"Take Me To YOur Leader........"

”Many people are afraid to empty their own mind lest they plunge into the void. What they don’t realize is that their own mind is the void!”…huang-po

The house is quiet, only the hum of the air-conditioner with me here in the computer room giving any intrusion into the silence that marks six-thirty in the morning. We visit the Youth Detention Center today and I’ve already reviewed my few thoughts intended to share with the kids should the Holy Ghost leave space for me before final prayer. My inner man, however, remains occupied with a self-examination of itself, having encountered the above quote yesterday while visiting “Whiskey River”. Most in Pentecost would reject all consideration of anything coming from a Buddhist Zen master, their ears open only to that which they already believe, their faith in Christ a self-constructed fortress against the outside world rather than a living word reaching into it. In that sense, then, I find myself agreeing somewhat with what this Chinese recluse seems to suggest. For me, the only question lies in applying some sort of definition to just what the word “mind” embraces. Indeed, it is one of four means by which Jesus said we are to love God. Does the term equate to nothing more than our brain? If it refers to our thinking process, can we assign our spirit some part in the matter, that part of our identity having been omitted from the package? Whatever boundaries we might attempt to apply to it, we are left with exactly what this religious priest proclaims it to be: a vast universe, each of us adrift in our own individual version of it, none of us very adept in exploring its infinity, and all of us subject to “falling off the deep end”. Security depends upon whether our “anchor-line” is a linkage that we, ourselves, have created, or a spiritual umbilical cord alive within us, connecting us to Him. When Paul states that we, as believers, have the “mind of Christ”, he isn’t saying that we now think like Christ, but that we now possess within us a potential for the Holy Ghost to be inserted into our thinking process, each of us yet permitted our own decision as to whether we’ll listen to Him or not…..