messiah complex

Of the friends that I have who have chosen a Buddhist path, several have shared their decision to take the “Bodhisattva Vow.” With this vow (part of the Mahayana Buddhist path), they promise (among other things) to work for the sake of humanity’s enlightenment to the point of forsaking their own liberation from the wheel of life until all sentient beings have achieved enlightenment. In short, they are promising to return to the human experience – life after life after life – until all of humanity is enlightened.

I’m not Buddhist, and I’m sure there are many layers to this vow and ways to understand it, and I’m only understanding it on a very surface level… but to promise to return to the human experience until all beings are enlightened?

HELL NO!

Don’t get me wrong, I have a deep love of humanity and deeply desire for all of humanity to know peace, love, and joy, and to experience the freedom of liberation. BUT, it sure as hell isn’t MY job to enlighten them. Neither do I plan on waiting around until all humans across all time finally decide to wake up and learn how to be loving and kind to each other. Based on my experience of some humans, I could be waiting around for an eternity.

No thank you! When I’m done with this life, I’m outta here, hopefully never to return!

Beyond the faith in which I was raised that tells us we’ve already been liberated, and that death is the final liberation, humanity’s enlightenment is not my responsibility. Regarding enlightenment, I can hardly take care of myself! Besides, if humanity’s enlightenment was my responsibility, a hell of a lot more people would be listening to me. (ha ha ha…thump)

I leave Buddhists to their beliefs, but as one actively recovering from a Messiah Complex, the Boddhisatva vow sounds a little co-dependent – suggesting it’s our job to take care of others to the point of personal sacrifice, and that there is some sort of “award” for doing so. This strikes me as not much different than the Catholic practice of indulgences as a way of earning our way into heaven. If Jesus did his job properly (and we’ve been taught that he did), then we don’t need to do shit to get into heaven. The payment’s already been made (if you subscribe to atonement theology).

I don’t subscribe to atonement theology. Neither do I ascribe to the belief that Jesus died for our sins. Instead, I believe he died for speaking in ways that empowered people on a path that might free them from the ruling institutions of the time. These institutions felt threatened by the “enlightenment” that Jesus offered and killed him for it. That being said, I don’t believe that Jesus was responsible for the enlightenment of those he taught. Neither is he the source of salvation in the way we have been taught by institutional religion. Instead, he found his own enlightenment and simply shared with others how to do the same. His listeners could choose to accept what he offered, or not.

The Bodhisattva vow, along with atonement theology seem to be placing responsibility for enlightenment in the wrong hands. Enlightenment, as I understand it today, is purely the responsibility of the individual. In fact, it may not even be up to the individual to decide as enlightenment may simply be a matter of fate (more on that later).

Arriving at this understanding of enlightenment as being the individual’s responsibility, however, has been an arduous journey. Based on conditioning, life experiences, trauma, and woundedness, I came to believe it was my job to save the world. It stood to reason, if I could convince human beings to be loving and kind, and later, teach them how to get there, the world might finally feel safe. Right?

WRONG! Instead, I have learned that I cannot convince anyone of anything they do not want to do for themselves, and I certainly can’t do it for them (no matter how hard I tried). Human beings are stubborn and willful and cling tightly to what they know – no matter how harmful that knowing might be to and for them. Jesus spoke of this often!

What I have come to understand is that the only human I can save is myself – and even that is debatable! This begs the question – from what do I/we need saving anyway?

In the simplest of terms, we are each a unique and individual expression of Source, here to have a human experience. From this perspective, there are an infinite number of ways in which Source might choose to express itself. Within those infinite expressions are infinite choices. In a single life not every human will choose enlightenment. Across many lifetimes, some might never choose enlightenment.

What good is enlightenment anyway if the cycle of the human experience is that we come from Source and when we are done being human we return to Source? We’re here. We have a life. We die. We return to Source. No judgment. No right or wrong. Simply Source expressing itself. In this we have to allow that Source is just as likely to express itself as an oligarch or serial killer as it is to express itself as Buddha or Christ. So what difference does enlightenment make anyway?

To some, enlightenment (as I understand it) is a way to heal and transform from non-loving conditioning, woundedness, and trauma, so that they might experience life as a little more peaceful, kind, and loving and in this they might find contentment. To others, they may have simply come here to be human and experience the fullness of the human experience as it is right here and right now, simply and without judgement or the need to change it. This, in fact, may be its own kind of enlightenment!

Enlightenment is a personal choice. If you choose it, cool. If not, that’s ok too. For my part, I can’t say that I’ve been seeking enlightenment, simply a way to feel at home within myself and to know some measure of peace in this life. If by my choosing and sharing, others feel inspired to cultivate their own kind of enlightenment, then so be it. If not, that’s their business. It’s not my job to make them do it or try to do it for them. And I’m certainly not waiting around for the collective of humanity to choose love and kindness over the hatred and cruelty that so many seem to enjoy. I’ve done for myself what I have felt called to do and humanity is on its own. Their enlightenment is not my responsibility.

For over thirty years, I have been on a deeply transformational journey to uncover my truest nature so that I might live the life that most reflects that. This journey has brought me face to face with my own woundedness and non-supportive societal conditioning and led me to tools to help support my inner transformation. This journey has empowered me to find the answer to these three questions and to then live out those answers:

Who am I?
Whose am I?
What are my unique gifts and how am I called to share them in the world?

Out of this journey, I have created a full curriculum of online courses and trainings through which I am able to share the knowledge, insights, wisdom, and tools that I gained so that you too might discover the fulfillment of living the life you were meant to enjoy. These online courses provide for all levels of personal and spiritual development with a focus on embodied learning – that which transcends the mind and reaches into the heart. All classes support you in your journey of self-actualization and are rooted in scholarship, mindfulness practices, and psychology.

Lauri Ann Lumby, educator, author, mentor.

See all classes here.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…..there was an author who dared to suggest that at the end of our spiritual journey, is a return to the mundane. This author is Richard Bach and the books is Illusions – the Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. In this story, Donald, a messiah, quits his messiah business and becomes a pilot. He then travels the wilds, giving people rides in his three-passenger plane. As the story demonstrates, being a messiah is a tricky, stressful business that has even been shown to get people killed. This, among other reasons, is why Donald quits his spiritual business and returns to the everyday, mundane world.

I first read this book in my twenties, and several times more in my thirties (it’s a short book and can be read in a day). I got the moral of the story then, but as I’m approaching sixty, I relate to this story even more. Not because I consider myself a messiah (one sometimes suffering with a messiah complex maybe), but because I now understand that after we have completed our spiritual journey (it’s never really complete – but we do eventually arrive at a place of “enough”), life takes on a whole different feeling and flavor.

In technical terms, the spiritual journey, as it has been articulated by the ancient mystics, is comprised of four stages – spirit entering form, awakening and ascension, the great descent, and then ending in spirit leaving form and returning to source – Death. Each tradition gives these stages their own names, but the general descriptions are much the same.

Western pop-culture spirituality gives a lot of attention to the awakening/ascension stage of the journey, so with this you may be familiar. The great descent, however, is most often ignored as it is rife with challenge, struggle, ego-death, and suffering. It is the stage of the journey where after finding union with Source/God, we are plunged into the depths of our own inner hell – made up of our unhealed wounds, past traumas, spiritual fears, cultural conditioning, ego-attachments and more. This is a hell made up of all those things within us that have forgotten our original nature as Love resulting in non-loving beliefs or behaviors about ourselves or others. It is here where we must come face to face (for example) with all our desires to be famous, rich, powerful, desirable, admired, respected, special, and needed rear their ugly face. This is also where we must confront every single lie we’ve been told and illusion we’ve created about life needing to have meaning and purpose in a way that is tangible, visible, and seen. Finally, during this descent, every illusion and need for control will be pried from the grip of our cold, dead, fingers.

There’s a reason few speak of this stage of our spiritual journey. Having been thrown into this stage somewhere around the year 2000, I know it well and can say not one single person chooses descent to make up nearly thirty years of their life! I am also here to attest that the descent does eventually come to an end of sorts. Perhaps there are still ego attachments to confront, and pain still to be endured, but with these we have become familiar and accustomed and now we have tools for moving through these subtle layers of deepening in the important journey of ego-death.

The great descent frees us from all which imprisons us in insecurity, fear, ego-attachment, etc. While being freed, our truest nature of Love in Union with Source is increasingly liberated. Each moment we give to this transformation, we come to more and more fully live as Love, embracing all we are as Love (including our humanness) while finding the simple joy of being in the human experience. Here we are no longer bothered by life’s pursuit of meaning or purpose. Neither are we plagued by our imperfections. We are now able to return to the innocence we knew as children when we could simply enjoy the wonder of discovery, curiosity, and unbothered play. (YES, I know not every child’s childhood was great, but there was an innocence there among the pain.)

It is at this stage of our spiritual journey where many-a-messiah leave behind their work of saving the world and get on with simply living, which for those like the character in Illusions means returning to the mundane.