Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
    and he will make your paths straight.

• Proverbs 3:5-6

By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.

• John 5:30

So he said to me, “This is the word of the Lord to Zerubbabel: ‘Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,’ says the Lord Almighty.

• Zechariah 4:6

The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

• Exodus 14:14

Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

• John 14:6

“ ‘Happy is he who has overcome his ego… who has attained peace … who has found the truth. ’ – Gautama Buddha”

• Bryan Magee, The Story of Philosophy

“Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

• C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Siddhartha Gautama, referred to as the Buddha (either 563-483BC or 480-400BC), was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher.  Pillar and rock inscriptions greatly differ as to when the Buddha lived.

The author did a strange thing here.  He starts the book with ancient Greek philosophy and progresses to the time of Schopenhauer in the 1800s, but at this point he introduces Eastern philosophy.  He is writing the history of western philosophy and about this time, we see the emergence of eastern philosophy into western philosophy.  Thus, about this time two fully developed philosophies (philosophy by its nature is never FULLY developed) were comingling.  To explain what was happening, the author has to give a backstory.

The Buddha’s quote seems simple enough and most people would agree, but is it possible in the Eastern philosophical environment?  There is no figure similar to God and Jesus.  Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  He is the only Way.  Jesus came to earth, proclaimed by the angels bringing peace to men whom God favors.  Well, that would not generally include any eastern philosophical thinkers that do not believe in God.  Buddhism is mostly a series of reincarnated attempts at living the life Buddha describes in the quote, essentially becoming like a god.

But to overcome ego, we need something stronger than ego.  Someone asked me once if they could be sinless for an hour.  I suggested that they might succeed for fifty-five minutes, but in that last five minutes before success is fully in their grasp, they will realize that they were about to succeed.  Their ego would puff them up so that they would be so full of themselves that they could not stand it.  The other person laughed and agreed.  Overcoming ego becomes more difficult as we succeed in overcoming ego.  The difficulty increases exponentially.

In other words, we cannot do it without God.  In fact, thinking that we could do it for a short stretch of time on our own strength is believing that we are ourselves some sort of god.  We cannot even start the “test of the hour” without initiating the test with a sin.  We fail the test by simply attempting the test.

We are nothing without God.  We have no strength to resist sin without God in us.

We can never know peace without God.  We can never know Truth without the Truth in us.

Yes, our ego must be overcome, but it is overcome when we stop fighting God and let Him overcome our ego.  He is the Creator.  He can do that.  We are the created.  We do not have that power within our own strength.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.