In Christian theology, kenosis (Ancient Greek: κένωσις, romanized: kénōsis, lit. 'the act of emptying') is the "self-emptying" of Jesus. The word ἐκένωσεν (ekénōsen) is used in the Epistle to the Philippians: "[Jesus] made himself nothing" (NIV),[1] or "[he] emptied himself" (NRSV)[2] (Philippians 2:7), using the verb form κενόω (kenóō), meaning "to empty".
The exact meaning varies among theologians. The less controversial meaning is that Jesus emptied his own desires, becoming entirely receptive to God's divine will, obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross, and that it encourages Christians to be similarly willing to submit to divine will, even if it comes at great personal cost. The phrase is interpreted by some to explain the human side of Jesus: that Jesus, to truly live as a mortal, had to have voluntarily bound use of his divine powers in some way, emptying himself, and that it says that "though [Jesus] was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited," suggesting that Jesus was not "abusing" his divine status to avoid the implications of a mortal life. This interpretation is contested by others, who consider this to overly downplay the divine power of Jesus, for example.
Etymology and definition
The term kenosis comes from the Greek κενόω (kenóō), meaning "to empty out". The Liddell–Scott Greek–English Lexicon gives the following definition simplified for the noun:[3]
emptying, depletion, emptiness (of life) (Vettius Valens)
depletion, low diet, as opposed to plerosis, fullness (Hippocrates)
waning (of the moon) (Epicurus)
New Testament usage
The New Testament does not use the noun form kénōsis, but the verb form kenóō occurs five times (Romans 4:14; 1 Corinthians 1:17, 9:15; 2 Corinthians 9:3; Philippians 2:7) and the future form kenōsei once.[a] Of these five times, Philippians 2:7 is generally considered the most significant for the Christian idea of kenosis:
Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself (ekenōsen heauton), taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name...
— Philippians 2:5-9 (NRSV)[5]
Christology
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Kenotic Christology
Philippians 2 is sometimes used to explain the human side of Jesus's existence. In early Christianity, some groups propounded beliefs of a fully human Jesus who was especially honored and raised up by God (adoptionism), while other groups argued for a fully divine Jesus that was more like a spiritual apparition (docetism). The Chalcedonian doctrine that prevailed was that Jesus had a dual nature, and was both fully human and fully God. Kenotic Christology essentially states that in order to truly live a human experience, Jesus, despite being a preexisting divine being, voluntarily humbled himself. He could still perform miracles, heal the sick, and dispense reliable moral doctrine, but was not using divine might to resolve all of his problems as a mortal, and struggled through all the usual human problems. Thus, Jesus needed to sleep and eat; was tempted by the Devil in the wilderness; could become frustrated at fig trees not being in season; stated that no one knows the day or hour of the end of the world;[6] and so on.[7]
Gottfried Thomasius is the first theologian to discuss and expound upon kenotic Christology by name. Other theologians associated with kenotic Christology include P. T. Forsyth, H. R. Mackintosh, Charles Gore, Fisher Humphreys, Donald G. Dawe, and Roger E. Olson.[7]
Eastern Orthodoxy
Orthodox theology emphasises following the example of Christ. Kenosis is only possible through humility and presupposes that one seeks union with God. The Poustinia tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church is one major expression of this search.
Kenosis is not only a Christological issue in Orthodox theology, but also relates to Pneumatology, matters of the Holy Spirit. Kenosis, relative to the human nature, denotes the continual epiklesis and self-denial of one's own human will and desire. With regard to Christ, there is a kenosis of the Son of God, a condescension and self-sacrifice for the redemption and salvation of all humanity. Humanity can also participate in God's saving work through theosis; becoming holy by grace.[8]
In Eastern Orthodoxy, kenosis does not concern becoming like God in essence or being, which is pantheism; instead, it concerns becoming united to God by grace, through his "Energies". Orthodox theology distinguishes between divine Essence and Energies. Kenosis therefore is a paradox and a mystery since "emptying oneself" in fact fills the person with divine grace and results in union with God. Kenosis in Orthodox theology is the transcending or detaching of oneself from the world or the passions, it is a component of dispassionation. Much of the earliest debates between the Arian and Orthodox Christians were over kenosis. The need for clarification about the human and divine nature of the Christ (see the hypostatic union) were fought over the meaning and example that Christ set, as an example of kenosis or ekkenosis.[9]
Catholicism
Pope Pius XII, in his 1951 Sempiternus Rex Christus, condemned a particular interpretation of Philippians in regards to the kenosis:
There is another enemy of the faith of Chalcedon, widely diffused outside the fold of the Catholic religion. This is an opinion for which a rashly and falsely understood sentence of St. Paul's Epistle to the Philippians (ii, 7), supplies a basis and a shape. This is called the kenotic doctrine, and according to it, they imagine that the divinity was taken away from the Word in Christ. It is a wicked invention, equally to be condemned with the Docetism opposed to it. It reduces the whole mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption to empty the bloodless imaginations. 'With the entire and perfect nature of man'—thus grandly St. Leo the Great—'He Who was true God was born, complete in his own nature, complete in ours' (Ep. xxviii, 3. PL. Liv, 763. Cf. Serm. xxiii, 2. PL. lvi, 201).[10]
In John of the Cross's thinking, kenosis is the concept of the 'self-emptying' of one's own will and becoming entirely receptive to God and the divine will. It is used both as an explanation of the Incarnation, and an indication of the nature of God's activity and will. Mystical theologian John of the Cross' work "Dark Night of the Soul" is a particularly lucid explanation of God's process of transforming the believer into the icon or "likeness of Christ".[11][12]
Unitarianism
Since some forms of Unitarianism do not accept the personal pre-existence of Christ, their interpretations of Philippians 2:7, and the concept of kenosis—Christ "emptying" himself—take as a starting point that his "emptying" occurred in life, and not before birth. However, as Thomas Belsham put it, there are varying views on when in life this emptying occurred.[13] Belsham took this to be at the crucifixion, whereas Joseph Priestley[14] took this to be in the Garden of Gethsemane when Christ did not resist arrest. The Christadelphian Tom Barling considered that the "emptying" of Christ was a continual process which started in the earliest references to Christ's character, Luke 2:40,52, and continued through the temptations of Christ and his ministry.[15]
Gnosticism
The equivalent to kenosis in Gnostic literature is Christ's withdrawal of his own luminosity into himself, so as to cease dazzling his own disciples. In the Pistis Sophia, at the request of his disciples, "Jesus drew to himself the glory of his light".[16]
Kenotic ethic
The kenotic ethic is an interpretation of Philippians 2:7 that takes the passage, where Jesus is described as having "emptied himself", as not primarily as Paul putting forth a theory about God in this passage, but as using God's humility exhibited in the incarnation as a call for Christians to be similarly subservient to others
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosis
Ego death is a "complete loss of subjective self-identity".[1] The term is used in various intertwined contexts, with related meanings. The 19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James uses the synonymous term "self-surrender", and Jungian psychology uses the synonymous term psychic death, referring to a fundamental transformation of the psyche.[2] In death and rebirth mythology, ego death is a phase of self-surrender and transition,[3][4][5][6] as described later by Joseph Campbell in his research on the mythology of the Hero's Journey.[3] It is a recurrent theme in world mythology and is also used as a metaphor in some strands of contemporary western thinking.[6]
In descriptions of drugs, the term is used synonymously with ego-loss[7][8][1][9] to refer to (temporary) loss of one's sense of self due to the use of drugs.[10][11][1] The term was used as such by Timothy Leary et al.[1] to describe the death of the ego[12] in the first phase of an LSD trip, in which a "complete transcendence" of the self[note 1] occurs.
The concept is also used in contemporary New Age spirituality and in the modern understanding of Eastern religions to describe a permanent loss of "attachment to a separate sense of self"[web 1] and self-centeredness.[13] This conception is an influential part of Eckhart Tolle's teachings, where Ego is presented as an accumulation of thoughts and emotions, continuously identified with, which creates the idea and feeling of being a separate entity from one's self, and only by disidentifying one's consciousness from it can one truly be free from suffering.[14]
Definitions
Ego death and the related term "ego loss" have been defined in the context of mysticism by the religious studies scholar Daniel Merkur as "an imageless experience in which there is no sense of personal identity. It is the experience that remains possible in a state of extremely deep trance when the ego-functions of reality-testing, sense-perception, memory, reason, fantasy and self-representation are repressed [...] Muslim Sufis call it fana ('annihilation'),[note 2] and medieval Jewish kabbalists termed it 'the kiss of death'".[15]
Carter Phipps equates enlightenment and ego death, which he defines as "the renunciation, rejection and, ultimately, the death of the need to hold on to a separate, self-centered existence".[16][note 3]
In Jungian psychology, Ventegodt and Merrick define ego death as "a fundamental transformation of the psyche". Such a shift in personality has been labeled an "ego death" in Buddhism, or a psychic death by Jung.[18]
In comparative mythology, ego death is the second phase of Joseph Campbell's description of the Hero's Journey,[4][5][6][3] which includes a phase of separation, transition, and incorporation.[6] The second phase is a phase of self-surrender and ego-death, after which the hero returns to enrich the world with their discoveries.[4][5][6][3]
In psychedelic culture, Leary, Metzner, and Alpert (1964) define ego death, or ego loss as they call it, as part of the (symbolic) experience of death in which the old ego must die before one can be spiritually reborn.[19] They define ego loss as "... complete transcendence − beyond words, beyond spacetime, beyond self. There are no visions, no sense of self, no thoughts. There are only pure awareness and ecstatic freedom".[19][20]
Several psychologists working on psychedelics have defined ego-death. Alnaes (1964) defines ego death as "[L]oss of ego-feeling".[10] Stanislav Grof (1988) defines it as "a sense of total annihilation [...] This experience of "ego death" seems to entail an instant merciless destruction of all previous reference points in the life of the individual [...] [E]go death means an irreversible end to one's philosophical identification with what Alan Watts called "skin-encapsulated ego".[21] The psychologist John Harrison (2010) defines "[T]emporary ego death [as the] loss of the separate self[,] or, in the affirmative, [...] a deep and profound merging with the transcendent other.[11] Johnson, Richards and Griffiths (2008), paraphrasing Leary et al. and Grof define ego death as "temporarily experienc[ing] a complete loss of subjective self-identity.[1]
Conceptual development
The concept of "ego death" developed along a number of intertwined strands of thought, including especially the following: romantic movements[22] and subcultures;[23] Theosophy;[24] anthropological research on rites de passage[25] and shamanism;[23] William James' self-surrender;[26] Joseph Campbell's comparative mythology;[4][5][6][3] Jungian psychology;[27][3] the psychedelic scene of the 1960s;[28] and transpersonal psychology.[29]
Western mysticism
According to Merkur,
The conceptualisation of mystical union as the death of the ego, while the soul remains the sole bearer of the self, and its replacement by God's consciousness, has been a standard Roman Catholic trope since St. Teresa of Ávila; the motif traces back through Marguerite Porete, in the 13th century, to the fana,[note 2] "annihilation", of the Islamic Sufis.[30]
Jungian psychology
According to Ventegodt and Merrick, the Jungian term "psychic death" is a synonym for "ego death":
In order to radically improve global quality of life, it seems necessary to have a fundamental transformation of the psyche. Such a shift in personality has been labeled an "ego death" in Buddhism or a psychic death by Jung, because it implies a shift back to the existential position of the natural self, i.e., living the true purpose of life. The problem of healing and improving the global quality of life seems strongly connected to the unpleasantness of the ego-death experience.[18]
Ventegodt and Merrick refer to Jung's publications The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, first published 1933, and Psychology and Alchemy, first published in 1944.[18][note 4]
In Jungian psychology, a unification of archetypal opposites has to be reached, during a process of conscious suffering, in which consciousness "dies" and resurrects. Jung called this process "the transcendent function",[note 5] which leads to a "more inclusive and synthetic consciousness".[31]
Jung used analogies with alchemy to describe the individuation process, and the transference-processes which occur during therapy.[32]
According to Leeming et al., from a religious point of view psychic death is related to St. John of the Cross' Ascent of Mt. Carmel and Dark Night of the Soul.[33]
Mythology – The Hero with a Thousand Faces
See also: Dying-and-rising god and Descent to the underworld
The Hero's Journey
In 1949, Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a study on the archetype of the Hero's Journey.[3] It describes a common theme found in many cultures worldwide,[3] and is also described in many contemporary theories on personal transformation.[6] In traditional cultures it describes the "wilderness passage",[3] the transition from adolescence into adulthood.[25] It typically includes a phase of separation, transition, and incorporation.[6] The second phase is a phase of self-surrender and ego-death, whereafter the hero returns to enrich the world with his discoveries.[4][5][6][3] Campbell describes the basic theme as follows:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.[34]
This journey is based on the archetype of death and rebirth,[5] in which the "false self" is surrendered and the "true self" emerges.[5] A well known example is Dante's Divine Comedy, in which the hero descends into the underworld.[5]
Psychedelics
See also: Shamanism, Neo-shamanism, and Beat Generation
Main articles: The Psychedelic Experience and Bardo
Concepts and ideas from mysticism and bohemianism were inherited by the Beat Generation.[22] When Aldous Huxley helped popularize the use of psychedelics, starting with The Doors of Perception, published in 1954,[35] Huxley also promoted a set of analogies with eastern religions, as described in The Perennial Philosophy. This book helped inspire the 1960s belief in a revolution in western consciousness[35] and included the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a source.[35] Similarly, Alan Watts, in his opening statement on mystical experiences in This Is It, draws parallels with Richard Bucke's 1901 book Cosmic Consciousness, describing the "central core" of the experience as
... the conviction, or insight, that the immediate now, whatever its nature, is the goal and fulfillment of all living.[36]
This interest in mysticism helped shape the emerging research and popular conversation around psychedelics in the 1960s.[37] In 1964 William S. Burroughs drew a distinction between "sedative" and "conscious-expanding" drugs.[38] In the 1940s and 1950s the use of LSD was restricted to military and psychiatric researchers. One of those researchers was Timothy Leary, a clinical psychologist who first encountered psychedelic drugs while on vacation in 1960,[39] and started to research the effects of psilocybin in 1961.[35] He sought advice from Aldous Huxley, who advised him to propagate psychedelic drugs among society's elites, including artists and intellectuals.[39] On insistence of Allen Ginsberg, Leary, together with his younger colleague Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) also made LSD available to students.[39] In 1962 Leary was fired, and Harvard's psychedelic research program was shut down.[39] In 1962 Leary founded the Castalia Foundation,[39] and in 1963 he and his colleagues founded the journal The Psychedelic Review.[40]
Following Huxley's advice, Leary wrote a manual for LSD-usage.[40] The Psychedelic Experience, published in 1964, is a guide for LSD-trips, written by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, loosely based on Walter Evans-Wentz's translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.[40][35] Aldous Huxley introduced the Tibetan Book of the Dead to Timothy Leary.[35] According to Leary, Metzner and Alpert, the Tibetan Book of the Dead is
... a key to the innermost recesses of the human mind, and a guide for initiates, and for those who are seeking the spiritual path of liberation.[41]
They construed the effect of LSD as a "stripping away" of ego-defenses, finding parallels between the stages of death [web 2]and rebirth in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and the stages of psychological "death" and "rebirth" which Leary had identified during his research.[42] According to Leary, Metzner and Alpert it is....
... one of the oldest and most universal practices for the initiate to go through the experience of death before he can be spiritually reborn. Symbolically he must die to his past, and to his old ego, before he can take his place in the new spiritual life into which he has been initiated.[12]
Also in 1964 Randolf Alnaes published "Therapeutic applications of the change in consciousness produced by psycholytica (LSD, Psilocybin, etc.)."[43][10] Alnaes notes that patients may become involved in existential problems as a consequence of the LSD experience. Psycholytic drugs may facilitate insight. With a short psychological treatment, patients may benefit from changes brought about by the effects of the experience.[43]
One of the LSD-experiences may be the death crisis. Alnaes discerns three stages in this kind of experience:[10]
Psychosomatic symptoms lead up to the "loss of ego feeling (ego death)";[10]
A sense of separation of the observing subject from the body. The body is beheld to undergo death or an associated event;
"Rebirth", the return to normal, conscious mentation, "characteristically involving a tremendous sense of relief, which is cathartic in nature and may lead to insight".[10]
Timothy Leary's description of "ego-death"
In The Psychedelic Experience, three stages are discerned:
Chikhai Bardo: ego loss, a "complete transcendence" of the self[note 1] and game;[19][note 6]
Chonyid Bardo: The Period of Hallucinations;[44]
Sidpa Bardo: the return to routine game reality and the self.[19]
Each Bardo is described in the first part of The Psychedelic Experience. In the second part, instructions are given which can be read to the "voyager". The instructions for the First Bardo state:
O (name of voyager)
The time has come for you to seek new levels of reality.
Your ego and the (name) game are about to cease.
You are about to be set face to face with the Clear Light
You are about to experience it in its reality.
In the ego−free state, wherein all things are like the void and cloudless sky,
And the naked spotless intellect is like a transparent vacuum;
At this moment, know yourself and abide in that state.
O (name of voyager),
That which is called ego−death is coming to you.
Remember:
This is now the hour of death and rebirth;
Take advantage of this temporary death to obtain the perfect state −
Enlightenment.
[...][45]
Research
Stanislav Grof
Stanislav Grof has researched the effects of psychedelic substances,[46] which can also be induced by nonpharmacological means.[47] Grof has developed a "cartography of the psyche" based on his clinical work with psychedelics,[48] which describe the "basic types of experience that become available to an average person" when using psychedelics or "various powerful non-pharmacological experiential techniques".[48]
According to Grof, traditional psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy use a model of the human personality that is limited to biography and the individual consciousness, as described by Freud.[49] This model is inadequate to describe the experiences which result from the use of psychedelics and the use of "powerful techniques", which activate and mobilize "deep unconscious and superconscious levels of the human psyche".[49] These levels include:[29]
The sensory barrier and the recollective-biographical barrier
The perinatal matrices:
BPM I: The amniotic universe. Maternal womb; symbiotic unity of the fetus with the maternal organism; lack of boundaries and obstructions;
BPM II: Cosmic engulfment and no exit. Onset of labor; alteration of blissful connection with the mother and its pristine universe;
BPM III: The death-rebirth struggle. Movement through the birth channel and struggle for survival;
BPM IV: The death-rebirth experience. Birth and release.
The transpersonal dimensions of the psyche
Ego death appears in the fourth perinatal matrix.[29] This matrix is related to the stage of delivery, the actual birth of the child.[50] The build up of tension, pain and anxiety is suddenly released.[50] The symbolic counterpart is the death-rebirth experience, in which the individual may have a strong feeling of impending catastrophe, and may be desperately struggling to stop this process.[21] The transition from BPM III to BPM IV may involve a sense of total annihilation:[21]
This experience of ego death seems to entail an instant merciless destruction of all previous reference points in the life of the individual.[21]
According to Grof what dies in this process is "a basically paranoid attitude toward the world which reflects the negative experience of the subject during childbirth and later".[21] When experienced in its final and most complete form,
...ego death means an irreversible end to one's philosophical identification with what Alan Watts called skin-encapsulated ego."[21]
Recent research
Recent research also mentions that ego loss is sometimes experienced by those under the influence of psychedelic drugs.[51]
The Ego-Dissolution Inventory is a validated self-report questionnaire that allows for the measurement of transient ego-dissolution experiences occasioned by psychedelic drugs.[52]
View of spiritual traditions
Following the interest in psychedelics and spirituality, the term "ego death" has been used to describe the eastern notion of "enlightenment" (bodhi) or moksha.
Buddhism
Zen practice is said to lead to ego-death.[53] Ego-death is also called "great death", in contrast to the physical "small death".[54] According to Jin Y. Park, the ego death that Buddhism encourages makes an end to the "usually-unconsciousness-and-automated quest" to understand the sense-of-self as a thing, instead of as a process.[55] According to Park, meditation is learning how to die by learning to "forget" the sense of self:[55]
Enlightenment occurs when the usually automatized reflexivity of consciousness ceases, which is experienced as a letting-go and falling into the void and being wiped out of existence [...] [W]hen consciousness stops trying to catch its own tail, I become nothing, and discover that I am everything.[56]
According to Welwood, "egolessness" is a common experience. Egolessness appears "in the gaps and spaces between thoughts, which usually go unnoticed".[57] Existential anxiety arises when one realizes that the feeling of "I" is nothing more than a perception. According to Welwood, only egoless awareness allows us to face and accept death in all forms.[57]
David Loy also mentions the fear of death,[58] and the need to undergo ego-death to realize our true nature.[59][60] According to Loy, our fear of egolessness may even be stronger than our fear of death.[58]
"Egolessness" is not the same as anatta (non-self). Where the former is more of a personal experience, Anatta is a doctrine common to all of Buddhism – describing how the constituents of a person (or any other phenomena) contain no permanent entity (one has no "essence of themself"):
the Buddha, almost ad nauseam, spoke against wrong identification with the Five Aggregates, or the same, wrong identification with the psychophysical believing it is our self. These aggregates of form, feeling, thought, inclination, and sensory consciousness, he went on to say, were illusory; they belonged to Mara the Evil One; they were impermanent and painful. And for these reasons, the aggregates cannot be our self.[web 3]
Taoism
The Taoist internal martial artist Bruce Frantzis reports an experience of fear of ego annihilation, or "ru ding":
I was in Hong Kong, beginning to learn the old Yang style of Tai Chi Chaun when ru ding first struck me… It was late at night, at a still and quiet terrace on the Peak, where few people came after midnight…the park was quiet, and the moon and the sky felt as though they were descending downward, putting enormous pressure on every square inch of my skin, as I tried to lift my arms with the expansive energy of tai chi…I felt as if Chi from the moonlight, stars, and sky penetrated my body against my will. My body and mind became immensely still, as though they had dropped into a bottomless abyss, even though I was doing the rhythmic slow motion movements…At the depth of the stillness, an overwhelming, formless fear began to develop in my belly…. Then it happened: an all-consuming, paralyzing fear seemed all at once to invade every cell in my body… I knew if I kept practicing there would be nothing left of me in a few seconds… I stopped practicing… and ran down the hill praying hard that this terror would leave me…. The ego, goes into a mortal fear when the false reality of being separate from the universal life force is threatened by your consciousness having reached an awareness of connection to everything in existence. The ego spews forth all sorts of terrifying psychological and physiological reactions in the body and mind to make meditators petrified of leaving the state of separation.
Bernadette Roberts
Bernadette Roberts makes a distinction between "no ego" and "no self".[61][62] According to Roberts, the falling away of the ego is not the same as the falling away of the self.[63] "No ego" comes prior to the unitive state; with the falling away of the unitive state comes "no self".[64] "Ego" is defined by Roberts as
... the immature self or consciousness prior to the falling away of its self-center and the revelation of a divine center.[65]
Roberts defines "self" as
... the totality of consciousness, the entire human dimension of knowing, feeling and experiencing from the consciousness and unconsciousness to the unitive, transcendental or God-consciousness.[65]
Ultimately, all experiences on which these definitions are based are wiped out or dissolved.[65] Jeff Shore further explains that "no self" means "the permanent ceasing, the falling away once and for all, of the entire mechanism of reflective self-consciousness".[66]
According to Roberts, both the Buddha and Christ embody the falling away of self, and the state of "no self". The falling away is represented by the Buddha prior to his enlightenment, starving himself by ascetic practices, and by the dying Jesus on the cross; the state of "no self" is represented by the enlightened Buddha with his serenity, and by the resurrected Christ.[65]
Integration after ego-death experiences
Psychedelics
According to Nick Bromell, ego death is a tempering though frightening experience, which may lead to a reconciliation with the insight that there is no real self.[67]
According to Grof, death crises may occur over a series of psychedelic sessions until they cease to lead to panic. A conscious effort not to panic may lead to a "pseudohallucinatory sense of transcending physical death".[10] According to Merkur,
Repeated experience of the death crisis and its confrontation with the idea of physical death leads finally to an acceptance of personal mortality, without further illusions. The death crisis is then greeted with equanimity.[10]
Vedanta and Zen
Both the Vedanta and the Zen-Buddhist traditions warn that insight into the emptiness of the self, or so-called "enlightenment experiences", are not sufficient; further practice is necessary.
Jacobs warns that Advaita Vedanta practice takes years of committed practice to sever the "occlusion"[68] of the so-called "vasanas, samskaras, bodily sheaths and vrittis", and the "granthi[note 7] or knot forming identification between Self and mind".[69]
Zen Buddhist training does not end with kenshō, or insight into one's true nature. Practice is to be continued to deepen the insight and to express it in daily life.[70][71][72][73] According to Hakuin, the main aim of "post-satori practice"[74] (gogo no shugyo[75] or kojo, "going beyond"[76]) is to cultivate the "Mind of Enlightenment".[77] According to Yamada Koun, "if you cannot weep with a person who is crying, there is no kensho".[78]
Dark Night and depersonalization
See also: Depersonalization
Shinzen Young, an American Buddhist teacher, has pointed at the difficulty integrating the experience of no self. He calls this "the Dark Night", or
... "falling into the Pit of the Void." It entails an authentic and irreversible insight into Emptiness and No Self. What makes it problematic is that the person interprets it as a bad trip. Instead of being empowering and fulfilling, the way Buddhist literature claims it will be, it turns into the opposite. In a sense, it's Enlightenment's Evil Twin.[web 4]
Willoughby Britton is conducting research on such phenomena which may occur during meditation, in a research program called "The Dark Night of the Soul".[web 5] She has searched texts from various traditions to find descriptions of difficult periods on the spiritual path,[web 6] and conducted interviews to find out more on the difficult sides of meditation.[web 5][note 8]
Influence
See also: Influence of Timothy Leary
The propagation of LSD-induced "mystical experiences", and the concept of ego death, had some influence in the 1960s, but Leary's brand of LSD-spirituality never "quite caught on".[79]
Reports of psychedelic experiences
Leary's terminology influenced the understanding and description of the effects of psychedelics. Various reports by hippies of their psychedelic experiences describe states of diminished consciousness which were labelled as "ego death", but do not match Leary's descriptions.[80] Panic attacks were occasionally also labeled as "ego death".[81]
The Beatles
John Lennon read The Psychedelic Experience, and was strongly affected by it.[82] He wrote "Tomorrow Never Knows" after reading the book, as a guide for his LSD trips.[82] Lennon took about a thousand acid trips, but it only exacerbated his personal difficulties.[83] He eventually stopped using the drug. George Harrison and Paul McCartney also concluded that LSD use didn't result in any worthwhile changes.[84]
Radical pluralism
According to Bromell, the experience of ego death confirms a radical pluralism that most people experience in their youth, but prefer to flee from, instead believing in a stable self and a fixed reality.[85] He further states this also led to a different attitude among youngsters in the 1960s, rejecting the lifestyle of their parents as being deceitful and false.[85]
Controversy
The relationship between ego death and LSD has been disputed. Hunter S. Thompson, who tried LSD,[86] saw a self-centered base in Leary's work, noting that Leary placed himself at the centre of his texts, using his persona as "an exemplary ego, not a dissolved one".[86] Dan Merkur notes that the use of LSD in combination with Leary's manual often did not lead to ego-death, but to horrifying bad trips.[87]
The relationship between LSD use and enlightenment has also been criticized. Sōtō-Zen teacher Brad Warner has repeatedly criticized the idea that psychedelic experiences lead to "enlightenment experiences".[note 9] In response to The Psychedelic Experience he wrote:
While I was at Starwood, I was getting mightily annoyed by all the people out there who were deluding themselves and others into believing that a cheap dose of acid, 'shrooms, peyote, "molly" or whatever was going to get them to a higher spiritual plane [...] While I was at that campsite I sat and read most of the book The Psychedelic Experience by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass, later of Be Here Now fame). It's a book about the authors' deeply mistaken reading of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a guide for the drug taking experience [...] It was one thing to believe in 1964 that a brave new tripped out age was about to dawn. It's quite another to still believe that now, having seen what the last 47 years have shown us about where that path leads. If you want some examples, how about Jimi Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Syd Barrett, John Entwistle, Kurt Cobain... Do I really need to get so cliched with this? Come on now.[web 7]
The concept that ego-death or a similar experience might be considered a common basis for religion has been disputed by scholars in religious studies[88] but "has lost none of its popularity".[88] Scholars have also criticized Leary and Alpert's attempt to tie ego-death and psychedelics with Tibetan Buddhism. John Myrdhin Reynolds, has disputed Leary and Jung's use of the Evans-Wentz's translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, arguing that it introduces a number of misunderstandings about Dzogchen.[89] Reynolds argues that Evans-Wentz's was not familiar with Tibetan Buddhism,[89] and that his view of Tibetan Buddhism was "fundamentally neither Tibetan nor Buddhist, but Theosophical and Vedantist".[90] Nonetheless, Reynolds confirms that the nonsubstantiality of the ego is the ultimate goal of the Hinayana system.[91]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death
There is an unavoidable paradox in a Christianity that calls its leaders to be humble. This was brought home to me a few years back, on a Sunday morning after church. The assistant pastor had preached the sermon, and in the process of making his point (which I don’t recall!) he had included himself among those who needed to respond to the message. This didn’t bother me in the slightest; it is deep in our preaching tradition, and, if sincere, is very effective, to my thinking. But afterwards in the courtyard I heard a shocked reaction. Samir is a Muslim, the husband of one of our members, who sometimes attends church social functions and visits very rarely on Sunday mornings. We had gotten to know him well enough for him to share with us his honest disgust at what he had heard: how could the church foster someone as a leader who was so clearly a loser? As I attempted to respond briefly but meaningfully, my mind was suddenly spinning at the challenge of bridging the gap between a sincere and legitimate question, and the complexity of the full theological answer it deserved.
Philippians 2:5-11, a text on the short list of any consideration of Christian humility, is also a locus classicus for incarnational theology, with its dense and poignant narration of the path that Jesus took from glory to abasement and back to glory. Paul’s emphasis is not on the Christology, but on the model it provides to the Philippians of a Christian spirituality: “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus “ (Phil. 2:5). Paul wants his readers to consider how Jesus followed his path, even if the Church has tended to give much more attention to the substantive issues of nature, essence, form, attributes, deity, and humanity.
Philippians is known as an epistle of joy—a recent reviewer has noted “the countless popular studies on Philippians…, many with the word joy in the title somewhere”1—but the foreground of serious distress, for the church as well as for the imprisoned apostle, is increasingly acknowledged.2 Paul commends the mind of Christ (or attitude, or way of thinking, as it is sometimes translated) because he knows that the Philippian community is struggling: God has been “granted” it to them “to suffer for his sake” (Phil. 1:29). In this extremis, Paul commends to his flock the essential mind-set that was Christ’s in the pain of his own distress: “he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death” (Phil. 2: 8).
Humility and obedience, then, go a long way in giving us the content of the “mind of Christ,” that is, the basic orientation and even motivation that governed all that Jesus said and did (and suffered to be done) during his earthly ministry. The humility is layered and textured: accession to the will of the Father, involving the relinquishing of heavenly prerogatives, the entrance into the existence of the slave rather than a lord, and finally experiencing death itself, and an ignominious death at that. The obedienceis entirely strategic, accomplishing the redemption that is the will of God.3To refuse it would entail an unholy “grasping” or “exploitation” (Phil. 2:6). So this is a humility and an obedience that have the essential character of peace and joy, as the epistle as a whole indicates, and as is clear in the depictions of Christ in the Gospels. In the “mind of Christ,” joy, humility, and obedience define each other.
Much theological effort has been expended on Paul’s observation that “Christ Jesus, being in the form of God,… emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness” (Phil 2: 6-7). Several “kenotic” theories (from kenosis or “emptying”) have been propounded over the centuries to help explain what was laid aside and what retained in the astonishing act of incarnation. Something of a consensus is emerging on the front of Pauline studies, which understands the passage in the following way: “form of God” and “form of a slave/human likeness” point not to a mere surface appearance, but to authentic existence God and as a human.4 Further, those translations—and there are many—which read that “although he existed in the form of God,… he emptied himself” ought to be corrected to more accurate phrasing: “being in the form of God” or even “because he existed in the form of God,… he emptied himself.” That is, the self-emptying is not to be seen as a divestment of deity; on the contrary, it is an expression of deity. Jesus is able to do it because he is God. The act of incarnation is an elegant expression of what God can do that is otherwise to us incomprehensible: in the being and existence of God, he took as well the being and existence of the creature. Surely he “emptied himself” of something; above we used J. B. Lightfoot’s language, that he divested himself of heavenly prerogatives. Without ceasing to be God, he became human. As N. T. Wright has written, “The pre-existent son regarded equality with God not as excusing him from the task of (redemptive) suffering and death, but actually as uniquely qualifying him for that vocation.”5
I suggest that there is a key here to the paradox in which Christians are called to exercise leadership in humility.6 If Paul describes deity as being able elegantly to function as humanity, it is not a stretch to understand Christian leadership as intended to function and to be empowered precisely in humble solidarity with humanity. Many are the prerogatives of the professional ministry, some of which are arguably necessary to the task. But all professional honors and privileges and prerogatives cut against the very grain of the ministry itself unless they become part of the resources by which we exercise Christian leadership in the mind of Christ: to be there for others, to listen to others, to pray for others, to exert and network for others, and to speak the grace of God to others in the diligence of obedience.
“If you've gotten anything at all out of following Christ, if his love has made any difference in your life, if being in a community of the Spirit means anything to you, if you have a heart, if you care—then do me a favor: Agree with each other, love each other, be deep-spirited friends. Don't push your way to the front; don't sweet-talk your way to the top. Put yourself aside, and help others get ahead. Don't be obsessed with getting your own advantage. Forget yourselves long enough to lend a helping hand. Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself…” (Phil. 2:1-6, The Message7).
—Theopulos
To refuse to do it would entail an unholy “grasping” or “exploitation” (Phil. 2:6).
1 D. A. Carson, New Testament Commentary Survey (6th ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), p. 115.
2 See, for instance, Gregory L. Bloomquist, The Functioning of Suffering in Philippians (JSNT Sup 78. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993).
3 Romans 5:12-21 offers a further meditation on the value of Jesus’ obedience: if by disobedience the world was plunged into loss and death, “so by the one man’s obedience” loss and death are overturned decisively.
4 The progress of this discussion can be followed in contemporary critical commentaries such as Peter O’Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians(NIGTC. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991) pp. 186-270, or, more briefly, Margaret Thrall, “The Epistle to the Philippians,” in Keck, et al., eds, The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX (Nashville: Abingdon, 2000), pp. 500-517.
5 Cited in O’Brien, p. 216.
6 Robert J. Wood, a Quaker and sometime dean of Yale University Divinity School, addresses the proclivity of many in his communion to “regard the term ‘Quaker leadership’ as an oxymoron;” he has much to say to other groups in his essay, “Christ Has Come to Teach His People Himself: Vulnerability and the Exercise of Power in Quaker Leadership,” in Richard J. Mouw and Eric O. Jacobsen, eds., Traditions in Leadership: How Faith Traditions Shape the Way We Lead (Pasadena: The De Pree Leadership Center, 2006) pp. 208-221. The citation is from p. 209.
7 Eugene Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language(Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002), ad loc.
www.fuller.edu/next-faithful-step/resources/kenosis/
