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September 25, 2017September 24, 2018

10. Forgetfulness

Chinese moon cakes filled with lotus-seed paste deliciously point us to an old story from Homer’s Odyssey. The hero, Odysseus, and his crew took their ship to land after several days of rough voyaging at sea. Odysseus sent a few men from the ship to meet the natives. The kind inhabitants treated their visitors well and gave them some lotus to eat. The crewmen found the lotus so delicious that they lost all desire to go back to the ship. They stopped caring about returning home. In their dreamy, blissful state, they forgot about everything else except remaining in that same place and eating lotus perpetually.

Odysseus sent a team to retrieve their shipmates from among the Lotus-eaters. Carried back to the ship and tied down, the wayward crewmen bitterly cried at their separation from the lotus. Odysseus ordered the rest of his men back on board quickly. They hurriedly pushed off into the sea to get away from the land of the dangerous, but pleasantly nice, Lotus-eaters.

The lotus in the Chinese mooncake and the lotus in the Greek epic may have nothing in common except a name, but the lotus (whatever kind) serves to remind us of another part of our experience of death – forgetfulness. We have forgotten God in our hearts.

When our ancestors lost the knowledge of God in their hearts, they kept only rational knowledge about God. Over time, this knowledge too slipped away. Within societies and cultures spread throughout the world, human beings developed philosophies, mythologies, religious rituals, and spiritual ideologies. In the place of Truth, they answered their questions about human existence, the seen universe, and the unseen the spiritual realm based on human reason, imagination, and their interaction with their environments. Men and women substituted the Creator’s revelation with their own opinions and mistook the deception of demons for spiritual enlightenment. Our forgetfulness of God has produced spiritual confusion in human history, but also in our own souls and the souls of those around us.

Since God made the human being according to His own Image, how can we know what it means to be true human beings if we have forgotten the true God? How can we become like God if we don’t know who the One is we are supposed to be like? If we do not remember the true God, we also forget what it means to be human beings. We also forget how to relate to other human beings properly. This forgetfulness creates chaos in relationships, which are intended to nurture love and peace.

In Chinese mythology, Meng Po, the Lady of Forgetfulness, collects a variety of herbs on earth to make her Five-Flavored Tea of Forgetfulness. This Goddess of Amnesia provides her tea to those souls passing through Diyu, the realm of the dead, so that will not remember their previous lives when reincarnated, according to traditional belief. While amnesia forgetting the past, is an important concept in this myth, the practice of anamnesis, remembering or recollecting the past, proves central to a healthful spiritual life.

A relatively similar Greek myth tells of a river called Lethe. This is the River of Oblivion, that is, the River of Forgetfulness. A river associated with sleep and death, those who drink from its waters forget their lives on earth. The Greek word for forgetfulness (lethe) is the opposite of the word for Truth (aleithia), which means no forgetfulness.

When we forget God, we forget the Truth. We forget the truth about our identity, our purpose, and our potential. If we do not remember, we fall into delusion and error.

September 23, 2017October 11, 2017

9. Mind and Heart Disconnected

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Since the heart is darkened, the rational mind no longer harmoniously aligns with the spiritual intellect of the heart. (Keep in mind that we do not use the word heart to mean emotion as it is often used in our culture.)

We have been created with the ability to reason, but since we have imperfect knowledge, spiritual illness, and disharmony in our relationship to God, we do not always use our reason rightly. In our condition of pride and delusion, we may use our reason to make arguments, sometimes long and complex, to justify our sin in our own minds and to convince other that we are right. The human being can justify terrible ideas and actions through logically consistent steps in reasoning that are based on dangerously false ideas.

However convincing our arguments may be, good-sounding rational arguments cannot really make evil actions good. Upon a foundation of basic assumptions, we can construct a series of strong opinions that together form the ideology by which we understand the world around us. If our foundational assumptions are false, the weak foundation renders the whole structure of our opinions unstable, not resting firmly on solid Truth.

Some basic assumptions about reality cannot be proved by reason alone, but are known to be true through revelation, that is, the spiritual knowledge revealed by the Uncreated One. We are sometimes too confident in our ability to determine what is true and good by using our own reason alone. We need the Light of spiritual insight to illumine the Way for the rational mind. Pride and delusion encourage overconfidence and cause us to complicate simple Truth.

September 23, 2017October 11, 2017

8. Pride and Delusion

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Because our hearts are darkened, pride (egotism) hardens the heart. We see ourselves and others with blurry vision, not clearly or soberly. We overestimate our own greatness and spiritual maturity while we undervalue others, judging them to be worse in comparison. Through pride, we can even deceive ourselves into thinking we are humble when we are far from it. Pride brings forth egotistical Self-love, which is opposed to true self-denying love aimed at benefiting the other. In our warped perspective, we confuse what is right and good with what is wrong and bad, yet we render ourselves deaf to correction. We refuse to listen to those who possess clearer vision, more perfect perception, greater knowledge, and wiser discernment.

Remember Narcissus from the old Greek myths. Peering into a perfectly clear pool, he found the most beautiful creature he had ever seen looking back at him from beneath the water. When he tried to kiss his beloved, touching his lips to the pool’s still surface, the one beneath disappeared, fleeing with the ripples at the disturbance of the water. This happened over and over, every time he tried. Narcissus stayed by the pool, gazing in, until he wasted away and died. He could not bear to leave such beauty. Unknowingly, Narcissus had fallen in love with his own reflection. His prideful delusion led to his destruction.

Similarly, we can be like Don Quixote, who, charging bravely on his horse, attacked a vicious giant, but the giant was really only a windmill. The windmill proved innocent, but because of his delusion, Don Quixote was a danger to the windmill and, more importantly, a danger to himself.

The more dark pride covers, seeps in, and hardens our hearts, the more we cut ourselves off from the nurturing streams of Divine Grace, the less clearly we see reality, and the farther we drift from the route that leads toward our potential and purpose.

September 22, 2017October 11, 2017

7. The Darkened Heart

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Associated with our physical heart is our spiritual heart. The heart is sometimes called the spirit. The heart is at the center of the human being. Therefore, the darkening of the heart is at the center of our sickness.

The heart is often called the spiritual intellect (which is different from the rational intellect). With our rational minds we can perform academic work, conduct scientific study, and develop philosophical concepts about God, human beings, and the universe, but with the heart we know God directly by experience.

I do not know my wife through academic study, objective observation, or rational reflection. If I did only know her in this manner, I would know information about my wife, but I would not really know her. Rather, I know my wife personally as my own wife. We know each other through the experience of being married together and raising our children together in our home. According to the Orthodox Way, a true theologian is not a scholar who has studied philosophical doctrines about God based on academic study, observation, and rational reflection, but a true theologian is one who knows God with the heart by experience through prayer.

The heart is the eye of the soul by which we see the spiritual reality. Because our hearts are darkened, we do not see (that is, we do not know by experience) the true God as we should. The blackness of our hearts prevents the healing, transformative Grace from penetrating into our souls. We do not love as we should. We are blind to the fullness of reality. We do not see ourselves honestly, nor do we see others as they truly are, fellow human beings made according to the image of God.

Again, since the heart is the center of the human being, the darkening of the heart is central to our illness.

September 19, 2017October 25, 2019

6. Death: Our Ultimate Diagnosis

Read Genesis 3. You may read it online here.

In the third chapter of Genesis, a serpent slithers into Paradise. This serpent is not just a garden snake, but a highly-intelligent bodiless power – a spiritual creature. (At least, the spiritual serpent is working through the physical snake.) The Old Serpent is known by other names: the Great Dragon, the father of lies, the prince of demons, Satan, Lucifer, and the Devil. Once a beautiful angel, the Devil chose the way of darkness and pride. Enamored by his own beauty, the serpent rebelled against God because He wanted to be a god himself. Since the Creator is All-Powerful, the Devil sorely overestimated his own greatness. Like a bolt of lightning, He fell down from heaven along with the many angels who followed him. These angels, who had been created to be pure and do good, became demons, evil powers who hate God and human beings, whom God loves, and try to corrupt all that is loving and good.

The sneaky serpent approached the woman in the Garden. He deceived her into thinking that God really wanted to prevent her from becoming like Him. The serpent craftily presented disobedience as a quick way for her to achieve greatness and to become a god.

Why did God forbid Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? God’s commandment protected them. The fruit was not yet ripe for eating, or, rather, they were not ready to eat it. Adam and Eve had not yet attained to the maturity necessary to be enlightened through the Tree.

Eve believed the serpent’s deceptive lies. She looked at the Tree and the fruit with the snake’s seductive words in mind. She was tempted to eat from the Tree. Reaching out and taking hold of the fruit, she ate it. Then, she gave some of the fruit to her husband and Adam ate it, too. The fruit had looked sweet to their eyes, but their disobedience turned its taste bitter in their mouths.

This disobedience of Adam and Eve is called sin. Sin means disobeying the instructions the Creator gives us to keep us in good health and keep us on the Way of Life. He designed us, so He teaches us how to live in the Way that is natural for the human person. A sin is an act that is unnatural according to how God has designed us as human beings. Sin separates the human being from the experience of God.

Adam and Eve expected to see with vision of gods, but their eyes were opened to the experience of death. God is Life, so when our first ancestors disconnected themselves from Life Himself, they experienced the absence of Life, which is death. When we sin, we inhibit Life Himself from working within us fully. The consequence is a greater experience of death. Simply put, sin causes death.

When Adam and Eve tasted the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, their eyes were opened, but their eyes were opened in the way they expected.

God had intended for sickness and death to only be a rational concept in the minds of the man and woman. He created them to experience only good health. After their sin, the opposite became true. Sickness and death entered their experience while the good health they once knew remained only in their memory. The eyes of the man and woman were opened to see themselves standing naked and ashamed. That is, Adam and Eve saw themselves stripped of the radiant Light of Grace, the Divine Presence that had once clothed them royally.

The man and woman certainly obtained knowledge of good and evil. They had already known good by experience because goodness was the natural Way of their existence. Even though they only knew good, they possessed (because God created them with free will) the ability to act completely against what was natural for them to do. After they turned away from God, rejecting their natural inclination, their knowledge of good and evil turned upside down. Adam and Eve no longer knew only the experience of good as they had done in their innocence. Their eyes were now opened to a newfound experience of evil because they committed an act of evil. (God is Life, Light, and the Good One. As death is the absence of Life and darkness is the absence of Light, evil is the absence of Good.)

Death afflicted Adam and Eve both in the soul and in the body. It stuck their souls immediately. Their hearts were darkened, causing spiritual blindness. They no longer remained in the Divine Presence they once enjoyed. Although they did not physically die completely for quite a while, their bodies became susceptible to sickness, difficulty, and the wearing down of age.

When God confronted Adam and Eve after their sin, neither the man nor the woman expressed sorrow or a desire to repent. Instead, Adam responded by blaming both his wife and God, saying, “The woman you put here with me gave it to me and I ate it!” In turn, the woman blamed the serpent for deceiving her. God clothed Adam and Eve in garments of skin. They now possessed mortal flesh like the animals. Their Creator exiled them from the Garden of Paradise to keep them from eating from the Tree of Life. As a result of their sin, they had to live very different lives in a very different world than their loving Creator had made for them to enjoy.

Like the lower animals around them, Adam and Eve reproduced. With the help of God, they brought more human beings into the world. All their descendants inherited the disease of death in body and soul.

Why did God throw Adam and Eve out of Paradise and post an angelic guard with a flaming sword to guard the sealed entrance? Why did God want to keep Adam and Eve away from the Tree of Life? The answer is Divine Love. God did not want the human beings He crafted according to His image to eat from the Tree of Life in their sickened condition. If they ate from the Tree in their sickness, they would exist forever as mortals in a perpetual state of spiritual sickness and death. God intended for us to be truly Immortal, sharing in His Life with bodies and souls in perfect health. He wants us to fulfill our potential and purpose. God doesn’t want us to just exist, but to thrive, being fully alive. So, God exiled humanity from the Garden, until He completed His work to cure our disease.

Eventually, Adam and Eve died by death as God had warned. They breathed their last breaths. The souls of our first parents entered into Hades, the name for the place of souls which have departed this life. Their bodies decayed, returning to the earth.

Even in physical death, God’s mercy is evident. Physical death puts an end to suffering in this life caused by sin and puts an end to the many various symptoms of death at work in our souls.

We all have been born afflicted with death, a disease unnatural to our human nature. Throughout human history and across our world today, we see the long trail of pain and destruction death has left behind.

You may think of death in the soul as a syndrome, a collection of inter-connected illnesses present in our souls. The next several entries address various specific sicknesses that we experience as part of our experience of death.

Remember: Death is our primary diagnosis.