Jesus, Shiva and Buddha Walk into a Bar, or How Eastern Wisdom Can Shed a New Light on Christianity

I was born in a Christian family and raised according to Christian values and norms. My family and I used to go to Church every Sunday, for both the morning and the afternoon services. As it was the custom in Neo-protestant circles in my small Romanian town, children up to a certain age (12 or 13, if I remember correctly) used to gather in small groups where they learn about God and Jesus through stories, games, songs and other activities. All this to make kids ready to sit on a chair for two hours and listen to what is preached from the pulpit.

In adolescence I became quite inquisitive in nature. The old stories from the Bible that I was so accustomed to started to feel a bit bland and quite fictional. The fact that they seemed more like fiction than reality wouldn’t have been such a problem for me if people didn’t insist that they were absolutely real. It seemed to me — and, to be fair, this is the case for most Protestant and Neo-protestant Churches — that preachers are much more interested in proving that the stories in the Bible were actual historical events than looking for the hidden meaning in them and discovering what we could learn from these stories.

So, I used to sit through countless Sunday services where I was brought, a lot of the times, against my will trying to poke holes into the preacher’s logic. Look, you need to understand that, while I kinda hated going to Church, I don’t resent that I did for all those years. It helped me develop my critical thinking :)). I mean, I had to do something to alleviate the boredom and learning to listen and think was much more productive than playing video games or spending my time in bars smoking cigarettes and acting like a smart-ass alongside my peers.

At some point, however, I was pretty much done with it; going through the same stories over, and over, hearing the same old ideas with the same old monotonous delivery save some very random modulations in the preachers voice. Starting university provided the best opportunity to stop going to church especially because this meant that I was moving to another country. I really didn’t want anything to do with Christianity, the Bible, churches, religion, or spirituality in general. I was completely sick of it. For all intents and purposes, I was and even considered myself an atheist; not of the militant kind, but rather of the ‘don’t-wanna-have-anything-to-do-with-it’ kind. Christianity made me an atheist.

However, I still felt over the next few years like something was missing, like I was missing something; it felt like a wasn’t seeing the full picture. While I didn’t believe in God, it still felt like I was only half-living. The religious indoctrination that I suffered was still roaming over me like a dark cloud, except this dark cloud could have been very angry with me this time…

The empty feeling that I was left with as I was going through my young adulthood was the lack of meaning in my life. I think this is the pandemic that the Western World is currently struggling with. Nothing I did could fill this whole; not overworking, not drinking, not smoking, not sex, not pornography and especially not the old beliefs that I was raised with.

My life became very tiresome and ugly and boring and depression crept in slowly but surely. Until I couldn’t handle it anymore! And a book almost fell into my lap: The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. This book not only helped me overcome my depression but it opened my mind and heart to spirituality precisely because little to no religious or spiritual language was used in the book.

Watching tons of Eckhart’s videos on YouTube, eventually lead me through to Mooji and thus I was acquainted to Advaita Vedanta, a branch of Hindu Philosophy. As I was studying and getting immersed into Mooji’s teachings, spirituality stared to become something very serious to me, something that you should not joke about. I put on an almost convincing pious show for a while. The first time I heard one of Alan Watts’ lectures I just couldn’t stand it because it was taking the whole matter of spirituality so lightly; like it was something you can joke about.

It took quite some time until I opened myself to the Zen character of Alan Watts. But when I did… oh my Lord, how fun everything became! I learned to enjoy life, to take steps in the direction of my heart’s calling and to stop taking myself, life, the universe and even — especially — God so seriously.

At some point, though, while on holiday back home, I felt a strong urge to pick up the Bible, open in and start reading. I didn’t know what would happen or where I would open it. But I opened it in what seemed like a random place and I started reading. Suddenly, immense floods of new meanings and interpretations I have never heard before started flowing towards me. I had to pick up my laptop and write whatever I could down. I did this for a few weeks; reading and writing. Somehow, studying Hinduism and Buddhism cleared the clutter of my previous religious indoctrination enabling me to see what was shoved down my throat for years with new eyes. This process resulted in my second book Sermon on the Skyscraper [I used a pseudonym back then because I was still kind of afraid to be called out for having such an unchristian view].

This whole weird and twisted journey of mine — which was more complicated than time allowed me to expose in this article — brought me to a place of deep appreciation and recognition of the priceless wisdom present in the Bible. I still love discovering new meanings of passages and ideas that are so mainstream that people overlook the simplicity and beauty of their message. It’s kinda funny how Hinduism and Buddhism shed a new light on Christianity for me. If Jesus, Buddha and Shiva had the chance to meet each other in flesh, I think people would be shocked and even outraged at how well they’d get along.