When people hear that Free Your Mind draws on Buddhist philosophy, some Christian readers feel uncertain. As though engaging with these teachings might require abandoning their own tradition, or as though the two are somehow incompatible.
This uncertainty dissolves almost immediately upon encountering the Christian contemplative tradition — the stream of mystical theology that runs from the Desert Fathers and Mothers of the 3rd century, through Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich in the medieval period, through John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila in the 16th century, and into the 20th century with Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating.
This tradition has been, at various points, marginalized by mainstream institutional Christianity — perhaps because what it discovered was too radical, too direct, too threatening to structures of intermediated religious authority. What it discovered was that the divine presence the tradition pointed at externally was available as direct, immediate, personal experience. Right now. In this moment. Without institution, without intermediary, without the accumulated weight of theological commentary.
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
— Meister Eckhart, 14th century German mystic
If these words sound familiar, it is because they are pointing at exactly what Mooji and Papaji point at: the non-dual recognition that the awareness through which you perceive is not separate from the divine awareness that constitutes all things.
Julian of Norwich — a 14th century English mystic who received a series of visions during a near-fatal illness — produced one of the most extraordinary documents in the English language: 'Revelations of Divine Love.' Her central message, received directly in experience and then reflected upon for twenty years: 'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.'
This is not naive optimism. Julian had witnessed the Black Death. She understood suffering. Her 'all shall be well' is not the denial of difficulty. It is the recognition — arrived at through direct contemplative experience — that underneath the suffering, beneath the impermanence, beyond the apparent brokenness of things, there is a love that is absolute, unconditional, and ultimately indestructible. And that this love is not somewhere else. It is here. Now. At the very ground of everything.
Thomas Merton — 20th century Trappist monk, writer, and one of the most important spiritual voices of the last hundred years — spent his life building bridges between the Christian contemplative tradition and the wisdom of Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism. He recognized, with the clarity of someone who had gone deep in his own tradition, that what the contemplatives of every tradition had discovered was essentially the same thing expressed in different languages.
His encounter with the great Buddha statues at Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka, shortly before his death, produced one of the most extraordinary passages in spiritual literature — a direct description of the recognition that all the contemplatives point at, arriving for him through Buddhist art while he stood as a Christian monk. The tradition doesn't matter. The depth of the looking does.
✦ KEY INSIGHT: If you are Christian, the contemplative tradition within your own faith has already arrived at everything the East discovered. You don't need to leave your tradition. You may need to go deeper into it.
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