This

by Michael Gungor

  When the Divine is seen not as an agent that stands apart from the world but instead the mystery expressed by and as the world, there are no victors or victims but God. “From him, through him, to him are all things.”

  But if there is any sort of awareness or love that is a fundamental aspect of the nature or essence of THIS, as I’m suggesting, why would existence include so much suffering? And, this is where post-structuralism comes to the rescue! (Don’t worry, I won’t hang out here long.) But post-structuralism helped reveal how our binaries (good/evil, for example) are never quite as simple as we like to think. Each of those terms came from somewhere in history and shouldn’t be lazily lumped together as though there were an actual structure in reality where good and evil can be thought of as real and equal opposites. In other words, when we start talking about ideas like good and evil, let’s not oversimplify or assume too much about how those two concepts relate without careful examination of what we’re getting at and where all of that came from.

  Of course, fully delving into the concepts of good and evil philosophically is far too extensive of an endeavor for a book like this, but for our purpose, suffice it to say that we shouldn’t simplify ideas like love, suffering, good, or evil to the point where we get permanently stuck on questions like, “How could existence be thought of as ‘loving awareness’ and yet still include all of this suffering?” The truth is that the opposing energies of yin and yang create a lot of room for paradox and tension, and these tensions are the only way that this universe can be this universe.

  In this universe, what we think of as opposites always go together, even if their relationship is not as simple as our normal binary thinking might make it. There is no such thing as up if there is not also down. You can’t have the joy of union without separation. There is no order without chaos. There is no bliss without suffering. All of it goes hand-in-hand, though not always in equal measure. Our normal mythic perspectives often force us into small thinking about these perceived opposites. We think of this event as good and that one as bad. Life is good. Death is bad. Happiness is good. Pain is bad. But, as we have seen, all of these opposites fit together as a necessary balance of flow within the All. You could never have one of these “positives” without all of the interconnected “negatives.” Nor would you want to.

  You might disagree with that last sentence at first. You might say something like, “I’ll take unending bliss with no suffering please!” Okay. Imagine you could will yourself to have one uninterrupted orgasm of bliss for as long as you’d like. How long do you think you would enjoy that? Ten minutes? Ten hours? Ten years? A hundred thousand years? Two hundred trillion years? I would imagine whatever the number would be that you may overestimate how long you would enjoy it. I saw a TV show once where they showed this guy who has a medical condition where he spontaneously has dozens of orgasms every day. He was miserable. He was having orgasms during his grandpa’s funeral. This poor guy lives his life in nearly constant suffering from too much pleasure.

  If you take a moment and really try to imagine an existence of only uninterrupted eternal bliss, it becomes clear that such an imagined existence is an absurdity. What good is a glass of cold water without the thirst for it? What is life without death, creativity without entropy?

  Looking at things through the Hindu lens for a moment, ask yourself this question: If you were an infinite, playful, and creative love, what game wouldn’t you play, at least for a little while? After all, maybe in some segment of a multiverse, you (God) are playing other sorts of games where you don’t forget that you are God. Maybe you are playing an infinite number of games in an infinite number of universes, where you experience bliss a billion years at a time while fully remembering that you are the infinite Godhead. But would you stop there? Is that all you would ever do? Or would you consider trying another game at some point? Maybe one where you go on adventures that make you afraid? Maybe some where you even forget you are you for a bit? As the Infinite, would you ever consider taking up residence as an evolved ape on a tiny speck of a blue gem suspended in space with a penchant for Chinese takeout and a nose that is a tiny bit off-center of your divine face? Maybe you would enjoy a game with some apparent randomness in it? Why wouldn’t you? What would you have to lose? It all comes back to you in the end. Why not infinitely love that character and every variation possible of that character? Infinity leaves room for a lot of patterns to paint, a lot of love to express, a lot of songs to sing, a lot of journeys to take, and a lot of games to play.

  If you were an infinite ocean, you would ultimately become an infinite amount of all possible waves. And why not? And who is the clay to say to the potter, “Why have you made me like this?”

  When you shift your perspective to stay aware of this higher vantage point while remaining engaged in the stories of your experiences, all of the drama of life becomes less weighty. It’s sort of like the experience of watching a good film, where on one plane of awareness you are fully experiencing the drama, but on another, you know you’re watching a movie. If it’s a particularly good film, you may get so caught up in the story that you momentarily forget you are watching actors performing in front of cameras. But very few people would ever get PTSD from watching a war scene in a movie. Because even if we are emotionally involved, something deep within us knows that it’s actually going to be okay. Even if the character on the movie gets killed, we know deep down that the actor is not in real danger. It’s just a movie, after all.

  In the same way that it is possible to hold that the murder and suicide in Romeo and Juliet is bad while simultaneously saying that the play itself is good, it is possible to be involved in the drama and emotion of human life in a way where we get caught up in the story of suffering and fighting and working for good, but have a stillness inside of it all that knows deep down that all of it is story and at the deepest level, it is all perfect just as it is. It’s possible to push back against death and entropy while seeing that death and entropy are a necessary part of the whole. It is possible to work for the Kindom45 of God to manifest on earth while knowing deep down that it’s already here. In this multiplaned awareness, we can see that all of THIS is love without losing our passion to bring more love into the world.

  But what does it mean for all of THIS to be love? Isn’t that just more anthropomorphic, sentimental woo? To see why I think saying THIS is love is a reasonable thing to say, let’s hear from some of the other younger stories as well.

  • • • • •

  Physics has unveiled the workings of a universe that is weirder than any of us could have ever imagined. For instance, nobody has ever been able to find any real thing at the bottom of anything. When you look out into the night sky, there are stars, but there’s a whole lot of space between those stars. That’s how everything is when you look close enough. The whole universe consists of all these little interconnected, empty, vibrating, floaty, magic swirls, or wiggles. The physical sense with which you’re feeling this book in your hand right now gives you a sensation of something solid touching something solid, but that’s an illusion. No “thing” ever touches any other “thing.” What you feel as solidity is just forces repelling one another, or in Watts-speak, it’s just wiggles wiggling.

  This “solid” book is a wiggle made up of other wiggles—ideas, polymers, atoms made of stardust that were once in the lungs of a blue whale or the arm hair of Julius Caesar, etc. It’s also a small part of other larger wiggles—the room you are in, the planet Earth, the Milky Way, etc. Quantum mechanics reveals that these fundamental wiggles aren’t things but, like music, are relationships of vibration.46 What we think of as a thing is simply our recognition of a temporarily repeating melody or motif within the notes.

  Music has layers. You can listen to the bassist, or the violin section, or the lyrics, but it all goes together, and in a good piece of music, it all belongs. The tension, the resolution, the rise and fall, the noise and the silence, it all works together to form a cohesive whol
e.

  When you look out at the world, with all its complexity, you are literally seeing vibration—seeing music. The leaves blowing in the trees—music. The clicking of the commuter’s shoes on the tile floor of the train station. The sound of children playing in the park, the sound of the helicopter flying overhead, the Instagram feed of that annoying girl at work who is always posting pictures of her food—it’s all music. Some of the notes are pleasant to the ear; some of them are grating. But together, they make up a symphony that includes all of the sophistication, subtlety, and beauty that you have ever experienced or imagined.

  The whole universe is built of these little musical motifs within motifs. Integral theorist and philosopher, Ken Wilber, coined the word holon to speak of this phenomenon. The whole fabric of the universe consists of these “whole” systems that are also always a “part” of other whole systems. For example, an atom can be seen as a whole that transcends but includes other smaller parts, which are wholes in themselves consisting of other parts . . . and on and on it goes. There is no end in sight to these stacks of holons, either up or down. An atom is part of a molecule; which is part of a cell; which is part of a nervous system; which is part of a body; which is part of a biosphere; which is part of a planet; which is part of a solar system; which is a part of a galaxy; which is a part of the observable universe; which, as far as we know, could be a part of a divine being or some random dream in the brain of an elven goddess who is part of a computer simulation; which itself is part of a computer simulation; and so on and so on to infinity that is all an unforeseen consequence of a science experiment for some intelligent community of super-bacteria on the buttocks of a bonobo that is roughly the size of the Virgo Supercluster. My point is that we don’t have any idea how far up or down these holons go, but this whole/part pattern does seem to be the way that the void manifests as form.

  So what does any of this have to do with love? As we discussed earlier, love is the connection, the relationship, the desire that brings separate parts together into a new whole. When we experience love, we are getting swept up into some greater reality that transcends and includes our individual sense of self. I love my wife and my daughters, and in that experience of loving them, I feel caught up in something greater than my own ego. In love, it’s not just me. And it’s not just them. An us is born. Love joins disparate parts into a single, transcendent whole.

  In physics, we see that subatomic particles join together in a sort of “relationship” with one another, thereby creating a new “we,” or atom. Atoms are “attracted” to other atoms just as planets are to suns and galaxies are to other galaxies. In other words, there seems to be something fundamental within reality about connection and relationship. There is something about a negative charge that “desires relationship” with a positive one. There is something about gravity that pulls matter towards itself. Couldn’t one say that is a form of “longing”? In this loose way of talking about objects in very human terms, one could say that the universe is made of love.

  In saying that, I’m not saying that the universe is literally made of the human emotion of love. Conversely, the human emotion of love may simply be a clear manifestation of how things operate at the core of reality—connection, desire, and relationship.

  What is it that keeps trees growing toward the sky? What is it that keeps every cell in your body working to keep you alive, living and dying for the greater good that is you, even if they don’t understand that greater good themselves? Why not call that creative, organizing, and sustaining unity underneath it all love?

  THIS is love.

  Allowing myself to mix myths now, I can feel that the only true I is the One Dance underneath it all, the play between heaven and earth; the love between Father, Spirit, Son; the unity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva; the mysterious dance of protons, neutrons, and electrons within an atom.

  What holds the cloud floating in the blue sky? All of it. How many small particles and patterns of energy have to connect and cooperate to make that cloud appear as it did in your brain? All of them. All the energy in the whole universe has to take its place on the orchestra stage just for that particular cloud to appear like it does. That period at the end of the sentence had to happen just as it did for that cloud to appear like that. Not necessarily because one thing causes the other, but because everything in this universe goes along with everything else, just as every hair on your head goes with your hairstyle. Every ripple in the ocean is a necessary part of the pattern of energy that needed to exist within this moment for the ocean to be just what it is.

  THIS is love.

  By incarnating, God gets to experience having and loving a baby. Billions of times over. He gets to experience being a newborn baby. Billions of times over. It gets to be a sunrise and a viewer of a sunrise. She gets to compose every symphony, and listen to every performance of it. We get to build and witness the end of every empire, feel every victory and defeat of every battle. I Am-ness feels the pain of every tragedy and the happiness of every triumph. Playfulness gets to play. Story gets to be told. The ocean gets to feel the dramatic movement of every individual wave. And as any individual crest finally breaks upon the shore and flows back to it source, the great sea has already churned up a thousand new stories from the depths of its belly with the adamant joy of a child who screams in delight after being tossed into the air by her father—“again!”

  How else would you have it?

  In the film Arrival, one of the characters sees into the future and learns that if she has a child, she will lose that child in the future. She knows she will have her heart broken, and that it will hurt beyond her ability to bear. But she chooses to have the child anyway. She chooses to experience love, even though she knows that love comes with unbearable torture, concurring with that famous Alfred, Lord Tennyson quote: “Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”

  What else would infinite love do, other than love everything and everyone? What else would infinite creativity and playfulness do, but see through every perspective and incarnate into every possible narrative? What stories would Fearless Becoming be afraid of telling? With an infinite play chest, what arrangement of matter and space would go unexperienced or unloved?

  Human culture has tended to value uniformity—in our society, which has historically leaned toward the male, the white, the able, and the normally gendered. But this is the uniformity of death—as all the living systems and variety within the body stop their movement and devolve into a dead heap of decomposing cells. THIS is so much more alive than that.

  In the human family alone, God puts on wildly different hues of eyes, hair, and skin. THIS is love shows us that God is most importantly found where we have forgotten to look for him. He walks proudly in the culturally shamed bodies of the queer and the transgender. She sits in a wheelchair and lies dying in hospital beds. It’s easy enough for many people to find God in churches, picturesque nature, or success. But there is a reason Jesus identified with the most overlooked and forgotten corners of our society. If you want to find God, you can always find him in prison, in a mental institution, or sleeping under a bridge.

  Some forms of spiritual practice focus on transcending suffering—not being affected or weighed down by the grit of life. Other practices focus on incarnation and immanence—sharing in the stories and suffering of others. THIS is love creates room for the practice of both transcendence and immanence by allowing for the drama of a perceived “other,” without losing sight of the fundamental unity between “thou” and “I.” Here, we don’t have to get lost in the weeds of egocentric separation, but we can play in them. We can feel the full brunt of life and death without being incapacitated. We can enjoy the play without forgetting that the villains are just actors on a stage. We can fight for the liberation of the world from within our own unfolding liberation rather than from the despair, fear, and illusion of trying to change the world as an ego. THIS is love means life can be lived in the full light o
f day—not avoiding the pain, adventure, and romance of incarnation, nor missing out on the peace and contentment that comes in nondual realization. THIS is love means life—and life lived to the fullest as we brave the journey of walking in, with, and as God.

  In this balance between perspectives, we can love the homeless woman, doing our best to serve her while also being angry at the systems that make her problems so complicated, all while knowing underneath it all that it is all perfect just as it is in THIS. We can work for shalom to come into the earth while knowing that it was already here the whole time. I think this is what it means to, as G. K. Chesterton put it, “have tragedy in our hearts and comedy in our heads.”47

  Free to Suffer

  “There’s blood in your heart, and Jesus is in the blood.”

  —AMELIE GUNGOR

  (three years old)

  A few days ago, Lisa told me that our daughter Amelie recently asked her, “Momma, am I pretty?”

  Tears immediately spilled down my cheeks. My heart felt like a nerve suddenly exposed to the air. Amelie, you see, is a gorgeous human being. She has the soul of a sage, the warmest smile, and those brilliant blues from her mother. She has no rational reason to be insecure in who she is. She’s pretty, smart, hilarious, and talented. But she also lives in this world. She sees what our culture values. She sees the kind of women cast as leading ladies. She sees what sorts of faces get printed on the covers of magazines, which girls get followed around at school by all of the others. As hard as Lisa and I have tried to instill in Amelie how neither her nor anyone else’s appearance has anything to do with their value, we haven’t been able to save her from being a part of this world that values people based on what they look like. And hearing that broke my heart.