Feb. 14, 2026
The Ground Beyond:
Courting a New Conciousness
I cannot imagine that I am the only one who, in these fraught days, has recalled Albert Einstein’s famous statement: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” A review of history offers up a number of moments when humanity has made surprising leaps of awareness to address challenges both moral and practical, and we may find both satisfaction and hope in noting our progress. But while psychologists and sociologists search their disciplines for keys to unlock resolutions to today’s seemingly intractable problems, entry into the new consciousness needed today must look to the spiritual – or perhaps, beyond it.
We live in a world of moral dichotomies: right/wrong, good/evil, justice/mercy. Scores of philosophers have argued their roots and boundaries; numberless heated exchanges over fences or dinner tables or pub drinks have attempted to define them. The word “polarization” is tossed around much these days, but when applied to the most volatile issues facing us – climate change, immigration, military enterprises – one may rightly ask whether we are any longer at either end of a spectrum, or rather broken into unmendable pieces. As lives are ravaged, and people die.
We need to find a way off the teeter-totter of the moral good as defined by competing perceptions of reality at best, by
individual or tribal interests at worst. We need to discover something currently unimaginable: a new seat of compassion and justice that serves and includes all – even and particularly those over against whom we define ourselves. Yes, Herr Einstein, we need a new level of consciousness.
Jesus Consciousness
At the heart of Jesus’s teaching was the imminent Kingdom of God, not as a heavenly destination free from struggle and care, but as a new age on earth defined by the work of justice and mercy for all, the culmination of the tutelage of Israel begun in the covenant with Abraham that called the people out to be a blessing to the world. And the road into that Kingdom was repentance.
Repentance acknowledges the struggle embedded in faithfulness. Far beyond remorse for misdeeds, the repentance preached by the prophets to a recalcitrant people of Israel called for a “turning around,” a reorientation of one’s whole being in the return to the covenant with God and the work of justice it called forth. This God’s justice was one born of humility and compassion in the care for the most vulnerable – a tall order, and one the Jewish people, and indeed humanity, often failed to fulfill. And Jesus was about to raise the stakes.
When Jesus stepped into the line of Hebrew prophets, he almost certainly used the same Aramaic word, shuv, to invoke the need for repentance as had those before him. But in explicit discourse and evocative parables, Jesus positioned repentance within faithfulness to a new standard, a new covenant that demanded a complete emptying of self-interest in love of neighbor, a law that redefined neighbor to include the enemy, 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘮𝘺 𝘢𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘰𝘢𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘮𝘺 𝘦𝘮𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘮.
The full impact of this call can perhaps only be felt by those living under authoritarian power. Or in a home with an abuser. Or by a wrongly incarcerated person of color. Or an immigrant afraid to leave the house. The call to love the enemy does not sound like the birthplace of justice, not the kind we generally desire anyway. Righteous anger feels more to the point – and the gospels give ample evidence that Jesus had plenty of that. But his message was clear: Don’t stop there.
I have to wonder how this command landed on ancient, oppressed ears. Did it sound as impossible to his hearers then as it does to us? Yet hear it they did, for there it is, wound throughout the record of his teaching. Borne on the spirit of one who not only spoke it but lived it, what was inconceivable was also indisputable.
Yet also there, nearly hidden, is a hint to the 𝘩𝘰𝘸 that we will struggle to discern. Of the several Greek words available to gospel writers in their translation of 𝘴𝘩𝘶𝘷 – at least one of which strikes very near the original – by far the most frequently chosen term is a slightly less literal one, 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘪𝘢. Considered apart from the alternatives, many theologians have yet seen 𝘴𝘩𝘶𝘷 and 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘪𝘢 as commensurate. But biblical scholar Marcus Borg has discovered in the choice of 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘪𝘢 something more revolutionary, something with the power to convey the immediate impact of Jesus himself on his first-century followers.
Borg has suggested that the overtones of 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘪𝘢 in ancient usage, even its etymology, push not toward a simple turning or return, but into an entreaty to “𝘨𝘰 𝘣𝘦𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦.” This 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘪𝘢 evokes the mystery of undiscovered territory, of new levels of awareness, of unfolding dimensions of truth; it calls us into direct knowledge of the divine Reality beyond the limitations of our conceptual structures – into the very Reality at the core of Jesus’s own experience. “The Kingdom of God is within you.”
This 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘪𝘢 opens the way for humanity to move beyond the repetition of the conflicts that have plagued history. A way glimpsed by a spiritual giant of an even earlier era.
Buddha Consciousness
Six hundred years before Jesus, the eyes of a pampered prince living on the Indian sub-continent opened upon a depth of human suffering unimaginable within the gates of his palace. Abandoning his privileged life of wealth and pleasure, Siddartha Gautama first pursued the ascetic life of the holy men of his realm, only to find no wisdom there. But the recollection of an experience of deep contemplative peace as a child, led Siddhartha to pledge to sit beneath the shelter of a bodhi tree in the forest of Uruvela, along the banks of the Nerañjara River, to await in meditation an understanding of reality that might offer a path out of suffering. After 49 days of the awakened contemplation that met him there, the Buddha re-entered the world to invite all of life into the ground beyond it.
What the Buddha experienced presaged the ground from which Jesus’s call to 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘰𝘪𝘢 would emerge. The Buddha called it Emptiness, not because it was nothing, but because it could not be objectified, could not be conceptualized, could only be directly realized as womb of Being. From within this field of Emptiness everything arises not as single and independent entities choosing to interact with other entities, but as profoundly interdependent manifestations of the Suchness, the Isness, the Fullness of What Is. Every single thing we see and hear and know, including our own beings, owes its life to every other single thing and being. Each of us in our own fullness 𝘪𝘴 the other, is 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 other. Together we arise and perish, moment to moment, in the dance of life that includes and yet transcends each and every pulse that brings forth existence.
And the only way to know it, said the Buddha, is to let go of what we think we know, to let go, in fact, of knowing itself. To trust the Reality we seek to know, whose way is barred by our attempts to hold the infinite in finite categories. To welcome the new consciousness that is seated beyond mind, in direct apprehension of the mutual participation of everything that arises into manifestation.
For it is here, he tells us, and only here, that true wisdom and compassion are born. In an open awareness that loves not “in spite of” the other, but “just because of” the other, lies the only genuine potential for creativity, for harmony, for the thriving of All.
Our Consciousness
Different men, from different cultures and different historical circumstances. Employing different cosmologies, different vocabularies. There is much to distinguish between the movements that formed and developed in the train of their teachings. Yet from one within his intimacy with a God of history, and from the other within his experience of an open field of rich and interwoven possibility, there emerged the same invitation: to step into an immediate consciousness of the Reality beyond our imagining, to resonate with the harmonies of the Truth that is not a value but that is royally and thoroughly and simply What Is.
No less a scholar than esteemed Japanese philosopher Masao Abe has suggested that indeed the Buddha’s Emptiness can be compared with Jesus’s Kingdom of God. It is a brave assertion, for many from both camps continue to back away from such parallels. But these are times that call for courage, that demand wisdom from wherever we may find it, and that reward the one who looks for the shared rather than the possessed. These are times that can afford nothing less than the open hearts that may hold the sacredness of Being in complete openness and expectancy of a radiant wholeness, however one finds the way there.
What will this new consciousness reveal to us? What possible resolutions to the current impasse of ideologies may be discovered there? I have no idea, and that is the point. We will not see it and know it until we are willing to sacrifice our need to be right in order to realize the creative compassion that the few who lived from it have reported to us, until we are willing to step past even the ground that seems the most solid. Even the best of the present known can block our view of the unknown, more, can dismantle our trust that there is more to be known.
It is a fine line, to be sure, for I am most definitely not advocating a passive posture of waiting for what waits for us beyond our certainty. We must act from the best, the most thoroughly examined, of truth as we see it. Nor am I claiming that finding what is beyond is easy, or that it will offer instant solutions. But even as we act from our most humble and compassionate lights, we must also cultivate the ground, unbolt the door to what lies beyond – the Emptiness, the Kingdom, the Harmony and Wholeness that is the next step in the evolution of humanity into the image of God.
We must begin, for if we do not bravely look, and trust, beyond where we are, nothing will change. Fortunately for us this path is not an all or nothing proposition. Small transformations will happen along the way, mirroring our commitment 𝘵𝘰 the way.
The Buddha called it meditation; Jesus called it prayer. For both it was opening to the possible by taking a step back before taking a step forward. It was the moment of remembering who they were in the hands of the Ultimate, of remembering 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘴𝘦 hands they were. And 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 taking a step, and another, until the opening and the step become one.
It seems clear that Jesus and the Buddha spoke from a ground that most of us have not yet gazed into. The issue for our time, it seems to me, is not whether we believe it was true for them, but whether we believe that it is true for 𝘶𝘴, and whether it is true for us 𝘯𝘰𝘸, already existing as the ground under our next step. The ground beyond right and wrong, beyond good and evil, beyond justice and mercy. The ground wherein the enemy and I are one, where there is no enemy. The ground of an entirely new way of being.
The issue for our time is whether we are willing to do the work to seek it, open to it, prepare for it.
Yes, it is impossible to imagine. Now. Yet. But why let that stop us? Are we not, after all, on an adventure?
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