Giovanni del Biondo (Italian, active c 1356-1398)
Vision of St. Benedict.

WHAT YOU SEE IS NOT WHAT YOU GET

Computer programmers have given us the acronym WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get. It means that what you see on the screen as you type in text, is exactly how it will look when you print it out. Last year I read the Dalai Lama’s book The Universe in a Single Atom: the Convergence of Science and Spirituality, the title of which is tantalizingly similar to Saint Benedict’s vision of the whole world encompassed in a single ray of light. I read that a fundamental Buddhist doctrine is that there is a basic disparity between our perception and way things are in reality. This seems to me to give us the acronym WYSINWYG, What You See Is NOT What You Get.

I have greatly benefited from psychological input in my monastic journey. One of the most fundamental insights into self-knowledge is when we realize that what we see is directly dependent on the color of the glasses we wear. Our perception of reality comes from our background, the patterns of behavior and especially defense mechanisms we picked up from our parents, and other significant formative factors in our growing up. Most of us think we are objective, but we each have our own truth, and that is subjective. Furthermore, our expectations of what can happen to us in life, based on our previous experience of our reality, predisposes us to repeat the experience and perceive it as happening again. So what we see IS what we get, because we expect it.

One of the greatest scientific expressions of the last century is that even space and time are relative. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that a supposedly objective observer of physical phenomena also influences the result of the measurement. The literal position of the observer determines the perception of the event. What you see depends on where you stand.

Former abbot general Dom Bernardo Olivera summarized in a humorous way his experience of attending meetings in Western and Eastern cultures. In the West, meetings begin and end at a certain time shown on a device called a clock. In the East, meetings begin when everyone has arrived, and end when the business has reached a satisfactory conclusion. It has been pointed out by more than one commentator on the New Testament that Jesus operated on this more relative understanding of time—or at least that those who observed him, the evangelists, wrote about him this way. They describe, for example, a healing, and then narrate that “after this” Jesus went to Judea. What is important is the way Jesus relates to the needs of the people who come to him. Space and time are relative—and relational.I have been struck by one great difference in the way men and women integrate their experiences. Men tend to “cut off” or deny stray branches, in order to focus on the pure, straight trunk (phallic!). Women tend to take in their various experiences, in order to bind them to their center and incorporate them into their wholeness (a web or a wheel). What men and women see depends on what they intend to do with it.

A Norwegian friend of mine delights in a whole generation growing up with Harry Potter. The books have made it commonplace that there can be two realities existing side by side. Which reality you see depends on whether you are a magical person or a mere Muggle. The next generation to enter our monasteries may not find it so strange and not at all difficult to perceive the spiritual world co-existing with the physical world plagued by natural disasters, economic crises and intertribal warfare. In one of his sermons, Bl. John Henry Newman describes the two worlds we confess every Sunday in the Creed:

There are two worlds, ‘the visible and the invisible,’ as the Creed speaks, --the world we see, and the world we do not see; and the world which we do not see as really exists as the world we do see. It really exists, though we see it not. The world that we see we know to exist, because we see it. All that meets our eyes forms one world. It is an immense world; it reaches to the stars. It is everywhere; and it seems to leave no room for any other world.

And yet in spite of this universal world which we see, there is another world, quite as far-spreading, quite as close to us, and more wonderful; another world all around us, though we see it not, and more wonderful than the world we see. For, first of all, he is there who is above all beings, who has created all, before whom they all are as nothing, and with whom nothing can be compared. Almighty God, we know, exists more really and absolutely than any of those fellow-men whose existence is conveyed to us through the senses; yet we see him not…

Angels also are inhabitants of the world invisible…

The world of spirits then, though unseen, is present; present, not future, not distant. It is not above the sky, it is not beyond the grave; it is now and here; the kingdom of God is among us.

Such is the hidden kingdom of God; and, as it is now hidden, so in due season it shall be revealed… Such are the power and virtue hidden in things which are seen, and at God’s will they are manifested… They will be manifested for ever when Christ comes at the Last Day in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. Then this world will fade away and the other world will shine forth (Parochial and Plain Sermons, volume 4, pages 200-204. 207-209).

In dialogue with Reimyo Tierelinckx Roshi and Trudy Fredriksson  of the Swedish Buddhist Union, and with Helena Anliot and  Morten Berg  of the Dhamma Sobhana Vipassana Center, Lyckebygården, Ödeshög, Sweden, we have found that we hold in common the discipline of awareness. To practice awareness means living in a spirit of communion with all that is. The world is not divided by mental labels. To reach enlightenment is to break through to this ultimate reality behind the apparent reality. The well-known adage, “Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water; after enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water” conveys the truth that spiritual insight does not change the exterior, but changes the eyes with which one sees. Everything is the same, and everything is different. It is the practitioner who is transformed. What you see, IS.

The monk, too, tries to will the one thing necessary. This was the attraction, for me, to a lifestyle where everything was directed toward God. This was the impetus for the desert fathers and mothers, as well as the founders of Cîteaux: to follow the simplicity of the rule as a way of living the gospel. Our founders are described as seeking to avoid the division of illusion in order to arrive at the oneness of truth. Unanimity was a paramount value. The way to create unity in the monastery was a certain degree (to us today, a too high degree) of uniformity. Disunity is caused by illusion, that is to say, by individual monks not seeing correctly. If they conformed to the exact usages of the New Monastery, the community would be united in its single-hearted pursuit of God. This seems to me to be very close to the Buddhist perception: illusion causes pain. The way to happiness is the noble eightfold path: right view, right aspiration, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. While the eight disciplines are to be practiced simultaneously, the first one listed is right view, learning to see truly. The founders of Cîteaux tried to set up the monastery so the inhabitants would be formed interiorly by conforming to the many minutiae for external behavior. What you see is what you become; what you become is what you see.

If Buddhists reach Nirvana, which is the absence of pain, by thinking right thoughts and perceiving the reality that all creation is connected, I ask myself how much Christianity is in touch with reality. It has been said that what makes Christianity unique are the doctrines of the incarnation and the resurrection after the passion—the two times in Jesus’ life when his human body is most obvious. It could be argued that the pain of birth and death are the times when one is most in touch with reality. What you see is what you feel.In fact, I would say that part of being awake as a Christian is being attentive to pain and to the wounds that still mark us as we go through life. In a Christian community like a monastery, my woundedness—and the woundedness of my sisters—often becomes quite obvious. It is not to be escaped or denied, but accepted and converted to the good. The sister with wounds, whether somatic or psychological, is real, part of the Body of Christ, and I, as another member of His Body, need to acknowledge her wounds as part of her reality—as my wounds are part of her reality as we seek God together on the monastic path.

For me, the temptation is to see her flesh and stop there. I need also to see the divine which is in her, and which is equally real. As Jesus was both divine and human, so are we. Each of us is an embodied soul. We are each two worlds, both visible and invisible. For the Christian who has attained a state of being awake, what you get is both what you see and what you don’t see. It is important to honor both the visible and the invisible, the imperfect and the perfect, the vulnerable and the victorious. What you see is what you have been GIVEN by the Creator of all that is.

• Note: I have previously reflected on how our woundedness can contribute to the good of community and have written about it in two articles: “Bernard’s Prayer Before the Crucifix that Embraced Him: Cistercians and Devotion to the Wounds of Christ, ” published in Cistercian Studies Quarterly (29:1 [1994] 23-54) and  “Guerric’s Sermons for Palm Sunday: Imitatio Christi and Entrance into the Wounds,” published in American Benedictine Review (54:3 [September 2003] 269-290).