The Arithmetic
Five teachings on the subtraction every tradition arrives at, and why it is not a loss.
The Themes page calls this the same uncomfortable arithmetic, and the phrase is exact. Every tradition that goes deep enough arrives at a sum in which something has to be given up for the rest to come out right, and the something is always the same: the self you spent the second course looking for and could not quite locate. What could not be found must, apparently, still be surrendered. That is the discomfort.
This course does not soften it. It takes five readings that state the arithmetic plainly, from a hillside in Galilee to a lecture hall in the twentieth century, and it asks you to sit with each one rather than argue. Two of them are frightening on purpose. One of them is a goddess with a necklace of skulls. The last one is a single question, asked gently by a dying man, that undoes the whole difficulty in nine words. Read them in order. The order is the argument.
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V.1The poor in spiritThe Sermon on the Mount opens with a word that does not mean what it has come to mean.The Beatitudes · Matthew 5:1–12
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V.2The grain of wheatPaul names the move, and John gives it a seed.Kenosis — The Self-Emptying · Philippians 2:5–7; John 12:24
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V.3Call no one happyThe Greeks name the self that refuses the arithmetic, and watch what happens to it.Hubris and the Fall · Greek tragic tradition: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Homer
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V.4The dark, facedThe goddess of death and time is called Mother, and the teaching is in the facing.Kali — Facing the Darkness · Kali iconography; Tantric and Bengali devotional tradition
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V.5Who is that?Ram Dass, near the end of his life, asks the question that undoes the whole difficulty.Bearing the Unbearable · Ram Dass, “Dealing With Suffering and Seeing It as Grace”
Five readings on the one sum every tradition arrives at. It is not a happy course and it was not written to be. But notice what it did not say. It did not say you are nothing. It did not say suffering is good. It said that the self which reports the loss is the same self that the second course could not find, and that when it is asked its name, something in the difficulty shifts.
The next course is about what happens after that shift, the moment the wall you did not know was a wall thins out and you see through it. It is one of the first courses written, when this site was small, and it belongs here, after the arithmetic, because that is where it happens.