The Edible Bible

Years ago, I thought of manufacturing and selling edible Bibles. The book would be condensed, including only the most frequently quoted scriptures with pages made of a thin, wafer material similar to Catholic Holy Communion hosts. The idea was to cut out your favorite scripture and then eat it, after which it would mystically go deep inside where you would actually live that scripture.

As my spiritual life matured, however, I realized that simply reading something or even eating the words was not enough for a personal transformation to take place. We have to experience something quite amazing and unusual for a real change to happen, and when that change takes place, we must integrate that spiritual change differently from how we have integrated new experiences in the past.

So I began a quest to find out if it is at all possible to fundamentally change, which means not merely changing on the surface by pretending that we have changed, or living some kind of an ideal of perfection or fantasy, but changing essentially where all of our actions, big ones and little ones, become instinctively compassionate and wise.

My quest began as a selfish desire to find and experience enlightenment for myself, but as I began to meditate, I became more conscious of the world around me and concluded that whatever we were doing, it wasn't working.

What I was led to were methods by which the mind changes internally. In other words, "Wherever you go, there you are" changes to, "Wherever you go, there others are!" I could see that the idea of "me," which was so ingrained, had to change to "you," otherwise, everything that I did would be based on the "me" instead of the other. The "me" generation had to change to the "we" generation for the world to truly change. This I came to understand; and I understood as well that this would take a monumental shift in consciousness, because many people had the feeling that they were only responsible for themselves.

The feeling was that if you didn't have money, it was because of your personal laziness, and therefore if you are poor, or sick, or not mentally up to the task, well then, good luck; you are on your own – you deserve your bad fortune. The feeling was that we should only look out for ourselves and perhaps rely on our church or some other organization to help the poor. Other than contributing a small amount of deductable contributions to a church or organization, a cursory gesture for sure, we were out of the picture as far as a direct experience of helping our fellow human beings. We were detached and estranged from anyone not living up to our stringent standards. We looked upon others outside of our particular social strata as somehow less than us. We shunned and ignored those less fortunate and kept our distance, other than, of course, the cursory contributions we might make to a third party in order to look good, and that we could point to as an example of our charity.

This is not good enough, I thought. I felt that a dramatic "shift" in consciousness would be required. I felt this way because although we think that we are happy in our present consciousness (and therefore, why would anyone who is happy want to change his or her situation) we would never change our inner prickliness while we are under this delusion that our friends and activities fill us with happiness, and while we turn our backs on the rest of the world and humanity. We conveniently forget the "Wherever you go, there you are," aphorism that is so true. We drag all of our troubles and worries around with us, and although we think that we escape into our activities and friends, we can see that our happiness only lasts a short period of time, even though our psychological retention of that short-lived happiness creates the illusion that happiness is a permanent circumstance.

The Buddha's First Noble Truth looks at life objectively. The First Noble Truth is: "This is Suffering." He then describes the ways in which we suffer. He reminds us of eventual old age, disease and death, and also the clinging and attachment that bring up all kinds of trouble even while we are young. He said that the mere acknowledgment that we suffer is required as a first step toward authentic spirituality.

Without a serious illness or tragic event to shock us out of our complacency and dream world where we discover that a thin line separates us from the less fortunate, few in the opulent West ever see their own suffering until it is way too late to do anything constructive about it. We just don't believe that we are sick, and the Buddha always said that a patient without apparent symptoms will rarely take medicine. Only when we become sensitive to our real feelings and experiences, and see that indeed we worry and become stressful, will we begin to discover that we are in fact spiritually ill, regardless of our current practices and beliefs.

So eating the Bible won't work. Jamming our heads full of quotations and facts and spewing them while hating those who disagree with us, just doesn't work; we can never force others to go our way. What we can do is accept others for whatever they are, or whatever they believe, and worry more about our own lack of compassion.

Curiously enough, working on yourself, which seems a selfish thing to do, is the only way to defeat the ego. And if we think that a strong ego is a good thing, something necessary to defend our country or make sure that we survive, then we haven't even begun to understand the deeper levels of humanity, the levels that Christ and the Buddha were all about.

We haven't begun to explore our "selves."