I was at a meeting some time ago and I listened to a woman talk about a problem she was having with her spiritual practice. It seems that she had been studying the writings of a particular man and had found his teachings meaningful. So, after only reading what he had written for a number of years, she decided to attend a spiritual retreat that he was conducting. She found him irritating, non-enlightened and far from the spiritual guru that she had grown to love over the years. Meeting the man in person completely destroyed, for her, his teachings. He was no longer a person she felt she could look up to, or learn from.
I see how this happens in American society, we can’t separate the ideas from the personality. A dualistic view of the world doesn’t give the majority of us much practice living in the grey areas of life. Someone is either good or they are bad, and we base much of this either/or choice on personality and behavior. Personality rules, behavior rules. The content of who we are is what makes us worthy or unworthy.
Yet, content is completely subjective, and more often than not, it is created by our own projection of our own selves. We see irritation in the same place that we cause irritation. We see non-enlightenment from the place of non-enlightenment within ourselves. We create the content, therefore the only way to judge the content is to judge ourselves.
Could we, perhaps, begin to relate to others as process, rather content? Could we see “others” as the meeting of both them and us; that unique space that happens in every encounter that shows that we are not separate beings. My content is not different from your content. Together we are process.
An intriguing question for me, what if we began to relate to Jesus as process, rather than content? What if the complicated Christian story isn’t the focus? Who does Jesus become if he is no longer a man, a martyr, a savior, the son of God, the product of the virgin birth – really anything that has become the content of a self-differentiated person? Jesus becomes the process that occurs when the teachings that are attributed to him encounter an “other.”
