The audio is available above, but it is poor quality. Thanks to Joe Lightfoot for hosting us!

It was a real joy to meet Michel Bauwens in person for the first time at this event.

Slightly edited transcript: 

All right—hello, everyone. I’m going to share something that’s very personal, but also transpersonal. I’ll be talking about the tension between Christianity and Buddhism within myself, if indeed there is a self. Maybe there is no self, and the tension is being held by some other means. I’m not exactly sure. But I’m not trying to convert anybody. This is just about my journey. I actually really enjoy being converted by others who are deeply devoted to paths that are not my own, because it helps me, through differentiation, understand who in the hell I am and what I’ve gotten myself mixed up with.

So I’ll share a little bit of autobiography first. I grew up with a mother who is quite evangelical and a father who is an agnostic Jew—he thought he was an atheist, but once I started getting philosophical we had some conversations, and it turned out he wasn’t an atheist, he’s agnostic. I ran away from my mother’s Christianity as a thirteen-year-old. I started reading physics and biology, and I started thinking of myself as much smarter than anyone who might be religious. I was kind of an obnoxious atheist for a couple of years there in my teens—which might be developmentally appropriate, though some people get stuck there.

By the time I was seventeen, I got exposed to Buddhism and started to meditate. I found Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, Chögyam Trungpa, and really got taken by the California, New Age form of Buddhism. So I was calling myself a Buddhist for a few years. By the time I was nineteen, I was meditating every day, and I was starting to feel a little bit depressed. I wouldn’t have said so at the time, because I thought it was meditative equanimity, and that I was on the verge of Awakening—but I was starting to lose touch with social reality, because I thought it was all an illusion of projections, maya, and egoistic competition and all that.

When I was nineteen, I ate some psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. I was going to journal at my desk. And something strange happened. I had an experience of what I immediately recognized as the Christ. I did not choose Christianity. I would have to say I was interrupted by it while I was trying to be a Buddhist.

I think of Buddha and Christ outside the context of any particular tradition or institution. These are real spiritual beings. They’re here with us, and within us. The traditions that grow up around them are, obviously, portals to them, and they carry wisdom and teachings that help us become aware of these beings—but for me, they’re not just cultural constructs or something. They’re real, and you can contact them.

And so this has been my struggle over the last twenty years. I haven’t stopped being a Buddhist. I haven’t stopped trying to sit under the Bodhi tree. But this Christ came into my heart, and there are some tensions between these two teachings.

Alfred North Whitehead is a philosopher I’ve studied who helps me mediate this tension. He says this about Christianity: it is a religion seeking a metaphysic. Buddhism, on the other hand, is a metaphysic generating a religion. What does he mean by that? Well, Christianity comes out of this bizarre event that happens in first-century Palestine. This Jewish guy, Jesus, gets some followers going, says he’s the Messiah, he’s crucified, he dies, he’s put in a tomb—and then, supposedly, he rises from the dead, and the whole religion starts. Initially it was mostly led by women who were having meetings in their homes, and eventually an entire empire had to rebrand itself because of the explosion of conversions that came out of this event. So it’s a religion—in other words, a saving experience that people were having in response to this event—and it’s seeking a metaphysic in the sense that it’s still trying to figure out what Christ’s deed means. Christians’ responses to that question come through centuries of argument.

Buddhism, on the other hand, comes out of Siddhartha Gautama, who had this awakening experience just sitting with his own moment-to-moment experience, and recognized that reality is empty, that there is no self, and that the cause of suffering is the clinging to the idea that there is a self. So it’s an insight into the nature of experience, the nature of reality, that then generates a religion—one that, like Christianity, is now worldwide. As Whitehead puts it: “The Buddha gave his doctrine to enlighten the world; Christ gave his life. It is for Christians to discern the doctrine.”

Whitehead also says this, in Modes of Thought:

“When the religious thought of the ancient world from Mesopotamia to Palestine, and from Palestine to Egypt, required terms to express that ultimate unity of direction in the Universe, upon which all order depends, and which gives its meaning to importance; they could find no way better to express themselves than by borrowing the characteristics of the touchy, vain, imperious tyrants who ruled the empires of the World. In the origin of civilized religion, Gods are like Dictators. Our modern rituals still retain this taint. The most emphatic repudiations of this archaic notion are to be found scattered in the doctrines of Buddhism and in the Christian Gospels.”

So what, then, helps me mediate this tension between Buddhism, where there is no self, and Christianity, where the divine is itself a relationship between beings? It’s not that there’s necessarily a separate self in Christianity, either—there’s the doctrine of the Trinity, where the nature of ultimate reality is relationship. And that’s not necessarily incompatible with Buddhism. But I still struggle with this. 

The Buddha is saying, unclench your fist, let go of the clinging to the self you think you are. And I’m happy to open my hand. And then Christ comes in and holds it. I need both of these impulses.

Whitehead goes on to say that in the present day, both of these traditions are in decay. Why are they in decay? Well, it’s been thousands of years since these teachers lived, and their inspiration has begun to wane—mostly, Whitehead says, because they need to learn from each other. What do they need to learn from each other? To balance these two impulses. For Buddhism, nirvana comes through the cessation of craving—blow out the candle. Whereas for Whitehead, eros, desire, craving, is the engine of evolution. It’s the teleology of the universe—he says “beauty is the teleology of the universe.” So the Buddha says: stop desiring. And Whitehead says: this life is an adventure, and it’s driven by desire, driven by this erotic longing to intensify our experience.

In other words, history and evolution—which are so important to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—are not just a kind of illusion. It’s not just a cyclical māyā or play that you should step out of in order to awaken. Something is actually trying to happen here, and we have a role to play in its achievement. And I think both of these things can be simultaneously true. This tension I hold—it’s not a problem I’m trying to resolve. It’s really a contrast that forms my heart-mind, and I believe it intensifies experience.

So I say: I’m a Christian at heart and a Buddhist in mind, and it’s Whitehead’s cosmology—which I won’t have a chance to say much about today—that helps me mediate between these two places. Buddhism is a deep philosophy that comes out of a careful analysis of the structure of experience, and it is true. And yet I can’t help but feel my heart broken open by what I would describe as a Christian impulse: to be in the world, and to be in love with other people and with what it’s possible for us to create together—not in a naïve way, but, you know, devotionally.

I think I’ve said everything I wanted to say. So maybe we can have more time for conversation. Thanks for your attention, everyone.

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Q&A

Audience: Is there a short version of Whitehead’s cosmology?

Matt: Yes. He has a view of reality in which everything is in process and everything is related to everything else—it’s a lot like the Buddhist idea of dependent co-origination. Nothing has self-abiding existence separately from everything else; everything coexists. And he has a vision of the divine, of God, as involved in the world—not just as a creator; not as a creator at all, actually. He describes God as a creature. His ultimate principle is Creativity. So if you ask what’s really real, for him it’s Creativity—this process of ongoing eruption of novelty. And God is the first creature of that Creativity, who sets the tone for all the other creatures that enter into cosmogenesis. What God is like, for Whitehead, is a lure. He says God holds up a mirror to every creature to reflect back to that creature its own potential beauty and greatness. We can feel that, and we respond to it, and we try to bring that beauty into the world—and we usually fail. But over the course of thousands, millions, billions of years, I would say there’s evidence of some kind of impulse in the nature of things that pulls it toward harmony. And that’s God.

Audience: How is that different from what people usually mean when they say God is in control?

Matt: This kind of God is not coercive—not forcing you to do anything. It’s a persuasive God who shows you something beautiful, and you feel, of your own accord, out of your own freedom, drawn to it. The power of God in this view is the love and the worship that God inspires. God doesn’t reach in and change things or force anything to happen. Whitehead’s vision of God is the love that we feel for each other, the creative pull that we feel to make beautiful art, to build community—that’s God working through us. We still have our own subjective freedom; it’s just that there’s something inspiring us to behave in ways that are good and true and beautiful, and we can call that inspiring agent God.

Audience: So do you think it’s up to us to define what’s ultimately real?

Matt: To some extent, yeah. But I think, for societies to hold together, we need to do better than everyone just having their own private opinion about what’s ultimately real. We have to coordinate with each other and arrive at something shared, if possible.

Audience: I recently discovered there are maybe fifteen Christian ashrams in India uniquely devoted to this kind of understanding. And when I was younger, in Brussels, there were Dominican friars—a group called “Ways of the Orient”—organizing an ongoing investigation of Buddhism. Do you know Raimon Panikkar?

Matt: Panikkar is an important influence for me. He would describe himself as fully Indian, fully Buddhist, and fully Christian. And he had a PhD in chemistry as well, so he embraced science too.

Audience: Would you do the same—identify as both a Christian and a Buddhist?

Matt: I tend not to identify, really, unless someone asks. … The Buddha is all about compassion—there is suffering, and there is a cure. And Christ is all about the passion—it’s literally all about the Passion. So, passion and compassion. Different, but we need both.

Audience: Have you come across tantra?

Matt: Yeah—in California, in grad school, I took some courses in Tibetan Buddhism, Vajrayana, tantric Buddhism. I wasn’t studying tantra too deeply, but a lot of my friends were. And I think that’s the direction Whitehead is tending toward—the tantric path, which goes into the eros of life and death rather than away from it, and recognizes that desire isn’t simply something to be extinguished.

Audience: A bit of my background: I spent about fifteen years inside Christianity, but I was born and raised in a Buddhist context, so I hold these two things in my view all the time. The Buddhist context I come from is very intense — it’s part of the culture; there are rules for what I cannot do based on the Buddhist cultural context. My sense is that Buddhism is something we practice, something on the inside — whereas Christianity feels more like reaching upward; you see it even in church architecture, trying to reach for God, to be higher. What’s your experience?

Matt: I have always found it very difficult to find a home at any church I’ve ever been to — Catholic, or any of the many Protestant churches, Episcopal, Anglican, Orthodox. I just don’t feel at home there, because there’s so much encrustation of patriarchy and hierarchical forms of cultural organization that I don’t think have anything to do with the true teaching. If Mary Magdalene had been allowed to be a leader of the church, I think we’d be in a different place.