Enlightenment and the Bird who Sang

A bird singing on a log can be enough to bring enlightenment

A Sad Bridegroom

The story dates from Medieval days, a Jewish cautionary tale told for those who seek the secrets of the gods. It does more than warn us about the dangers of hubris, however. “The Bird That Sang to a Bridegroom” also suggests that once we see the true nature of the universe, we cannot remain on earth. Normal human relationships will be impossible, and God will send Death to bring us home. It is as if, once enlightened, we might feel a generalized love for all humanity, but our individual loves will fade.

In this tale, a couple have just gotten married. The bridegroom escorts his new wife to the bridal celebration, then leaves her there to find enlightenment. Although he loved her, he did not feel the rapturous infatuation of young love, nor did he feel an anticipatory lust. Instead, he felt sad.

As the narrator of our story explains, in those days, it was believed that a child’s soul retains its connection with the divine, like Adam and Eve when they were still innocent in the garden. This unity is deeper than love, and it confers a kind of immortality on those who experience it. Unfortunately, when this innocence is lost, the connection is also lost. One is no longer immortal.

This made the bridegroom sad. He thought if he could conquer his passions, he could hold onto that godly and eternal relationship. A marriage, however, if it were to serve its purpose as a socially-sanctioned vehicle for bringing children into the world, requires that one “descend” to the level of the common person and “indulge in” common “enjoyments.” Once we sully ourselves in this way, the bridegroom thought, “we cease to be immortal as individuals, but contribute to the immortality of our kind.” [1]

Bliss in a Bird’s Song

Contributing to the immortality of the species is noble, but the groom couldn’t bear the thought of losing his personal union with God. He feared mortality. In his despair, he left the party and wandered into the woods behind the house. There he begged God to bless him with “one glimpse or one sound from eternity.”

His prayer was answered. A bird began to sing more beautifully than any he had heard before. The melody entered his heart, lifting him “as on the strong arm of the mountain breeze.” He felt “caressed” and “refreshed.”Happiness filled him, infusing his blood, his nerves, every fiber of his being. He felt “moved by the breath of angels”; exalted and at peace. [2]

I imagine this was a mystical moment for him. Perhaps he beheld the truth of the universe. As he listened to that wondrous song, perhaps he understood that he was both the man and the bird, not either-or. The separation between them, as between an infant and God, faded. This was bliss. Unbeknownst to him, it was also a timeless spell, an eternity of immortality, and forty years passed without his noticing.

To me, this sounds like enlightenment, that instant in which the true nature of things reveals itself. Although enlightenment is not typically a Jewish concept, this Buddhist idea can deepen our understanding of the young man’s experience.

A bird singing on a log can be enough to bring enlightenment

Enlightenment

The Buddhist teacher, Joan Sutherland, explains that though enlightenment is awe-inspiring, it is not a transcendent experience. We don’t become other than our selves. “Strawberries still taste like strawberries and harsh words are still harsh,” she writes. However, we don’t experience these sensations and experiences as discreet events disconnected from the whole. We understand that everything is undivided. Even when we feel uncomfortable or life is hard, we see that those hard and uncomfortable things are holy because they are one with everything. There is no holy and unholy; no separation between the sacred and the profane. There is just what is. [3]

The bridegroom’s moment of awe was like that, a oneness so profound that nothing existed except the sound. He was no more a man listening to a bird; he was the bird, the song, and the listening itself. Even the profane was filled with light.

This experience of light, however, is not enlightenment itself. To reach enlightenment, we must not only have this awe-inspiring experience and comprehend the undivided and eternal nature of all that is, but then we must “learn to live our enlightenment” in the world. It is through such “embodiment that enlightenment completes itself.” [4]

The bridegroom thought he had to choose between bliss and a “common” existence. Indeed, we sometimes think that if we are enlightened, the world seems less important. Family becomes no more special than the stranger in a tent down the street. But that is not enlightenment. Unlike the groom, who sought paradise in a private union with the divine, as if he were not one also with family and friends, the enlightened being does not withdraw from life. He engages with it, but differently.

Misunderstanding Enlightenment

Sutherland lists some of the ways we misunderstand enlightenment. Some of us think that only certain people can be enlightened, or that it should be part of some “self-actualization project,” a way to “improve” our lives. We may long for enlightenment, and in our longing, we fear it, for what if we get it wrong?

She tells the story that is common to many religious traditions, and is contained within the bridegroom’s belief that children have some special connection with God. We are born sacred, in union with the divine, enlightened, yet as life buffets us with pain and confusion and complexities, we forget our true nature. We forget where we came from. This feels terrible. Like the bridegroom, we seek a way out of our isolation.

Unfortunately, our seeking often leads to thoughtlessness, unkindness, betrayal, addiction, and loneliness. Often, like the bridegroom, we seek enlightenment everywhere but where it is.

The Bridegroom Loses Everything

Although the groom experienced a moment of bliss, a union with the divine that was beyond what he could have imagined, when that instant was over, he felt lost. The bird fell silent and flew away. Grateful for the gift he had received, the groom returned to the house. He was surprised to see that it was dark and silent. Confused, he tried to go in, but the door was locked. He knocked at the window of the room he believed his bride would be sleeping in, but the voice that answered was not hers.

“Who are you?” the groom called out. “Where is my bride? Let me in to see her.”

A stranger’s voice told him there was no bride there. “Go away,” it said.

Then the young man realized the house wasn’t his, after all. Puzzled, he wandered through the night, searching for a home he never found. In the morning, he made his way to the synagogue. There he found a congregation filled with people he did not recognize. He cried out the names of his father and father-in-law, but no one answered.

Finally, an old man walked up to him. “Who are you?” he asked. “Why do you call out the names of these old friends of mine?”

“Friends of yours? But they are my father and father-in-law. I am the bridegroom. I was married yesterday. Where is my bride?”

“Who is your bride?” the old man asked.

When the young man told him, the older one said, “Can it be? Are you the groom who disappeared forty years ago?”

Unable to believe what he heard, the young man blustered and argued, demanding to know where he could find his wife. In answer, the old man led him to a cemetery. There, he showed him the tombstones on which were written the names of his parents and of his bride. The inscription on her stone told of the strange disappearance of her groom. When he finally believed, when he realized all he had lost, the young man sat on his wife’s tombstone and wept.

Experiencing Enlightenment

Like the bridegroom’s moment of bliss, enlightenment is not something we can control. It happens to us. In the midst of a busy shopping center, changing a baby’s diaper, looking at a paving stone, listening to a speech, comforting a grieving friend, taking a shower, we can suddenly see beyond seeing.

That doesn’t mean it’s hopeless to seek enlightenment. For instance, the groom took initiative. He wandered into the woods; he prayed. But there’s no guarantee our prayers will be answered. Like addicts who long for a mystical experience that will take from them their craving, we can grow despondent if we are not of those special people who are blessed with divinely-inspired relief. If we depend on magical moments to get us clean or reveal the truth, we will suffer.

Yes, it seems that enlightenment is that miraculous jolt of awe we feel when mystical things occur, when the bird sings for the groom. But actually, enlightenment isn’t the bird, nor is it the song. It is the way we listen. When we stand in the timelessness of the moment and hear and see what is before us, then everything is new.

We don’t have to know we’re doing it. The bridegroom certainly didn’t. Yet we understand the sacredness of each thing because we are there, completely, and the divisions between this and that fall away. However it occurs, enlightenment is magical, and it can happen to anyone, even to someone who never thought she wanted to be enlightened.

Enlightenment Versus Awakening

Yet instantaneous insight is not the only way to experience oneness. Sutherland, for instance, contrasts enlightenment with awakening. The latter unfolds like a path or a process. “It has stages and aspects, sudden leaps forward and devastating stumbles.” [5] The practices of meditation or prayer or stillness will be part of the journey for some. Because they teach us how to exist with our hearts open, living in this moment and no other, they may predispose us to those flashes of enlightenment.

Even so, few of us experience those bursts of insight that shatter everything we thought we knew. Most of us reach enlightenment, if we do, as a slow journey. The way is different for each of us. Thus the addict who never experiences that brilliant answer to prayer can nonetheless stay clean and sober, and the seeker of truth can find that truth in a patient trek through space and time.

Nonetheless, there is something we must each do if we are to reach this point of insight, this dawning of truth. According to Sutherland, we must let go of what she calls our self-centerdness. This is not selfishness. Rather, self-centerdness is the belief that the self is real. In self-centerdness, we get lost in the concerns of our bodies and minds, our whims and desires, our sufferings and our pleasures. We might look selfish, because we work so hard to diminish our sorrows and increase our joys, thinking to make our own life better. But focusing on our desires distracts us from seeing the needs of others. We forget that they and we are one. What they experience, we also experience, but in our self-centerdness, we don’t understand that.

Enlightenment and Pride

This was the bridegroom’s fatal flaw. Thinking of himself as a “self,” one separate from his wife, he thought he could not love her in that “common” way without losing the immortality he craved. Unable to face the fear of death, he abandoned his bride to seek for himself a special moment with God, one he hoped would fill him for a lifetime. In that unification with God, his “self” would himself be extinguished, yet though he sought to lose himself in a very self-centered way. Because of this, he lost everything else, as well.

But that was not the end of the story.

As the young man huddled in the graveyard, tears spilling down his face, the Angel of Death appeared beside him. Surprised, the young man stared up at this apparition. Smiling gently, the angel explained that the young man had reached for something that was not his to have. He had been, the angel said, “[m]isled by an egotistical pride and curiosity concealed beneath noble aspirations.” By leaving his wife to pursue this fantasy of spiritual purity, the bridegroom separated “love from holiness” and showed himself to be “unfit for holy marriage.” [6]

This is self-centerdness. Even when we think we are pursuing lofty, spiritual goals, when we believe we are being generous and kind, we may find we are motivated more by intellectual pride and personal gain than selflessness.

The Path of Awakening

But the path of awakening, one that might or might not lead to enlightenment, doesn’t require us to have different thoughts or motivations. It requires that we recognize them and remember that they are not who we are. We are the bridegroom and the bride, the singer and the one who listens, the one who dies and the one who weeps, the one who hates and the one who loves. Enlightened or not, we remain who we are, full of idiosyncrasies and foibles. It is not by being good that we lose our self-centeredness, but by seeing clearly.

We don’t need to retire to some cave, nor give away all we own and sleep on some sidewalk in the rain. Enlightenment once experienced doesn’t take us from the world; it invites to be in the world differently.

In one magical instant, the bridegroom experienced forty years of bliss. Time meant nothing, because he was outside of time. Surely this is enlightenment.

But enlightenment isn’t the end of the journey. Afterwards, to sustain the understanding enlightenment brings, we must continue on the journey of awakening. We must incorporate what we saw and felt and held in that moment when enlightenment struck. If we continue in this way, we may learn to open our hearts, to become one with all that is, and to learn to love.

The Bridegroom’s End

So what happened to the bridegroom? Here was a man who rejected the one who most trusted him, his own wife. Trapped in his self-centeredness, he lost everything. Although he felt that oneness that is beyond description, there’s nothing in the story to indicate he incorporated his learning into his heart, yet perhaps his weeping showed that he had learned to love.

But whether he did or not, God sent the Angel of Death to bring him home. It seems God doesn’t care if we learn all our lessons before we die. Regardless of what the groom knew or didn’t know, what he felt or didn’t feel, he was going to have his wish. He would be immortal. If he hadn’t awakened to the truth of existence by the time Death came to take him, if his enlightenment was merely the faint memory of a magical moment, that was all right. He would have all eternity to figure it out.

In faith and fondness,

Barbara

Credits

  1. Field, Claud, Jewish Legends of the Middle Ages, New York: Cosimo, 2005, 3-7, 3.
  2. Ibid 4.
  3. Sutherland, Joan, “What Is Enlightenment?,” Lion’s Roar, December 19, 2015, https://www.lionsroar.com/what-is-enlightenment/, accessed 2/13/20.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Field 7.

Photo by Dean Truderung on Unsplash

Copyright © 2020 Barbara E. Stevens All Rights Reserved

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