Jack’s testimony of how an ex-Buddhist Christian Pastor helped him identify misinterpretations of scripture that were crippling his spiritual life.

Readership: All
Theme: Culture / Buddhism
Length: 2,000 words
Reading Time: 10 minutes

In many posts here at Σ Frame, I and other authors have often attempted to put the most basic beliefs and concepts of Christianity into words as a testimony of our faith, and also to inspire faith and belief in others.  This post contains another such testimony.

Executive Summary

My pastor was a Buddhist before he became a Christian.  I went to see him to discuss conflict in my marriage (ca. 2018).  During our talks, he told me that I was essentially a Buddhist.  I was surprised to hear this because I grew up in a Baptist church and I never had any interest in Buddhism.  I asked him why he thought so.  He said that my view of desire — that desire must be controlled, contained, and eliminated if possible, to achieve inner peace (IOW, Comfortably Numb) — and my concept of obedience — always altruistically doing the right thing — were fundamental Buddhist beliefs.  Once I understood these things about myself, I was able to undergo an ego adjustment and find a deeper connection to my faith.

The remainder of this post conveys the details.

Desire and Ego

Note: I described this before in The Biblical Adage of “Dying to Self” is not Ego Ablation (2022/8/5).  Here I’ll briefly reiterate with added emphasis on what I’ve learned.

After reading the entire Bible as a youth, I concluded that the phrase “dying to self” refers to getting rid of pride and killing the ego.  Furthermore, I’d heard countless times from other Christians and from reading Christian literature that pride and ego are enemies of faith, strongly reinforcing this notion.

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And so that is exactly what I did.  Because I believed that the ego was part of the “old self” that needed to die, I killed my ego as a general habit until I had no ego at all.  Likewise, I sacrificed all desire until I didn’t even know what I desired.  I made altruism my main focus in dealing with others, and I was always introspective, suspecting that I might have bad motivations.  I did not consider what others thought of me and simply followed my conscience.

There were several negative byproducts / effects of this approach.

  1. It destroyed my spiritual discernment.
  2. I became crippled by self-consciousness.
  3. Removing desire killed all my contentment and joy.
  4. Being ego-less promulgated a distrust of others.  I always felt like dealing with other people posed a risk to maintaining a clear conscience.
  5. People found it very difficult to relate to me.  In fact, it prevented authentic social connections to the point that others couldn’t understand me.
  6. It was common for others to assume that I was a bad guy, simply because I had no ego.  This often left me feeling angry, frustrated, and rejected because even when I hadn’t done anything wrong, people assumed I did and treated me as if I did.

Note: My cousin told me he also experienced point 6.  But the way he dealt with this is by actually doing the bad behaviors that others expected of him.  He told me it was better to own it than to let others define him and make him feel guilty for things he never did.  My conscience wouldn’t allow me to think like him.  Interestingly, he’s fared much better in life than I have in terms of $$$ and women.

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There were a few points I had to learn before I could ‘get it’.

  1. Discernment and desire are bound together, and the discernment of desire brings suffering.  One may be able to avoid suffering by abandoning discernment and desire, but at what cost to one’s soul?
  2. Desire is bound up in and expressed through the ego.
  3. The ego is the link between the head and the heart.  It is through the ego that the two are connected and synchronized.
  4. People who believe things in their head that they don’t believe in their heart, and vice versa, are people who have a broken, guilty, or maladjusted ego.
  5. People who have a poor or maladjusted ego are typically bad, immature, or morally corrupt individuals.
  6. People who are heavily into religion of any type, typically have a guilty conscience and/or a poorly developed ego.

After talking with him, praying, and meditating on these things, I learned that having a strong ego is important, but it must be healthy and well-adjusted.  Catacomb Resident and Ed Hurst are the only other Christians I’ve known who have said such things.  Every other Christian voice in my life has only warned me against the pitfalls of a prideful ego — without mentioning that rejecting the ego is NOT a Christian option for dealing with this problem.

The epiphany that made this click for me was realizing that point 5 above is what people sensed in me that led them to conclude I was a bad guy.

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The 8 Fold Path of Righteousness

The Noble 8 Fold Path of Buddhism is essentially the Buddhist equivalent of The 10 Laws of Human Nature (LoHN).  The difference is that where the 10 LoHN Boundaries are implemented for the purpose of obtaining greater authenticity, freedom, intimacy, openness, and trust, and to provide a protective hedge against evil individuals and influences, the 8 Fold Path of Buddhism is essentially a sincere, whole-hearted attempt to free one’s self of all iniquity, sin, and unrighteousness, both internal and external, in order to attain inner peace.

These 8 points are briefly summarized below (paraphrased according to my best understanding).

  1. Right View — To gain a correct understanding of reality and to clear one’s path from confusion, misunderstanding, and deluded thinking.
  2. Right Motivation — To renounce worldly living and to avoid violent and hateful conduct.
  3. Right Speech — No false testimony, gossiping, lying, rude speech, etc.
  4. Right Conduct — No killing or injuring, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, no covetousness or greed, etc.
  5. Right Livelihood — Pursuing an honest profession; no sex trafficking; no trading in weapons, living beings, liquor, meat, or poisons.
  6. Right Effort — To maintain an internal locus of control and to be a responsible moral agent.
  7. Right Mindfulness — To always be conscious of what one is thinking and doing and never be absent-minded (i.e. autopilot), coupled with the awareness of the impermanence of body, emotions, and mind.
  8. Right Consciousness — Develop and maintain a Noetic Nose and strive for the integrity of body, mind, heart / soul, and spirit.
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The 8 Fold Path vs Christianity

Overall, Buddhism is excellent Coram Mundo, but it is inadequate Coram Deo.

The thing that Buddhism gets right is that it covers all 10 of the LoHN (from a mystical standpoint), especially that one’s life is largely determined by one’s choices and that actions have consequences.  The things it gets wrong are that (1) suffering (The Law of Evaluation) is mismanaged and (2) righteousness cannot be attained by human effort.  The Christian path to righteousness is through repentance and faith in Jesus’ work on the cross, whereas Buddhists hope to be righteous enough so that repentance won’t be necessary.  Buddhists do believe in repentance, but if it ever comes to the fore, then one is considered to be careless, irresponsible, shameful, and stupid.  IOW, you bumbled one of the “Right” paths, notably paths 6-8. (Buddhists identify Christians’ need of repentance as a consequence of neglecting these paths.)

For Christians, a comprehensive reading of the Old and New Testament provides a familiarity with the first 6 paths.  However, there are a few things that what passes for modern Christianity gets wrong.

Over the past few decades, the first path, Right View, has been severely compromised by Blue Pilled beliefs, Chivalry, Churchianity, cultural convergence, Feminism, and sexual permissiveness.  Only since the advent of the Red Pill have we started a course correction.  Similarly, the Western equivalent of the sixth path, Right Effort, has been co-opted by Feminism and has thus degraded into male hyperagency and female hypoagency, and the concept of maintaining an internal locus of control has been neglected almost entirely except by certain Christian authors (e.g. John Chrysostom, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, A. W. Tozer, et al.) who have addressed this aspect of faith in the form of mystical ponderings and fictional mythos.

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The last two paths, Right Mindfulness and Right Consciousness, are not well understood nor practiced by Christians.  To Westerners, Right Mindfulness tends to devolve into self-consciousness rather than conscientiousness, and navel-gazing rather than feedback assessment, introspection, and self-monitoring.  A functional equivalent of Right Consciousness is recognized by Eastern Orthodoxy,* but is summarily dismissed as heresy, Gnosticism, or New Agey nonsense by Western churches.

* If one was schooled in both Buddhism and Eastern Orthodoxy, I believe one could compare many of the Buddhist paths with the mystical disciplines of EO.  For example, Right Mindfulness is similar to Nepsis, Right Consciousness is like Hesychasm and Ousia, and so on.  (Sorry if I got that comparison wrong.  I’m not EO.)

Results

To sum up, there were predominantly two false concepts I had gained from reading the Bible and growing up in churchianity.

  1. “Dying to self” = Killing my desire and ego and thereby avoiding temptation and sin.
  2. Obedience to the Lord = Altruism; Legalism; Self-Righteousness

My Pastor said my beliefs and practical approach is just like what Buddhists do.  He said I was Buddhist but I didn’t know it.  This was a grand mal OMG! experience for me.  It seemed so bizarre because I got these impressions from reading the Bible!

Concerning the first point, after talking with my Pastor and realizing that the ego is not evil but an important part of my psyche that has to be dealt with and cannot be rejected, there was one day, in the space of a moment, it felt like I suddenly had an ego that popped up out of nowhere!

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Concerning the second, my pastor insisted that I was proud, but this didn’t make sense to me.  I am too much of a loner to be proud.  After contemplating this, I realized that my issue was not one of pride, but rather a general inability to trust due to some childhood experiences.  But being proud and being unable to trust have the same effects on one’s spiritual life, and they look the same to others on the outside.  Sticking to altruism allowed me to avoid having to trust — trusting others, trusting myself, and trusting God with my sin.  The latter caused me a lot of angst, because it felt like I was letting it all hang out, but my pastor helped me understand that this is what is necessary to deal with it — to truly “know myself”, confess, repent, and correct course.  I couldn’t just contain it, cover it up, and/or deny it.  Without heartfelt trust, doing all the “Right” stuff becomes legalism.

Now, it is clear to me that I went down this path because I was already distrustful due to some childhood trauma, but I was too young to understand this about myself at the time.  Only after talking with my Pastor did I realize that I was distrustful and that this was not the right way to “die to the old self”.

I used to be very foolish (i.e. lacking spiritual discernment), or ‘dumb’ as my mother often pointed out to me when I was a kid (always to my shame).  But since this epiphany, my discernment has slowly been growing, as well as my inner joy and peace.  It’s much easier for me to get in tune with God than it used to be.

But still, to this day, I find that dealing with the ego, desire, discernment, humility, trust, etc. to be more trouble than what I feel it is worth.  I feel this way because it tends to bring more suffering than joy.  However, as time goes on, I have come to see this pain to be less of a distracting nuisance, and more as evidence of being spiritually alive.  IOW, I am no longer (un)Comfortably Numb.  I’ve had the idea that this suffering is partly what it means to “suffer for the sake of Christ”, but I’m afraid I might be wrong about this too.  I’d appreciate hearing readers’ thoughts about this.

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