Lent begins with the tribal story of the Exodus and concludes with the myth being lived out in the person of Jesus. From today the liturgy readings focus on the events that led to the tragic climax of his downfall, death and resurrection. Today’s gospel, however, opens with an apparently mundane detail: Among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. These approached Philip, who came from Bethsaida in Galilee, and put this request to him, ‘Sir, we should like to see Jesus.’ Philip went to tell Andrew, and Andrew and Philip together went to tell Jesus. Is the point to highlight the expansion of his influence beyond the Jewish world? Or to accentuate the physical danger Jesus was in and the need for security?

At many moments in life the very uncertainty of what might be the correct interpretation sharpens our sense of reality. How often do we have a sense of uncertainty about the meaning of something or the incipient feeling of meaninglessness while we also sense that something of great significance is underway? The passing details of a loved one’s last hours of life can remain with you for the rest of yours. In important moments we pay attention to everything. including all the loose ends and unanswered questions of life.

From this point in the Lent cycle, we are swept forward in a story of inescapable intensity, drawn into a sequence of events which we have heard before. But, as with children, repetition makes them new.

Jesus has just been told that some foreigners have asked to see him. His response to this small thing is not to check his schedule. Instead, he expresses both his anxiety about the direction events are taking happen and the meaning that is now beginning to unfold and whose outcome he already knows is inevitable. His hour has come and the ultimate meaning of his young life will be fulfilled. This will happen not through success and acclaim – as we fantasise fulfilment will come to us – but through failure, pain, loss and the non-negotiability of death. He sees the necessity of this when he says that a seed has to die before it will produce a harvest.

Then, turning from his personal fate to the universal truth of the human condition he shares with us the meaning, the truth. Anyone who wants to find their life must lose it. We cannot have our cake and eat it until we have let go of the cake and our desire for it. And, if he is the way we follow, we will have to go through what he is passing through. Hard though this path seems, discipleship reveals the Father, the source, to us as it has known and lived with it since his mission began.

The exodus in this personal transition is the final break with the powers of samsara, all the alliance of illusory forces that block and delude us. What seems the end becomes transparent and we see a new beginning take shape. Everything will be made new as we free ourselves from ancient bonds and embrace the unique gift of life that makes each of us who we truly are.

It is when you say goodbye to someone that you understand what the time you spent together really meant. The ending of something allows you to see it as a whole, beginning, middle and end, and its meaning is easier to grasp. You might feel sorrow at the separation or the loss about to occur. You might sense some missed opportunities, which makes it feel you not only had a wonderful time together but also that something is incomplete and there is a residue of unrealised potential.

Maybe this is why Irish goodbyes take so long, so that people have time to reflect on all these flavours of meaning before they leave. But, probably not, they just enjoy talking, and people tend to talk more at the end because perhaps there will not be another opportunity.

Saying goodbye – as Jesus is doing in many of the passages of scripture we will read between now and Holy Week – the week of the long goodbye – impresses on us that what is past can never be repeated. We may say ‘au revoir’ or ‘hasta la vista’ or ‘see ya again soon’ – but we know that, if and when we do, we will be different people. We will recognise each other but how much will have been forgotten, discarded or have wholly faded from the pages of memory. In a sense, then, at every future reunion we will be starting again. Every farewell is a death undergone in the hope of a resurrection. But the certainty of hope – which is faith – does not mean that death does not transform and transfigure everything. Understandably, we say Let’s not leave it too long before next time.

There is a uniqueness and unrepeatability in every encounter, all relationships and contact, however brief or enduring, intimate or superficial. Uniqueness is the fingerprint of God in this life on everything in time and space.

Nicholas of Cusa was a great Christian thinker of the 15^th century – cardinal and active church reformer – seen today as a transition between the medieval and the modern world. He anticipated many themes of modernity. His key insight was the ‘coincidence of opposites’ as being the ground of truth and so an especially good way of describing God. It means that God no longer needs to be thought of as separate and outside the human and natural world that He had called into being. He is here with us even when He is absent and absent, or self-concealing, when He feels most present. I learned recently that Nicholas was the first person to study plant growth and see that plants gain nourishment from the air – and that air has weight. Amazing, how much we can do in life when we are not wasting time with time-saving devices and trying to make our lives more convenient or productive.

Approaching God as the ground of being unites even the most polarised objects of consciousness in the ‘ever-present origin’ and widens the tent of consciousness which is our home in this universe. This changes even the finality of death, and so makes the daily goodbyes a little easier.

A key feature of Indian spiritual teaching is maya. It originally meant the magic power by which gods could convince humans that the unreal is real. Later it denoted the cosmic force that makes the whole phenomenal world convincingly real and enduring. This can be an attractive teaching at the mental level but a frightening one when it comes to experiencing and realising it for oneself.

It’s attractive because it seems to offer an escape route – should you ever need it or decide to risk taking it – out of the problems of this world into a real world imagined as a celestial resort wholly composed of peace and joy and selfless staff. Ramana Maharshi, the embodiment if anyone is of the wisdom of the eastern mind, is characteristically nondual about this. Yes, the world as we see and suffer it is unreal, like an image projected onto a screen or the words written on a blank page. But this concept of its unreality is a thorn used to remove a thorn. Once we have actually verified, the illusory nature of the world, as a projection of our minds dominated by ego-forces, we no longer have to reject it.

Ramana said: ‘At the level of the spiritual seeker you have got to say that the world is an illusion. There is no other way. When someone forgets that he is Brahman, who is real, permanent and omnipresent, and deludes himself into thinking that he is a body in the universe which is filled with bodies that are transitory, and labours under that delusion, you have got to remind him that the world is unreal and a delusion.’ But when you see through its illusory nature you see that God and the universe are one, the paper and the words on it are one.

Is this a problem solved? Or a path indicated? Only practice and patience can lead us gradually to see exactly what the ‘illusory nature of the world’ means. If we don’t see its meaning, we steal the idea to increase our illusory world and narrow our vision of reality. Yet experience proves that the world we think we live in as real is a projection of fears, desires and misreadings. Of course we want to escape the pain of this. But it is its illusory nature itself we should first be working on.

A practice of meditation will do this with an, at first, temporary and, eventually, unbroken effect. We can at any moment cease to worry and rage, simply by turning to the golden radiance of the kingdom within us. It is close at hand even if the path seems narrow. Change your mind, redirect the beam of your attention and place your trust in the reality that appears.

Is this a seductive call to separate us from those we love and to coldly turn our attention from a suffering world that we should rather bring engaged compassion to? First, we should come to the place where illusion and reality confront and then make the choice before we prejudge.

Recently I was on an immensely long and steep escalator at an airport. I don’t like heights but I turned around to look down. I saw a separated family regrouping themselves. As I went higher, they receded and became smaller but I saw the efforts happening in an ever-greater space. As I became more distant, I could also feel closer. Maybe dying is like this.

You cannot tell by observation when the kingdom of God will appear. You cannot say ‘look here it is or there it is’… for the kingdom is within, outside, among, between, around you. To think we can see it located anywhere except everywhere simultaneously is maya.

The Passion of Christ, like innocent suffering everywhere, suggests how wonderfully and tragically we are interwoven as human beings. It is a very crude and often cruel understanding of karma to say that when bad things happen it’s a result of our own actions. There is such a thing as chance and, although everything except Being itself has a cause, causes can be random. It’s not all about bad luck, however, there is the power of darkness arising from the action of a deluded individual, such as a global tyrant, which affects the world and whose effects last for generations.

By darkness I am thinking of ignorance, unenlightened consciousness and the incapacity to feel the feelings of others. Think of the ripple effect of the Holocaust or the pain and resentment of the Palestinian children in Gaza today or an incident of child abuse in an ordinary family that takes decades to be exposed. The interdependence of human beings is so astonishingly infinite in its nature that nothing except the principle of unity can explain it or cure us when we have been wounded by chance or darkness itself.

Yesterday I asked about the meaning of the idea that the world is illusory. It would be insulting to dismiss the suffering of a child or a torture victim as illusory and just say ‘meditate your way into oneness and everything will be alright.’ When you feel pain, it is very real and justice demands an immediate compassionate response from any human person, stranger or friend, who can offer it. The victim – it is not demeaning to be called a ‘victim’ of an earthquake or a war – has been hurt through no fault of their own and is innocent.

Innocence is the true essence of human nature and indeed of creation itself. It is what it is. When we see that the pain was inflicted through the cruelty of another person who could not understand what they were doing because they themselves were incapacitated by ignorance, we encounter the cosmic power of innocence, the goodness of creation. Even ignorance is an affliction with its own hidden causes. Jesus on the Cross asked the Father to forgive his murderers because ‘they do not know what they are doing’. He was invoking the power of truth to dispel the illusory nature of ignorance. The whole gospel is present in this, his last act on earth.

The unreal nature of the world we make up as a result of ignorance, pain and fear is tough, mean and tenacious. Rational argument rarely even dents it. All you can do is shoot down the drones it sends to attack the innocent before they do harm. We are trapped in our own crossfire: violence is the product of ignorance and history is its video loop.

Recall a time when you were locked in conflict from which there seemed no escape. Was there a moment when you or another softened and said, I’m sorry, or let’s talk or let’s start again? One word or a look is enough because love is the sole reality. Compassion, humour or forgiveness releases it from the prison of fear which is the breeding ground of the virus of illusion. Ignorance lifts like the mist. All its complicated constructs melt into air. A new world is born. At the end of his last play Shakespeare, who practiced illusion to reveal truth, understood that seeing the illusory nature of things is the reason to be cheerful:

Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air.
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it shall inherit, shall dissolve.

Shakespeare – The Tempest: Act 4 Scene 1

Sometimes you meet a young person who, although lacking life-experience, has a wisdom beyond their years. You can also meet older people, with much experience, whose development was arrested at an early stage. When you meet individuals like these you can’t help seeing what you see but, of course, always need to remember ‘judge not that ye be not judged.’ Maybe they jumped off the train for a moment and were stranded on an empty platform waiting for the next one to arrive.

The stages of human development have been closely analysed in recent times. We know that our phases of growth overlap but also have an inevitable sequence. Certain capacities, like language, social independence and emotional needs, seem to be laws of development written into the human person and follow a timeframe. Each of us develops in a unique way but we are all equal under the laws of nature. Yet there are exceptions. In some, the developmental process can get stuck and await a restart for decades. For others, well, they seem to cover decades in months. Mozart began composing at five. An eight-year-old chess player has defeated a world grandmaster.

More importantly, though, are the spiritual masters who have reached the highest level of development in this dimension. From their unique view of the panorama of reality they have given teachings that have formed lasting channels of transmission through history and many cultures. To encounter such teachers or benefit directly from their transmission through their followers is to enjoy a boost to one’s personal journey. It does not mean that the master’s experience becomes yours and they are cloned in you. But in a sense, something like this happens through a close encounter with a person of high spiritual development. Scriptures insist on the value and need to be in the presence of such individuals.

For the influence to be transmitted there needs to be peace, a faith-connection, and freedom from doubt and envy. Then something of their knowledge enters your experience, expanding your capacity for the personal realisation you must still achieve in your own way. So, it is not that you will become a spiritual prodigy just through osmosis but the ‘grace of the guru’ will accompany you on your daily rounds, protecting and supporting you in times of discouragement and doubt and helping you turn a sense of failure into wisdom.

The gospel tells a story of a feast a man was preparing but the people he invited refused his invitation. Business meetings, new possessions that distracted them or having recently got married were among the excuses they gave. The man told his people to go out and bring in the poor, the handicapped and the blind. He said – and I missed this in many re-readings I have done of the story – ‘I want my house to be full.’

I read this as an example of the humility of God which we see in the altruism of spiritual masters through history. A child once said God made people because he wanted them to enjoy the beautiful things he had made. He didn’t want to be alone A law of development is that the full empty themselves in order for the empty to be full.

Let all those who seek their own fulfilment,
Love and honour the illumined sage
(Mundaka Upanishad)

The word ‘upanishad’ means literally ‘sitting next to your teacher’ – just as you do at a meal.

There’s a simple map for the journey which every meditator is on. It helps those who are frightened to start to take the first step and encourages those who drop out to reconnect to the path. The first stage is discovering your own monkey mind and the embarrassing level of distraction that prevents you from stillness and the simple enjoyment of reality that is the fruit of attention. Giving up at the first hurdle is common but it doesn’t mean you cannot start again – as many times as you fail. You will discover the value of the selfless encouragement of meditating with others – of spiritual friendship.

The second stage is encountering the hard disc of memory. Everything, real or imagined, in our history is stored there and some of it may be repressed. Like grief, anger, fear or shame which cause suffering and control us from the unconscious. The mantra brings healing to this level of consciousness without – at the time of meditation anyway – requiring self-analysis. In fact, it is the complement of usual psychological therapy because it involves taking the attention off ourselves. This is not avoidance but detachment. Healing is the prelude to enlightenment: nothing is hidden that will not be made manifest, nor is anything secret that will not be known and come to light (Lk 8:17)

Then we touch the ego level itself, the ‘source of the I-thought’ as Ramana called it. Here we encounter a feeling of being blocked by our innate sense of separateness even as we long for the peace of union and non-duality. This brick wall has taken a long time to build and it takes time for the bricks to start falling out. As they do, we see through the wall and in God’s own time we find ourselves on the other side of it, in the Spirit. Here self-consciousness is reduced by transparency in the experience of recognition – seeing and knowing ourselves even as we know that we are seen and loved

At each of these levels, until we enter the full language of silence in the spiritual dimension, the mantra, with deepening subtlety is our faithful guide.

The important thing to remember is that as one level is reached and opens its mysteries the previous levels are not shut down. Distraction remains, though greatly reduced and at times more easily overcome. Healing continues even after the major wounds have been triaged. And the ego continues in daily life but more as a servant than as a tyrant.

This applies to other maps of human consciousness. For example, we could say we begin the journey in a pre-temporal state of oneness with all. This ‘uroboric’ mind will open to the magical with its attempt to manipulate what is now a strange, threatening world outside us. As the mind develops, we make stories – myths – to explain and manage things. Then we discover we can step back from them with rational objectivity. If we keep going, we break through into the conscious oneness of non-duality.

Wonderfully, though, all levels can stay open and be integrated with the next. Life without a sense of magic would be as algorithmically shallow as what we call ‘artificial intelligence’ but should think of as merely ‘very fast computers’. Life without the mythical imagination would lack the essential language which gives entry to the great scriptures and transcendent meaning. Rationality without these other levels contributing would be like getting the best grades at school but having no friends.

Before I became a monk I had several mini-careers including a couple of years in a merchant bank in London. It paid well and the work was quite interesting at first. I had gone there to get a break from academia and learn what really made the world go round: love or money. I had no desire to climb the corporate ladder but I liked my colleagues and found the personalities and interactions quite instructive about my other big question: what is the meaning of life and what happens to you over time?

It was this question perhaps that led me to decide to do a retreat – my first – in a monastery. I didn’t have much idea of what that meant, maybe prayer, silence, being alone, simple food. It didn’t turn out quite as I expected. When I arrived, I decided to fast as I thought that might prime me for higher spiritual experiences. What I received was a first night of intense nightmares which was something new for me and left me very shaken. One followed another and woke me up each time in a cold formless fear. No one in the monastery had taken any interest in me but I asked to speak to someone and an old kind looking monk came to see me. I described my night experience and he looked uncertain what to say; but when I mentioned I had been fasting he brightened up as if he had found the answer. ‘It was the devil,’ he confidently said. I waited for more information and he said ‘you see the devil saw you were fasting and decided to attack you because you were weak. Have a good lunch and you’ll be fine.’

My second and last night I went to my room after compline and was reading before going to bed. Suddenly there was a rapid knocking at my door. I opened it to find one of the other old monks looking very anxious and beckoning me into the corridor to follow him. I asked him what was the problem and as he shuffled ahead of me all I heard was ‘mass, mass. Theres’s no one to serve the mass. Quick!’ Before we got to the chapel the abbot appeared, apologised and rescued me from the delusions of monastic dementia.

Things rarely, if ever, turn out as we expect. The random games that the multiple universes play on us are infinite. It was a long time before I entered another monastery to learn from the teaching and personal example of the wisest and sanest person I have known before or since. Wisdom, goodness, personal sanity and who we learn from make all the difference to our life. But even then things never turn out as you expect.