic occurrence, this business of freeing one’s Buddha nature, one’s essence of mind. In fact, "You don’t actually ‘become’ a buddha, you simply cease, slowly, to be deluded. And being a buddha is not being some omnipotent spiritual superman, but becoming at last a true human being." (Rinpoche, 83)
So of course I think of the scarecrow in Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Dorothy had rescued him from his pole-bound solitude, had told him of her journey to have her own wish fulfilled, and invited him to join her. As Alison recalled for us, they set off down the yellow brick road. Noon came. It was lunchtime. The two, or three of them including Dorothy’s little dog Toto, found a resting place by the side of the road, rather like those just-off-the-highway welcome stops when we take our own road trips. There they sat, Dorothy, Toto, and the scarecrow, enjoying a leisurely lunch. What a perfect interlude for the scarecrow to relate his sorry plight to his new-found friends.
"My life has been so short that I really know nothing whatever. I was only made day before yesterday."
Ah yes, a creature who was born yesterday and knows just enough to know it. He also knows how he was created. That Munchkin farmer did a great job giving him eyes, a nose, even a mouth, but then went off and left him stuck on a pole and stuffed with straw. How the scarecrow wanted his freedom and some brains to go with it. How he wanted to be a whole man. So off to the Land of Oz they went, hopeful that Oz himself would be able to help.
I daresay it’s not giving away the story to remind you what happened. How many times have we pored over that book or sat mesmerized watching Judy Garland and friends in the film version? Adventure after adventure, Dorothy and Toto and the Scarecrow, arrive in the Land of Oz, along with two other needy creatures, one seeking a heart, the other, courage. Preparing to meet with Oz himself, the Scarecrow announces to his friends:
"Congratulate me. I am going to Oz to get my brains at last. When I return I shall be as other men are."
"I have always liked you as you were," said Dorothy simply.
So in goes the Scarecrow, in to the inner sanctum of Oz. And what does Oz do but remove his head, take it into a back room, and stuff it with bran and pins and needles, fortifying it with the very straw that was there in the first place. He returns with the newly stuffed head, fastens it on the rest of Scarecrow and says:
"Hereafter you will be a great man, for I have given you a lot of bran-new brains."
I’m wondering if this magic-laden pilgrimage of our friends Dorothy, Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion is all that different from how any of us seek what we miss most. Whether for a mind, a heart, courage, or simply to find that place that we once knew to be safe, home sweet home, we each chart our own journey to Oz and set off down the road. Like Dorothy, we each experience our own hurricanes and are swept into a place that we just don’t recognize. It takes a lot to orient ourselves to this space we hadn’t counted on. So we long for that familiar space that once gave us so much comfort. Sometimes we return; sometimes we don’t. Our challenge is to find home through the epiphanies of the journey and to recognize that it’s more about a trip to the center of our own nature than a trip to a far-off place. It’s more about uncovering what was always there, because home lives within us. As for the scarecrow, his plight and his journey and his easy satisfaction with a brain that was nothing more than bran and pins and needles and more straw suggest that the absence of a brain was illusion. Dorothy hinted at this when she said to her friend, "I have always liked you as you were."
What do we learn from our friends on their way to Oz? Home, heart, courage, and mind have been with them all along. For us, full-hearted, courageous, home-rooted mind comes with the gift of birth. It’s there just waiting for the moment when we’re ready to awake to it. It’s there, when we are startled into that space between the fragments of our "habits of mind" as Sogyal Rinpoche was startled by his Master at the age of nine. It’s there in that simple phrase of Emerson, "The heart knoweth." It’s there in the cracks between the dogma of a clinical supervisor and the resolve of a stubborn seminarian and in the bud, just the bud, of a realization that we do think with our hearts and feel with our minds.
And it’s there in what was perhaps the core pronouncement of Jesus in an episode played out in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Hearing of Jesus’ astonishing capacity to bewilder the Sadducees, it was the Pharisees, another group vying for influence in the Jewish community of that time, who summoned their very own lawyer to quiz this mystifying figure on the essence of the law. Probably garbed in ancient Armani, this erudite Pharisee set forth to catch Jesus on the hook of his expert inquiry. His leading question? "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" Jesus responded: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Matthew 22:34-39) No more questions.
In the Gospel of Luke, the story assumes a different sequence. The lawyer poses the question, "Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus answers with his own inquiry: "What is written in the law? How do you read?" It is the lawyer who responds, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself," to which Jesus says, "You have answered right; do this, and you will live." (Luke 10:25-28)
I wonder. I wonder if God is intrinsic to the nature of mind, resident in each of us from birth and freed by an uncannily simple attentiveness to what is here and now. What would it then mean to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength and to know that loving our neighbors as ourselves is the same thing? It boggles my mind. It blows my mind. Maybe I’m not so different from the Scarecrow in the sudden realization that I too was simply born yesterday.
Maybe we were all born yesterday, but we’re here today. Can the gift of today, can the gift of this time, this moment be unwrapped if we’re willing and ready to free our mind, to free mind, to take a second look at those banners waving outside, Open Minds & Open Hearts, and to grasp their connection. To love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength is to love what’s deepest inside us. And to love what’s deepest inside us is to love what is deepest inside each other, the full dysfunctional global family of each other and the each other inhabiting this sanctuary this morning.
Maybe I didn’t have to do battle with that supervisor at Mass General. All that was called for was to find the chink in his armor through the whittling away at my own and to discover underneath it all that we reside in the same intimate Universe. We’re one in the nature of mind and heart.
If this is so, maybe I can join that well-loved author of children’s stories, the late Robert McCloskey, in claiming to have "’one foot resting in reality and the other foot planted firmly on a banana peel.’" After all, nobody said the matter of mind wasn’t just a little bit slippery. Then again, so are matters of the heart. Should we be surprised? I hope so. Amen.
Sources:
http://io.spaceports.com/~wysardry/tales/b/baum/wizardoz/chap05.htm
The Bible, Revised Standard Version.
The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edited by Brooks Atkinson, Random House, Inc., 1940.
Gospel Parallels: A Synopsis of the First Three Gospels, Edited by Burton H. Throckmorton, Jr., Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1949.
The Oxford Companion to the Bible, Edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, Oxford University Press, 1993, 588-89, 667-68.
Eleanor Blau, "Robert McCloskey, 88, of ‘Make Way for Ducklings,’ Is Dead," The New York Times, Obituaries, Tuesday, July 1, 2003, C15.
Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. (Note: HarperSanFrancisco and the author, in association with the Rainforest Action Network, will facilitate the planting of two trees for every one tree used in the manufacture of this book.)
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