Good Evening. I am honored to be here with you.

Buddhism does not talk about God because we are concerned with experiencing and acting from the unity of existence. We don’t split off one part of reality, call it God and worship it as if it was outside our selves. When we are experiencing unity at a deep level we can make wholesome, realistic choices, and we are not suffering. Splitting off part of reality makes it impossible to act in a realistic and wholesome way, and it creates suffering, so we try not to do it. This is what we experience when we practice Buddhism.

We don’t recognize a separate object called God, so on the surface it might seem that Buddhism is incompatible with theistic religions, but looking deeper, we find that this is not so. We can recognize unity as God. This is the same as saying that the truth is God. That is all inclusive, absolute truth. We may as well just call it reality. Reality is a term that Buddhists use a lot.

Reality is not outside us, reality is not inside us, it is both and neither. We recognize the validity of all descriptions, because each is just one perspective on something too huge to describe adequately. If you are busy experiencing and acting from unity, if your purpose is to actualize oneness with God, you don’t have time to worry about what to call it

My Japanese Zen teacher, Joshu Roshi, who has taught western students for over forty years, and Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Zen teacher who has worked extensively with westerners, encourage us to make this connection between the experience of Buddhist practice and the language of theistic religions. By practicing Zen Buddhism and recognizing unity as God, westerners who could not relate to God as an object have been able to make sense of their own theistic traditions. To help this process Thich Nhat Hanh has published extensively on how Buddhism relates to theistic practice. You might like to read his book Living Buddha, Living Christ, or the more recent Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as brothers.

If unity is God, then there is no logical need to reconcile God and human suffering. God includes our suffering, and everything else. But just saying this is not very helpful.

You can agree with me intellectually if you like, but you will still be experiencing suffering if you are not experiencing unity. It is a lot of hard work to realize unity and end suffering. This work is all the reconciliation that really needs to be done.

Since the unity of existence is just reality, just things as they are, it seems strange that we don’t realize it automatically. We have a lot of scientists working very hard to explore reality, and it really isn’t very hard these days for us to realize unity intellectually.

Physics tells us that we are temporarily conscious collections of star dust, eddies in the river of time. Ecology tells us that we owe our existence to earth, sun, moon, evolution of Homo sapiens, farmers who grow our food, our nice clean water supply, and parents. Chemistry tells us that the energy of our bodies comes from the sun. Psychology confirms that interacting with other people as we developed has had a huge effect on who we are now.

We don’t have any trouble seeing intellectually that we developed in a certain way due to the swirl of "things" that flows past and through us. We don’t have a separate permanent existence. We arise from circumstances as they happen. There is complete moment by moment interbeing between us and everything else. There are a lot of ways to express it, and it seems quite obvious.

Why is it so hard for us to fully experience unity, when it seems so intellectually obvious?

We need to develop a concept of ourselves, because we need to take care of our bodies and minds by feeding, cleaning, resting, educating and moving ourselves out of harms way. Without a concept of self we could not do this, and we could not help other people either.

Pain is necessary to help us stay safe. We avoid pain by keeping our hand out of the fire, that’s fine, and quite compatible with experiencing unity. If we move some one else out of harms way, that’s also fine, and also compatible with experiencing unity. We are part of everything, and it is part of us, but we still have quite specific responsibilities that we need to be aware of. Having a self helps us do this.

Problems arise because most of us go beyond what is necessary and functional as our sense of a separate self develops. We make this too absolute, too rigid, too fixated on a certain image of ourselves. Instead of accessing unity, we contract our concept of our self down to a very small specific self image. Sometimes this is called the small self.

We forget unity and take our tiny self image to be all of ourselves. Of course self image doesn’t actually have intrinsic existence, it is just a temporary formation, contingent on momentary circumstances. Once we have identified with it, we are afraid of seeing this impermanence because then we will know that “we” do not exist, and that’s just too scary. Actually we do exist, but not as a small self, and the small self doesn’t find this very comforting.

When we first start practicing we think we want to go on being our small self. That’s because we have not yet experienced the fact that this is suffering.

Instead of allowing ourselves to change freely and creatively with circumstances, we avoid change and try to support a fixed self image. Sometimes we have an image of our selves as helpful, so we can’t see when we are making a nuisance of ourselves. Sometimes we are sure we are a nuisance, so we can’t see when we are helping. Sometimes we have an image of ourselves as bad and unlovable, so we can no longer connect with our natural love of ourselves and others. However it manifests, we are escaping the reality of constant change, which is unity, by thinking we are separate from everything else. In this way identification with the small self creates intense loneliness, as well as unrealistic thinking.

When we experience unity, there really isn’t any distinction between loving ourselves and loving others, but when we deny any aspect of unity we can’t see that any more. We start by trying to keep our hand out of the fire, but once we progress to protecting self image we are trying to pretend that our hand isn’t in the fire when it is, and then we are in trouble.

Trying to pretend that we are not burning while our hand is in the fire sounds twisted. It is twisted. It might sound like something no one would do, but people regularly lie to themselves about the source of their pain. We lie about how much we eat, how much we drink, how much we exercise, how often we hit our thumb with the hammer . . . If maintaining self image requires it, we will even deny physical pain rather than admit that we made a mistake.

Anzan Hoshin Roshi, a Canadian Zen teacher, has said that self image walks through the back alleys, lost and confused. It really wants to find out what is going on so it picks up old gum wrappers and other bits of trash and tries to make sense of what it reads on them.

It’s that hopeless for a fixated self image, it just isn't useful. It can’t experience reality directly without dissolving back into everything else, so it can’t know anything or contribute anything without ceasing to exist as a separate entity. Once we identify with self image we start choosing not to see what doesn’t fit that and we cannot experience unity. So we alienate ourselves from God. This alienation is very painful, it is suffering.

Suffering is something we do to ourselves by identifying with self image and refusing to fully experience things that don’t support it. If we have an image of ourselves as hard done by, we may even refuse to really enjoy ourselves. We can make ourselves very miserable like this.

On one level, which we call absolute, all we need do to close the gap between ourselves and God is to internalize what we already know, deeply recognizing the truth of unity. Actually we already have internalized it, we know interbeing exists, we just need to admit it.

Once we do this, our suffering will end. We will have access to things as they are. We will stop being twisted. We will start to make wholesome, realistic decisions and really enjoy life. It sounds easy, and the results are certainly desirable. So why doesn’t every one just do that, right now?

Go on, do it!

It’s not so easy.

On the relative level, where we live while we identify with our small self image, it is very hard to get real. We must do something that seems quite counter intuitive, even a little crazy, and simply open and submit to everything including our physical, mental and emotional pain, without distancing ourselves from it.

This is the same as a humbling and complete submission and openness to God.

The sense of exposure is dreadful. All our self serving lies and fantasies have to go, self righteous anger has to go, thinking we know what is going on has to go, what ever is holding self image together has to go. What is left is reality. Faced with this, self image, which is nothing but a fantasy, crumbles to nothing. We fear this as we fear death. In a sense it is death. Sometimes we call it death of the ego. Christians may call it “killing the fool”, dying to self, or dying with Christ.

If we face our fear, and allow ourselves to experience unity, then we have come before reality, as reality. When we do this we find that reality is basically good and loving. Joshu Roshi calls it true love. This is the same as coming before God as we are and finding that God loves us all as we are.

Whether it is a Christian dying with Christ, or a Zen student experiencing ego death, the process is much the same. It brings immediate relief from suffering, and if we take our practice into daily life we find a more creative and wholesome way of being in the world. The whole process of submission and death can scare us badly, but once we do it our suffering ends and our pain is not so difficult.

Nothing is stopping this right now, except our own resistance, our own fear.

Our scientific culture can make it harder for us to access unity by encouraging us to objectify ourselves and everything else, and by encouraging us to theorize, instead of experiencing things directly. But it can also help.

The intellectual understanding of unity can create a sense of awe. When we recognize where we fit in the scheme of things as we understand it through science, we may see how tiny and ridiculous our small selves are. Some of us start to realize unity at a deeper level by thinking like this. If we have started to approach unity, thinking like this for a while may help us get closer. If we sit down in meditation and contemplation and investigate our subjective reality in a truly scientific and empirical way, we will find unity. If we are open to it, it becomes unavoidable. That is why Zen teachers including Thich Nhat Hanh, Shunryu Suzuki and Anzan Hoshin Roshi have talked so much about interbeing in scientific terms.

There are many ways to approach unity, and many names for it. The absolute, connectedness, God, the larger self, interbeing, oneness, the deathless, transcendence, it's all the same. We recognize the validity of any approach that gives access to widest reality. In all approaches I know of the basic truth is the same: the way out of suffering and into the experience of unity is to accept suffering. This is always difficult from a relative perspective, and we have to start there.

Accepting pain and suffering and letting go of self image ends suffering. You would think that would be it, accept pain and suffering, submit to God, let the ego die, reality at last, unity with God, hallelujah!

Things do get a bit easier after we do it once. But as soon as we have seen through our current self image, a new one appears. This rebirth process is fast, and relief from suffering is momentary. As soon as we have a new self image, we start protecting it, separate from God and start suffering again.

If we want to stay real we have to repeat the death process. A cycle of death and rebirth must take place. With each rebirth we are more confident that between death and rebirth there is relief from suffering, and we gain more confidence in the benefits of practice.

This confidence is faith, not blind faith, but faith based on experience. The more faith we have, the easier it is to let go of self image and die into reality. We are not so desperate to hide from God. Ego death gets a bit easier each time.

The more we access unity, the more realistic our choices become on the relative level. We stop creating twisted situations, and respond in a more straight-forward, honest and direct way to life’s challenges. The more we do this, the less we fixate on our opinions. We no longer need to be right about everything to satisfy our small selves. We are free to apologize when we have mistakenly hurt some one. This improves our relationships, we find more joy and satisfaction in life, and we start to see the perfection and wholeness of God in our ordinary daily life.

As Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck pointed out, “we all have limits . . . it is difficult to see the perfection when we are hurting.” The way to extend our limits is to keep practicing. Joshu Roshi says if we work hard for a long time, eventually we don’t have to die any more. There ceases to be a gulf between the absolute and the relative, we stop contracting our sense of self down to self image. This is the promise that Shakyamuni made, there is a lasting end to suffering when we end the cycle of death and rebirth.

Reconciliation of God and suffering is not an intellectual exercise, if are really doing it, it is our practice.

I would like to finish by sharing Thich Nhat Hanh’s instructions on walking meditation with you:

You walk like you walk in the Kingdom of God. Right here, right now, don't wait until you die. . . . . .

You don't need to die in order to enter the Kingdom of God, in fact you have to be very alive in order to do so. Breathe in, become mindful, become truly alive, and you make one step, only one step can bring you into the Kingdom of God, right here, right now.

. . . . . . Every time you make a step, please make it mindfully, so that the land you tread will be the Kingdom of God, will be the Pure Land. It is the land of hell, or the land of God. . . . It depends on your way of walk[ing], not on the geological conditions.

You have heard that the Kingdom of God is in you. You have heard that the Buddha land is in you.

Touch it, make it real, walk in such a way that solidity and peace and non-fear can be possible. . . .Everywhere is the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is really available if you know how to walk.

It is a beautiful teaching.

Thank you very much for listening.