May Angels Lead You To Willingness: Dialogues with "Man's Search for Meaning"

I recently came across the idea of logotherapy in Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search for Meaning.”  I briefly nerded out big time: I initially intended this post to be a wholesale endorsement of Frankl’s thought.  It proposed good concepts such as “Nouogenic Neuroses”—those resulting not from conflict with the basic human drives (the freudian definition) but from “existential problems and existential frustration.”  It talked about “paradoxical intention” as a way of tackling neuroses, and that resonated with my experience that the first step of recovery was to label your situation unmanageable.  So “I’m an alcoholic” is the first verbalization necessary to render one’s alcoholism dormant and live more healthily.  Frankl’s book says that man’s search for meaning is his basic human drive, and that the “will to meaning” was his fundamental freedom, which can never be taken from him.

It was a tempting intellectual morsel for an author who, since June sixth’s first “Kairos, Koans and Conversion” post, has been claiming that “Logos is Mu.”  Sharing the divinity of Christ who emptied himself to share our humanity is too big a theme here to expect otherwise. My zeal has flagged some, in the changing winds of nuance.  Still, if Frankl’s book were a woman, I would be kneeling with a decoder ring fished out of a Cracker-Jack box, saying “You are at least 70 percent of what I’ve been looking for my whole life, and I sorta want to spend most of the rest of my life with you. Kinda.” Frankl himself got at the core of my difficulty: if the “existential frustration” with which one deals comes from outside of us, we deal with it by paradoxical intention—fully admitting it’s there—and work with it by embracing it.  If our existential frustration is actually a tension of our own making, it’s best to stop fooling ourselves, lay off the self-sabotage, and go forward from there.  But I’ve too often confused what I can change and what I can’t, and I haven’t bothered to seek differentiating wisdom.  I don’t feel I have the skill or conceptual tools, the wielding of which might prove Frankl’s philosophy personally accurate.

If philosophies are like women, consider this a singles ad, a statement of the kind of girl the walls at Under the Influence were made to bear posters of.  Meaning, for me, has been (too often) egotistically created and enforced, so I’m wary of Frankl’s “will to meaning” from the word “go.”  Before the metaphor overextends into long walks on the beach, let’s get down to it.

Under the Influence believes that the basic human drive is the search for willingness, and that the ability to accept the waxing and waning of meaning constitutes the fundamental human freedom.  I may sometimes have a "healthy sense of self." That will endure until it's time for me to look at my flaws.  I may sometimes have a coherent sense of life's meaning, but spiritual progress entails a scrambling of that meaning.  Accepting both meaning and the lack thereof, send of self and lack thereof--this is how I take my place on the Great Mandala.  Everyone's gotta take their turn on the downside of the wheel.  With this kind of set up, meaning’s a party bonus of finding willingness, not an object of potentially egotistical striving.

It is process, not product, that’s important here.  Furthermore, we don’t start out willing.  We start out willful and clinging to whatever will leave our desires for affection, security and power fulfilled.  If “spiritual materialism” is a trip we’ve laid on ourselves, we attempt to fulfill those egotistical desires and pass the whole thing off as holiness.  So “becoming willing” is important wording: it smacks of passive volition, of learning to be present to reality when we find ignoring it all too easy.

If a willful preoccupation with unreality is our starting point, then we come to grief in finding what is.  Egotism projects a stubborn false self, and it’s got to die daily if we’re to live more deeply.  Quite literally, we find willingness, in part, by moving through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s stages of dying. Those are, in order: Denial, Anger, Sadness, Depression and Acceptance.

To the monastic version of my earlier self, the “Stages of Dying” were a revelation.  I’d let go of my old life, of possessions, of the many ways society grabs for power, affection and security, but it never struck me that those renunciations saddled me with a grieving process.  Sensitivity to the constant and healthy role of grief in letting go explains, in large part, the depression that found me in my high school years and occasionally visits me still.

For a moment, let’s detail something.  In the first place, let’s talk about he “Stages of Reparenting” my own guideline for coming to terms with my past.  Then lets take a look at the passions by which we misuse things, emotions, others and self.   The Steps of Reparenting can be used to grieve our attachments to the passions as well.  Life is more full of good grief than we realize, and the processes are more similar than we think.  Not only are the stages similar, a few typical egoic avoidance maneuvers mark each process.  When they arise, if a person has their head about them, they will not be surprised.  

The Stages of Dying, referenced here because the other sets of stages echo them, are  Denial, Anger, Sadness, Depression, and Acceptance.  I won’t examine these in detail.  It was a blessing to have seen the Stages of Dying as personally applicable.  However, for a younger version of myself, emotional choreographies from my family of origin governed my present interactions.  This was a real thing, and even more pressing than coming to terms with mortality.

The Stages of Reparenting are lifelong tools, not one-time emotional tricks.  They are: Denial, Self-observation, Sensation, Transmutation of Energies, and Acceptance of the Past.  When we go from denial to self observation, family influence on present choreographies are laid bare.  A middle child might see that he often mediates disputes in his adult life because he grew up running interference between parents.  He might see that a facial expression or gesture by a colleague causes disproportionate anxiety, simply because similar expressions and gestures meant trouble growing up. 

After Self-observation, all of the truths about “the body being the unconscious” come into play.  Old trauma is stored as pain in the body, and isn’t released until we face it.  So the next phase is “Sensation.”  We reclaim the body from the emotional numbness unreconciled trauma imposed. We release old pain.  On the level of discursive thought, this looks like "reparenting."  I have, in my psyche, voices that represent different responses to trauma: my inner wounded child does a lot of raging and screaming, my inner unhealthy adult would drink his pain away and manipulate people ad nauseum if I let him.  It's possible to hear these aspects of the psyche, without doing their bidding.  And when they feel heard and empathized with, they don't tear through my choices like bulls through a china shop. The "Healthy Adult" and the "Original Child" are free to hold sway over my actions.

The fact is, though, the energies that undergird that understanding will need to be contended with whether I've become aware of the need to reparent or not.  If I can't quite wrap my head around "inner child language" it's possible just to work with the different bodily vibrations involved.

“Transmutation of Energies” is a term borrowed from Tantric Yoga.  In Tantra, it smacks of dualism to say that suffering is a problem in need of a solution.  Instead, Tantra sees suffering as pain we have not yet faced.  It’s famous for seeing lust as sexual passions we’ve not yet used for connection.  As in physics, the body’s energy is changed, not destroyed so another can be created to replace it.  Once we recognize stored trauma, we can then “inhabit it,” transforming the pain by full acceptance of it.  This involves an ability to recognize the pain, but make no attempt to manipulate it.  In particular, people raised in dysfunctional families may have a hard time with this: a childhood of being manipulated will inevitably have taught them to manipulate themselves.

There’s a quote, that is attributed (and misattributed) to a dozen people, but it came to me through the slam poet Buddy Wakefield.  In his poem “Gentleman Practice,” Wakefield says “forgiveness is letting go of all hope for a better past.”  This sunk in for me: when I let go of the hope for a better past, I can forgive.  Wakefield also, quite beautify, says “this is an apology letter to the both of us for how long it took me to let things go.”  I have often taken too long to let things go, especially if the hurt was prolonged.  But when I’ve been able let go, I’ve had a chance at reaching acceptance, the last stage of the grieving process, where the past can be the past, and its pain doesn’t have to be my present.  

My past created my ego, and letting go of that false self wholesale and all at once would most likely lead to nervous breakdown.  We have to allow life to highlight the presence of—and begin to deconstruct—each of the eight evil thoughts—which in the Catholic Tradition act together to form the ego.  Some of the thoughts—gluttony and greed—are about misuse of things.  Some of them—sloth and sorrow—are about misuse of emotions.  A third variety—specifically lust and wrath—are objectifying others and a fourth variety—vanity and pride—objectifies Self. 

The “Stages of Reparenting" can be used to deal with the passions as well.  All of the passions are about something good, at their core.  Food is awesome, gluttony is not.  I am freaking amazing, and vanity does me no favors.  Self-reliance is sometimes necessary, but pride makes me an isolated, sad white man.  So with our capacity for abuse laid bare, we’re simply left with the thing itself: Lust leaves us, and leaves us with love.  Sloth ambles off (anxiously, with disinterest) and leaves us with the ability, here to work diligently, there to take the rest we’re given.

It’s important to note that, when I’m grieving the false self, there are a few constant features to working through the steps. In the first place, as the post "Trust God: Steps 1-3 of ACA" claimed as it ended, I don't work the steps, the steps work on me.  At best, I am present to a work my Higher Power is doing in me. Additionally, right before the energy of Ego begins transmuting, it suggests suicide as a way to free ourselves.  Egoic thinking is un-nuanced, and is apt to throw life—the baby—out with the egoic bath water.  But that thought is just an event, and if I can let it go as spontaneously as it arose, then what comes next is an opportunity indeed: I hit rock bottom.  And as surrender became, quite suddenly, a possibility for Bill W., so it becomes for me as well.  Sometimes it’s sudden, sometimes gradual, but there is always a “giving up” that frees us from Ego’s grip.

If only that were the end of the story.  But the ego reasserts itself, this time wearing the garb of holiness.  In this regard, as funky as I feel about Frankl’s “will to meaning,” the flesh he puts on those bones is helpful in one respect.  He says that Love and Work are reasons to live, and I believe him.  As bad a rap as “spiritual materialism” gets at Under the Influence,  I have to say at least one thing in its defense.  Frankl was a survivor of Auschwitz.  He mentions several things on which the “will to live” might rest, in the absence of which, he said anecdotally, he’d seen too many perish.  People survived who had, for instance, the Love of a Spouse to return to.  He survived by rewriting a book whose only surviving copy was taken from him on arrival.  

I perpetually feel as if I’m only beginning to be aware of the purgatorial predicament my vocation’s designed to work out, to say nothing of creating enough self-love for my girlfriend’s generous affection to find sympathetic resonance.  All of this is to say, when my youthful self confronted the possibility of suicide, a perceived abundance of grace kept me alive.  But it came with no real self knowledge whatsoever.  The “commissioning” that such a life saving event could have been was severely stunted by not knowing what I’d been kept alive for.

Frankl speaks of a disillusionment among holocaust survivors.  He says that, after the War, people were liberated, but that didn’t mean they were happy.  The fact took prisoners by surprise, and caused no small amount of disorientation.  It was the same with me.  Avoiding suicide was a liberation, but no sense of purpose steered me safely through the deconstruction that ensued.  Conjuring a life and identity around religion kept me emotionally together while life haphazardly dismantled my former self.

The Porisover Rebbe, a Jewish teacher in the Hasidic tradition, said “If God sends sadness, we ought to feel it.”  Certainly that’s part of it.  But the responsibility goes even deeper. Bernard Malamud, in his book, The Mourners talks about Gruber, a well-nigh destitute Jewish tenant, who’s being evicted by Kessler, a Jewish Landlord.  Gruber delays moving out to such an extent that Kessler breaks into the apartment, only to find Gruber, now faced with homelessness and potential death, is praying the Kaddish, the classic Jewish prayer memorializing the dead, for himself.

“Saying the Kaddish for oneself” is important and instructive.  If we all, as St. Paul says, “die daily”—if the egotistical self is daily ceasing to be, then a certain quantity of grief will be ours to bear consistently.  If we can take nothing with us, then we have to work through the emotional choreographies of letting go.  In the end, it’s Jacob’s Ladder all over again: like our teacher, we bear our burdens, become like Jesus was, a crosswalk for the cherubim.  The Catholic Funeral prayer will be easily self-applied.  At the end, no one will need to say “may angels lead you to paradise” because we’ll have been their well lit path the whole time.  

One, Two, Buckle my Soup: Conversing with ‘Conversations with Hank’

Hank, Everyone...

Conversations with Hank is written by Joy Hanford, who lives in Guimarães, Portugal with her husband and two children. Described as an “accidental parenting blog,” Conversations with Hank is a glimpse into Hanford’s life as a quite-intentional mother, European immigrant of midwest US stock, and author of children’s books. The following was written after her post “Finding a Better Way to Vent.” As a general note, I hope use of such words as “Mãe”—the Portuguese word for “Mom” won’t throw the reader. The letter is posted because its content is pertinent to Under the Influence. Ultimately, the intended audience is Hank, who’s awesome enough to speak both languages. I’m confident y’all will deal with it.



Dear Hank,


My name is Josh. I went to high school with your Mãe. We weren’t in touch for a while, because we both went to college, and while she was meeting your Pai, I went off to live in a monastery. After a while I left the monastery—internet access was limited there, but that's not why I left—and it was a great joy to be able to get back in touch with her over Facebook. Being able to read a bit about your life in Guimarães has been just as fun.

I don't have the time to sit down with Conversations with Hank as often as I'd like, but your Mãe’s blog is always rewarding when I can check in with it. That was the case recently, when I read “Finding a Better Way to Vent.”

I like Conversations with Hank because it makes so clear the love your Mãe has for you, and the fascination she feels and watching you grow. You may think that I'm writing this post on my own blog simply because I went to high school with her, but that's not the case. I empathize with you quite a lot, Hank. “Finding a better Way to Vent” expressed a struggle with living up to standards and being social that I could relate to. It’s a struggle I’ve never liked, but that I’m unfortunately really familiar with.

So I'm writing this post in my own blog for two reasons:

First, because life comes with no instruction manual, and I’ve always hated that. The older me wishes that when I was your age someone had given me practical, usable advice. So I am writing this as “a letter to my younger self.”

Second, I'm writing this letter because, on the way to work this morning, I had to stop fast. The container of soup that I had packed for lunch flew out of my passenger seat and exploded—in puddles soupy deliciousness— all over my car.  Speeding down the highway, too occupied with driving to fix the fact that soup was all over my car, I had the idea to write this letter.

I was an awkward child (very, very awkward) from the start, Hank. I don't know how it is in Portugal, but in America, boys become men believing that they have to be successful athletically and financially, and that all the cute girls have to have little crushes on them, or else they’re not good at being men. I accepted this message without knowing it was there, and without thinking. In short, life was telling me to be awesome and confident and I would often feel nothing more than awkward. It left me a bit of an outcast from the start.

I was born with a mild disability, Cerebral Palsy. My muscles tighten faster than most people’s. This doesn’t mean a lot, but does mean that, if I want to run, or walk up stairs, or skip, I’m likely to fall more than others would. Most people trip because something’s in their way. I grew up tripping because I was walking in the first place. It made me feel unsafe in my own body.

I can dance, Hank, but because of my disability it has always taken me longer to learn. And so, when dancing with the ladies became an issue, I was hopelessly lost. I wanted to be popular and loved, but I would have settled for being accepted for who I was.

Since I was different, I was a bit of an outcast. I couldn’t compete physically, so I developed my mind. I had great ideas about how to do things, and no one listened. So I was at odds, not only with my own body, but with others as well.

The fact is, when life didn’t meet my needs, I felt sad. And if my older self could give my younger self advice, he would say: feel that sadness. Feel every bit of it. Do all the emotional things: listen to sad songs, fill notebooks with painful scribblings. All of that. And do it hugely. I would give my younger self that advice because, in the end, that’s not what I did.

It's not cool to feel sad, so I denied it. But I still had needs that people around me weren’t meeting. I would try to get people to meet my needs, and then if they didn't I would get mad. Again, American society says that you can be anything if you try hard enough. That may apply to something you're already talent at, but it certainly doesn't apply to being accepted, being secure, or being in control. When the right people didn't come to my birthday parties, when I would fall down (again), when I had good ideas about how to do things but nobody listened—these weren’t things I could change, but I spent too many years trying to change them anyway.

And I suppose this leads to the second thing that older me wants to say to younger me. In short, trying to solve sadness, (or trying to fix the ways life falls short) will only lead to anger. Looking back, older me sees that, when I denied sadness, I caused myself a lot of anger. I’ve spent way too much of my daily life being mad and perfectionist, way too much of my life needing to control things.  Looking back, I wish it had been different.

My Girlfriend's
Sadface is
particularly Cute

These days I have a wonderful girlfriend. Living our lives together and working stressful jobs sometimes makes us sad. Maybe it's because I'll always be a little bit goofy: but when we’re sad, I will often look at her and ask “Do you think we should make the sad face?” The sad face is the biggest, most deliberate, whiniest frown that either of us are capable of. When we make the sad face, everything stops. We do nothing else. We just sit there looking sad, and staring each other in the face. And then a funny thing happens: one of us laughs. “Who laughs first” has kind of become a game we play. I win most of the time. My sad-face skills are unparalleled. The point is, there's a third lesson in that: acknowledging my sadness is awkward at first, but ultimately it's both satisfying and funny.

What I'm not trying to say, Hank, is to be hurt and sad all over the world because it's how you feel at the moment. Unfortunately, while I was growing up, the “popular kids” would often become more popular by teasing me. I could never have admitted how sad they made me feel, and I definitely couldn’t have cried, without risking getting made fun of by the kids at school.

It's never good to be defensive without being aware of it. I became defensive by denying my sadness too much, and Older Me has spent a lot of my life trying to reverse that. The fourth piece of advice I’d give myself, though, is to be more guarded. I should've tested people more to see if I could express myself fully without being rejected. It’s often useful to be intentionally guarded. I’ve had to be careful to do two things: for one thing, I’ve to be careful not to become a bully myself—because sometimes young bullies become older bullies--because bullying others doesn’t fix sadness, and it can lead to anger. Additionally, I’ve had to learn to defend myself from people who put me down.

I am a Sadness Ninja.

I do that by not running from the “bad things” people want to pin on me. When people say I’m sad, (and mean it as an insult,) I smile and remind them that it’s more like constant, low-grade depression, and that they forgot “awkward and insecure.” I don’t take on things that aren’t true—no one could call me a bad father, because I don’t have kids- but if someone called me that, I’d say “That’s not true, but I am a terrible boyfriend. And I do a world-class ‘depression’ act.” People expect me to want to live up to their ideal, so they can use it against me. By showing that I don’t want that, I take away their way of messing with me.

I guess, in short, what my older self would say to my younger self is: there’s no way to get around how frustrating it is to need (and not to receive) acceptance, security and control. I hope that my younger self would recognize he can spend less time with anger by allowing himself to feel sad. He can be guarded instead of being defensive.

To put a fine point on it: When I spilled my soup, I realized that, though I want to control things, that's not realistic about a lot of things in my life.  Young and old, people are sometimes bullies, and sometimes I have to stop fast on the highway. I can learn to buckle my soup. Buckling my soup is something I can do to prepare for life's unpredictable stuff.  My younger self could have wished for acceptance, could have wished people were nicer. And my older self could spend time wishing people weren’t crazy drivers. But, just like I shouldn't fix my sadness with anger, I can't fix others' conduct.  So I might as well buckle my soup and get on with changing what it's possible for me to change. I’m starting to learn I can feel my feelings, that I can be purposeful in maintaining only a small group to express them with, and that I have a few things I can do to defend myself against life’s jerks.

When I got to work, and set myself to wiping up spilled soup, the things I’ve said in this letter all started to come to me.

Hank, I just want to thank you for finding safe spaces to let your real life show. I’m thinking particularly of your Mãe’s blog. Having the strength to “just be myself” is something that I’m still working on. Your willingness to struggle with that too, and then to let someone write about it—it helps a good bit. And because of you, I have said some things today that I needed to hear myself saying. Older me, and younger me, think you’re a good bloke.


Keep it real, man.

Peace,


Josh

Crucified and Risen: A Theory of Christian Reincarnation

I’ve been speaking for weeks about “purgatorial predicament” as if it were the equivalent of the Hindu concept of the Karmic Predicament.  I haven’t adequately explained what the purgatorial predicament is.  The purgatorial predicament is a “cross” we make light when we live our vocations to the fullest, and heavy when we sin.  In short, if we were to put both the eternal and immanent aspects of heaven and hell in a blender with the afterlife’s state of purgatory, if we press puree we might get a frozen concoction that helps us grasp its meaning. In any particular incarnation, the biblical laws about “reaping what we sow” and “sin being passed down to the 3rd and 4th generation” are the “purgatorial laws” that by which our state inches blessedly closer to heaven, or unfortunately close to hell. 

After Christ, some said, there would be no more prophets, no further revelations.  If it’s a fight, I don’t have a dog in it. It just seems a bit silly to claim that the fullness of time was an ending.  This post aims to explore the implications of believing that, because of Christ, the fullness of time was the tipping of chronological time into kairos time, an internalization of “now” until it becomes “fullness of being.”  God mercifully prepared the "fullness of Time" over multiple epochs, and it seems silly at best--and at worse, a limitation of God's mercy--to think that he wouldn't prepare "the fullness of being" over similarly-multiple lifetimes.  The paradigm for the fullness of being is Christ, and we’ll need to account for the rebirth of his body both in the Church (The Body of Christ) and in each believer (as an other-christ.)  The use of the word “rebirth” is purposeful: by the conclusion of this post, I hope to have laid the groundwork for a Christian concept of Reincarnation.

Even for those who wish otherwise, the bible contains no proof.  Those who misunderstand this often quote John 3:7 "You must be born again."  That translation choice is guided by protestant assumptions, in which "being born again" means something closer to "hitting rock bottom and surrendering."  A Catholic Translation of John 3:7 says "You must be born from above."  To those who feel I should attempt to prove my claims using Jesus words, I say: "Proof is not my circus. Jesus' words are not my monkeys."  (If I have a monkey, his name is Hanuman.  There, I said it.)

Instead of trying to mine what Jesus meant, let me be clear about what I mean: Lack of openness to reincarnation is a limiting of God's mercy.  Whether we're "reborn" or "born from above:" if God used human history to "reeducate" humanity in obedience, and if education fundamentally involves failure, then through reincarnation God may be giving us "multiple tries" at getting it right.  For the purposes of this post, I think "getting it right" is total self-emptying, and that Jesus' various appearances are "reincarnations." Through multiple existences, all Christians ride his coattails, progressively shedding false selves that drive them to a "success" that's full of selfishness.

First, let’s pencil sketch the fullness of time.  Humanity represented its beginnings in the myths of the primeval history.  In Genesis, this is chapter 1-11, beginning with creation and ending with the tower of Babel and the descendants of Noah.  They represented Judaism’s beginnings with the Patriarchs, Genesis 12-50.  They represented God’s manifestation of “Chosenness” through the Exodus, and the Law through Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers. After the death of Moses’ Assistant Joshua, when Israel was ready, it transitioned from a strictly tribal form of governance to one of ruling Judges.  The Judges, sent when providence demanded, were replaced by the more permanent Kingship model. Samuel the priest anointed Saul.  He ruled until he fell out of God’s favor, then David and Solomon ushered in what’s commonly known in Israel as a golden age of unity.  Under Solomon’s son Rehoboam, the Jews split into the Northern and Southern kingdoms.  Lacking stable kings, and with many of their priests serving idols, the kingdoms called out to God and he sent the prophets, who counseled them to repent.  The prophetic hope was to either avoid, deal well with, or be liberated from exile.  “When the fullness of time had come, Mary gave birth to a son, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them at the inn.”  After Jesus taught, his followers gave him the title “priest prophet and King,” investing him with the most complete authority in Israel.  

I don’t want to quibble over semantics or get too heady.  The fullness of time becomes fullness of being, and it seems to me that Jesus has had 4 historical “reincarnations.”  The first was his earthly life.  The second, his appearances as a stranger.  The third is his appearance in each person, of whom Paul said their “true self [was] hidden with Christ in God.” In the 4th, Jesus is reincarnated in his body, the church.  So, quite literally, Jesus is dharmakaya, “the body of the teaching.”  Christ’s incarnations are not 4, they’re one.  By being present in each of us, and in everyone throughout the ages, he’s had innumerably more.

Christ is reborn throughout history, and in Christ, so might we be reborn.  As the fullness of being approaches completion, the believer sheds his ego and the eight evil thoughts that work together to produce it. Our life is like a dandelion flower that a man keeps with him as he drives.  He speeds toward his death, and the Spirit blows where it wills.  If he guards the dandelion flower, his ego remains the same and his life, hidden with God in Christ, remains undiscovered.  But if the bloke holds the dandelion flower out the window, so that the energies of his sins can be transmuted into virtues, the “inner Christ” to which they clung can be laid bare.  Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said "Because I live, you also will live."

Jesus lived poor, taught the poor, worked miracles that the poor rejoiced over, then suffered and died.  He rose, and appeared to his disciples, first under the guise of a stranger who re-interpreted the scriptures to them.  Then he began to do things like break bread with them and address them by name, and they recognized their teacher.  As I’ve said elsewhere, he was training them to part with their paradigm of how he’d looked during his earthly life—so that they could see him in everyone, everywhere.  After sending his Apostles out to baptize the nations, Jesus ascended to the Father, to appear no more in particular bodily form.  

In the post resurrection appearances, Christ certainly became a stranger to part us from our preconceived notions about his physical form.  Additionally, though, he became a stranger to us because he knew we were, in truth, strangers to ourselves.  He became what we had yet to realize we were, so we could find him in finding ourselves.  This is Christian reincarnation: just as Christ passed into and out of human forms so that we could shed misconceptions about him, so we pass into and out of human forms so we can recognize him in ourselves.  

There’s a reason for this: we have a false self, a True Self (mahatman), and a divinized self.  We will shed the first two as we progress toward the third, and in the third we will be so united to God that distinguishing between divine and human will be impossible.  Jesus “moved through successive incarnations” in his earthly and post-resurrected life so as to show us that he himself is what we are, what we were, what we will be.

Each particular incarnation is bound by 5 laws: Gospel and Vocation, Vice and Virtue, and Prayer.  The first two vary based on how God made us, the third and fourth vary based on our attachments, and the fifth varies based on how quickly grace enables us to slip the trap of spiritualizing ego and desire.

For years, the church has been arguing the need for enculturation in evangelization.  Not only not only does each culture need the Gospel tailored to them, each individual too. There are tasks proper to each vocation, all of which have the capacity to enlighten.  The trap modern culture falls into is one of Ego and desire.  We ask our kids what they want to be when they grow up, we tell them they can be whatever they’re intent on being, forgetting that identity and desire are shitty jobs we should have never accepted in the first place. 

Only from the perspective of ego are Vice and Virtue things we collect, heavenly betty crocker points with which an eternally new toaster will one day be ours.  On the level of True Self, they’re purgatorial laws, and on the level of Divinized self, since we become totally part of God, they’re unimportant.

Prayer follows a pattern like that laid out in previous posts.  Just as there are “stages of dealing with the passions,”  there are “stages of prayer.”  These aren’t a method (because all methods are traps,) they’re descriptors of a process in which each part builds on another, but aren’t linear.  The stages are Distraction, Verbal Prayer, Meditation, Sensation, and Contemplation.  Distraction’s a state of racing thoughts.  Verbal prayer is a matter of words, offered in varying unity with emotion and divine intention.  Meditation’s the stuff of mental images.  This is the level on which the great saints’ storied revelations took place.  Sensation is the next level.  If the body has stored pain, it emerges as a sensation.  The “consolations” of which saints speak—which in Hinduism is Kundalini energy—manifests here too, and can make prayer sweet indeed.  Though ego itself might be something to which the haphazard practitioner becomes attached, Kundalini energy, in another dangerous little trap, can become addicting.  Should it become more difficult to raise, learning to live and pray without it can be quite difficult.  

But that very difficulty is a chance to see our attachment to spiritual things for the delusion that it is.

I said I don’t have a dog in theological fights.  I’m writing about this not because I myself have experienced it. Rather, Catholics I trust have remembered their past lives.  An old monk I lived with had been a civil war re-enactor in pre-monastery days.  This was more than a hobby.  It was important to him, in part, because charging the field, he remembered having done so in a past life.   The Church’s theology, if it’s to describe its members’ experience, may need to become at least unopposed to a language that can accommodate the whole of it.  I believe past lives to be a real possibility, if a person requires them to negotiate their purgatorial predicament.  I have not yet experienced memories of my own past lives, if such there be. I suppose I will find out whether I’m right when I’m reborn as a moth, who lives near a lantern and has memories of writing a quite verbose blog, back when he had fingers.

Christian Reincarnation, in which I may be reborn until everything false in me yields to Christ, is not an account of extraordinary holiness.  True, there are “realized beings” whose incarnations are a way God made his influence obvious: they’re near the end, and for them, purgatory needs no heavenly elements.  They’re the ones of whom Jesus said “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”  The rest of us jerks are left, now, to work out our purgatory on earth in a gradual way.  We hunker down in sin, or are freed from it, in the way grace and our cooperation with it enables.  We work with the tools the church gives, we make a heaven or a hell of earth as our conduct and inner dispositions dictate.  If we return to the earth for another incarnation—and of this truth, I may never have direct experience—then we continue that process through myriad earthly lives. 

From age to age, our cup runneth over.  It wells up within us again and again: Creation to Abraham, Moses and David.  From Daniel, Isaiah and Christ.  The spring wells within us: the Lord is reborn.  From life to life, when we stand face to face, we will think as he thinks. See, for every last one of us, life’s letting go. We find Heaven in kneeling to drink.

Why Patreon feels icky, and other musings

You might have noticed that I recently added a Patreon button to Under the Influence. I feel divided about it. Money's not the point: the site is a spiritual tool, primarily for me, but hopefully for you too.


On the other hand, when I finish a post, a small part of me feels so clean and liberated. And there's a tiny voice that says "if I could do this full time, I would." And I know that full-time bloggers, if they're ever going to get their start, start this way.


If you have benefitted at all from Under the Influence, that's awesome--and it's free. If you've benefitted and feel like kicking some loose change in the direction of sustaining it, that would be awesome too.


Alright. I'm gonna try to put this up and forget about it. Salam, y'all.

An Open Letter on the Holiday Season

To those who, like me, are perpetually recovering from their own assholery,

Over the Thanksgiving break, for the second time in the history of Under the Influence, I stopped writing the post I was working on.  The first time was on June  12 2017, when I sat down to write “Kairos Koans and Conversion Three“.  On that day last summer, I found myself attempting to write myself a solution to my anxiety. Yesterday, as on that June morning, I was working on what I consider to be a good idea.  That wasn’t the problem.  The problem was my writing tried to grasp for secure meaning, instead of letting meaning come and go as it pleased.  I was writing to "fix myself."  With a bit of vigilance, I'd have been able to see that plainly.

I should have looked my distractions, as I wrote.  Ostensibly I was writing about positive masculine gender identity.  Meanwhile, I was car shopping—I can’t yet afford a new car, mind you—but I’ll be able to some day.  I was doing research on the perfect replacement-pair of winter pajamas.  I practiced yoga nidra twice.  The first "sitting" hadn’t been “a good meditation”—that is, it had provided no remedy for my anxiety—so I did it again, and had a similarly “fruitless” experience.  Such evaluation indicates a dualistic way of approaching meditation, but I only saw that later. It stared back at me from the bathroom mirror.

In the middle of everything, I stumbled on an idea from the Kabbalah that got me particularly stoked, and I read through intellectual clickbait till my brain hurt.  I rock a few of the symptoms of Obsessive Compulsive thinking, and they roused themselves to speed my busload of potential blog posts over the intellectual cliff.  Eventually—Holy Shit—I had to stop.

Often I can't put my finger on precisely why I'm hella-angsty.  Mercifully, I eventually saw myself perpetuating my Advent pre-game mindfuck.  I took a shower, did some stretching exercises, shaved for the first time since Thanksgiving break started.

I feel I've come to something of a crossroads.  Since high school, whatever's transcendent has used thought to do its communicating with me.  As I said in July 27th's Art, Empathy and Ministry: Swordfighting with Poets--when the normal cacophony of mental noise is quiet, and I hear only one thought--I have, in the past, considered it a divine voice.  I no longer do.  In part, I suppose it's because a quiet mind is happening less and less.  I mourned this at first, tried to reproduce the inner calm.  Over the past year, I've learned that it isn't the absence of thought, or reduced thoughts, that indicates the divine presence.  I can cling as much to one thought as to 20: it's letting go that indicates the finger of God.  Since I learned this, when I sit down, I don't hear words, I hear the wind blowing through the trees.

Lately, in yoga nidra practice, I'm becoming much more conscious of how the body stores both old trauma, and kundalini energy. (Kundalini energy is the life-force energy one can "encourage" by being attentive to the Chakras.)  I'm not naive enough to assume the body's energies are a divine revelation, but at the very least they're the next thing I have to be attentive to.

When God speaks through thoughts, he makes himself clear, as he has in the past, through whole tomes of mediocre poetry.  When God works through bodily sensation, he says nothing, but lately I find myself listening more actively to that silence.

No matter what I consider my current signposts to be, I know I can have one of two attitudes about the path I'm on.  Either my delusions about self and God can guide my journey, or I can let the journey determine what I believe about myself and God.  I prefer the latter.  And in the midst of that, while I arrive at very few absolute truths, there are pieces of wisdom to which I return that have been consistently helpful.  

So, while brushing my teeth on that conflicted day after Thanksgiving, once I'd given up trying to "solve" my anxious state, I recalled a number of things that are important.  Here they are, in no particular order:

1.  As Ram Dass says, “All methods are traps.”  Both Yoga Nidra and concentrating on the word Om can become spiritual “possessions” I play with to avoid sitting with tension.  New Cars, Pajamas, financial planning for either of them--these techniques can all become justifiable parts of the spiritual-avoidance-complex.  For me, and for Under the Influence, anxiety is the primary indication it's time to switch spiritual methods, or cease them altogether.

2. If Jesus is "The Way, the Truth and The Life," then it's perhaps even more true that Life is Truth, that it's the Way.  To employ Ghandiji's thought again--as I did in May 18th 2017's "The Rights to Being Right"--I didn't, over Thanksgiving, realize Jesus was my life.  I realized my life was Jesus.  "Letting Go" came not as the result of spiritual work, but in the absence of it.

3.  Back in the monastery--I remember every detail of this moment--I remember a time my mental wheelspinning stopped.  I wanted very much to encounter my sufferings, to unite them to the suffering of Christ.  I wanted to commune with God, for christsakes.  After all, that's what had motivated joining.  It's what I'd rearranged my life for.  Toothbrush in mouth, I realized that, while brushing my teeth, the way to unite my sufferings to Christ was by shutting the fuck up and brushing my teeth.

It reminded me of the Zen Monk who'd sequestered himself in a cave to intensify his practice.  Once, he voiced his satisfaction about how his day had gone by simply and contentedly saying "Not one thought of Zen today."

What needs to happen, will happen, in the end, but not if our Egos wear the present moment like shoes and tie the laces together.  

So here it is: I am nothing.  The Spiritual Life is unimportant.  Transformation isn't a low-hanging christmas tree ornament, and we're not  beloved pet cats in a dysfunctional home.

This holiday season, let's donate the last of the fucks we have to give to the bell-ringers outside the grocery store.  If you get to the frozen aisle and find one left in your jacket pocket, join me in using it to follow the advice of my famous Jewish-Buddhist compatriot: "Whenever I find myself talking about Zen," he said, "I just can't wait to shut the fuck up."

The way to find serenity is a non-method.

So, um...Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, or whatever.  I want to leave the seeker of wisdom, and the hack of a guru I sometimes try to be, sitting on the couch while I do dishes.  Peace to all, and God Bless us, Everyone,

Josh W. 

Ecclesiology and Ego, Trinity and Transformation

On October 26th, Under the Influence’s post “Christ, Christians and the Body Language of Transformation” defined right belief (orthodoxy), right practice (orthopraxy) and its own term “right transformation” (orthomorphosis.)  For good or ill, we either acknowledge or deny who we are: our true self is either unmasked or concealed by what we do or think.  Unfortunately, most religions accept a certain number of concepts and actions as orthodox.  In the hands of communal egotism, orthodoxy can assist in concealing, not revealing, the Church’s true self.

The Church exhibits “spiritual materialism” in its controversies about things sacred.  St. Paul talks about factions who say “I belong to Paul” or “I belong to Apollos.”  It’s because of  spiritual materialism that people were going around prioritizing their teacher over Jesus.  The Potlucks that followed early Eucharistic celebrations eventually went by the wayside, but Paul initially had to caution communities not to rush into “[Their] own suppers” at the expense of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist itself.  It’s because of Spiritual Materialism that people prioritized their own meals over the one bread of Christ.

With the exception of Saints and Yogis and Bodhisattvas, the ego renunciation task is incomplete.  Therefore, institutions are much more apt to be guilty of spiritual materialism—the appropriation of spiritual things as egoic merit badges.  Spiritually Materialistic institutions have a corporate ego that collects the “spiritual experiences” of the saints, looks for evidence of “heroic virtue” and extraordinary holiness, and reduces whole lives down to hagiographical paragraphs.  Orthodoxy is king in the Catholic Church, with orthopraxy coming in at a close and amorphous second. Orthomorphosis is nowhere to be found.   

We can confirm extraordinary holiness: we know when a saints intercession has defied physical laws but can be certain of their sanctity only after death.  There is necessary work yet to do.  We have only begun, in such spiritual gifts as “The Steps of Humility” in Benedict’s rule, to describe what a normal person looks like who, chastened by this life, has parted with his ego.   

Zen teachers, with a longstanding tradition of orthomorphosis, have the means, in spades, to measure transformation.  This allows them to more accurately diagnose, and more quickly let go of spiritual materialism’s empty promises.  Catholic School teachers are routinely charged with forming students in “knowledge of the faith” while the one thing that matters, the gift of faith itself, remains something teachers can neither impart nor evaluate.  The Buddhist author Adyashanti has said that enlightenment is judged by what’s absent: a lack of clinging to material goods or thoughts.  Ultimately what’s absent is an interior life, the “self inside our Selves”  that evaluates.  We don’t think about what grocery runs involve or what they mean, we just go buy eggs.  We crack them, make omelettes and move on to the next thing.  Catholic Schools are too preoccupied with the mental constructs of Catholicism to form students in such a renunciation.  Even if that preoccupation held no sway, even if renouncing ego were possible, Catholicism doesn’t have the codified tradition of orthomorphosis with which to facilitate it.

Lacking a program of orthomorphosis, the Church has no means to avoid egotistically appropriating spirituality.  In an atmosphere of Spiritual Materialism, careers in the Catholic Church are characterized by competition, and the commodification of spiritual knowledge. 

The Saints offer proof of this by the fact that they are forced to treat their spiritual accomplishments as qualifications.  St. Paul had a bit of a chip on his shoulder naturally.  But the only situation in which he boasted, as such, was when his qualifications as an apostle were called into question.  He expressed his qualifications (how many times he’d been shipwrecked or stoned) only when the spiritually materialistic Church insisted he do so.  He talked about the inner life of his own prayer, (somewhat feebly attributing it to “a man [he knew] in Christ). He talked about "getting caught up in the third heaven" only when ministering to others.  And he otherwise boasted of his weakness alone, (of the thorns in his flesh), and of his need for Jesus.  Paul’s ego, then, could do the self-protective work that Egos are made for, but could step out of the way when necessary. 

St. Paul said everything, knowledge included, will pass away, until the only thing that remains is faith, hope and love.  Because there are no standards for orthomorphosis, Catholic school students are told to love Jesus, and not taught to make his journey.  In the professional sphere we hang “professionalism” on knowledge.  “Masters” are those with academic degrees, not those who have undergone transformation.  While I can’t personally evaluate the genuineness of my transformation, my 7 years in the monastery are often viewed as a nice fringe benefit, foot-noted on my resumé.  Nothing has influenced my teaching and personal theology more, and yet “life experience is not qualification.” 

A church that has sussed out a coherent teaching on orthomorphosis would be able to judge individuals as “Masters” who have become, in heart, mind and bearing, like the Master himself.  That “becoming,” I suspect, is visible in the calmness of one’s expression, audible in how people speak, or don’t, of themselves.  It’s measurable by the relativized importance of self and the acceptance of reality. 

For readers new to theological psychobabble, the “Great Commission” is the sending out of the apostles. At least in the book of Acts, it took place after Christ’s Resurrection.  Jesus says to his apostles ““Go forth and preach the Gospel to all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”  Had the Church, at the Great Commission, been concerned with orthomorphosis, I’m convinced it would have changed the understanding of the great commission entirely.  In turn, a well developed tradition of orthomorphosis would have added a good bit, and perhaps changed entirely, the ensuing history of orthodoxy and orthopraxy.  To borrow a structure from the Nicean Creed, it’d be worthwhile to think about how orthomorphosis might look from a Trinitarian point of view.

The post “Not Two: on the Non-Dual Mind of Christ” talked about the Koanic worth of the phrase “in the name of Jesus.”  To do something “In the name” of a member of the trinity is to actualize what that person is about.  The Father is the locus of true identity, which contains both being and non being.  The Son is the Koan of koans, the embodiment of mu and the teacher of self-emptying.  The Spirit is the acceptance of reality, which encompasses both reality and unreality.  The Totality of the Godhead is the whole of reality: us as we are, experiencing reality as it is.

Because Orthodoxy is our oldest model for discipleship, to be baptized, these days, is to accept a certain number of philosophical statements about the Trinity.  Jesus has two natures.  The Trinity is three persons who share one nature.  The Spirit proceeds from the father and the Son, and the Church is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic. Orthodoxy may indicate a stirring of the heart, but it may also remain a pure head-trip.  Orthomorphosisis is not as purely intellectual as the Creed.  We can’t answer a Koan, to say nothing of accept our suffering and death as the messiah did, unless we admit our fear, doubt and confusion, and learn to act in the face of it.  

From the point of view of orthomorphosis, Jesus redeems us from our false self, and we get glimpses of our True Self that’s hidden with Christ in God.  Unity with Christ has multidirectional effects: it unites us with God, (and our true identity,) and with the reality of the world, (both the demands of our “purgatorial predicament” and our own vocations.)  On the whole, the division between perceivers and the world they perceive falls away, leaving them with nothing but the anonymity of having been divinized. Following the lead of the perichoresis, they find their feet in the Trinity’s eternal waltz.

Union with our True Selves and with reality comes to fruition in peace of mind.  It pays dividends in a calm bearing.  Thich Nhat Hanh, in a 1966 letter to Fr. M. Louis Merton, said “We don’t teach meditation to the young monks.  They aren’t ready for it till they stop slamming doors.”  However much I believe prayer teaching should start early, this short statement bespeaks a connection between bearing and egoic detachment.  For Buddhists, it’s possible to evaluate when a student’s begun the process of distancing from the ego.  It’s possible to differentiate between the temporary egoic reprieves that come from “realization” and the permanent state of “enlightenment.”

Catholics can tell you what contemplation is.  Old monks have been praying for centuries that the novices will have the experience (so that, for Christ’s sake, they’ll finally calm down.)  Now that we know that the Desert Father’s “Eight Evil Thoughts” combine to form a single, ghostly identity called the Ego, it would require only slight attention to Catholic-Zen dialogue to describe what it looks like to gain permanent distance from it.  In short, Catholics are on the cusp of developing a Christian concept of enlightenment.  

Such a dialogue would bestow immeasurable gifts on the church.  Equipped with an articulated tradition of orthomorphosis and a Christian concept of enlightenment, we might be able to reserve the title “master” for the humble, instead of the intellectually accomplished.  We might be able to transmit, not just knowledge of Christ, but likeness to Christ, and institutionally recognize the resemblance.  I wish I could describe this for you from the inside out, but alas, my karmic assholery is too highly developed.

My namesake, Joshua Son of Nun, had the same problem.  When Eldad and Medad prophesied in the Israelite Camp, he asked Moses to stop them.  Moses response, his great wish, took things in another direction.  He responded “Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them.”  The book of Acts writes “In the last days, the Lord declares “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.  Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions.”  God can keep the visions and the prophesy.  I’d be content if we had a fuller vision of what it’s like to be humble: in other words, what it’s like to be healthy and normal.  Under the Influence is really stoked to work toward describing that more fully.  Until then, you will find its author waiting behind its pages, odd and hopeful as ever.

Love, Service Devotion: A reading of Ram Dass and Trungpa Rinpoche

When I was int the monastery, I was guilty of “Spiritual Materialism.”  This is when my ego makes the things of the spirit into little merit badges that I go around collecting.  By and by, I realized that, by doing this, I was ignoring a good bit about myself: namely, the way my dysfunctional past was affecting my present, and my own tendencies to addictive behavior.

One of a few “Theses” here at Under the Influence is this: I hear the church’s teachings differently because I’m an addict who comes from dysfunction.  I can enter into its teachings differently because I’m allergic to its most important sacrament, just as some who share my disability are unable to “do,” or to “think about” the church’s ethics.  Furthermore, my annoying daily lot of PTSD and OCD take the dualism of western thought and run with it, making God seem more distant than, if truth be told, he is.

I recently listened to Ram Dass’ lecture series called “Love, Service, Devotion and the Ultimate Surrender.”  On the whole, it was something so rich that I feel multiple hearings are in order.  Ram Dass, however, in speaking about all the spiritual direction he does, bemoans the way “everyone’s got their thing” that keeps them from doing spiritual work.  These hang-ups, he says, ultimately become little things an aspirant clings to.  Along with turning positive events into credentials, the ego turns negative bits of one’s history into reasons to avoid going deeper.

For me, this was convicting.  I don’t want to do either of those.  I don't want my issues to be a crutch, and I’d sooner take down Under the Influence than have it become the sash I sew my red badge of transcendence on.  Furthermore, Ram Dass’ surpassing grooviness is…so right on.  So I wanted to do a post that works in two directions: one, as an homage to some of Love, Service Devotion’s  more useful bits, and two, as an examination of the work Under the Influence is doing—to make sure I’ve not been, as St. Paul says, running in vain.

A good bit of Love, Service, Devotion concerns a dialogue between Ram Dass and Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.  Ram Dass is keen to say “Hey, man, it’s all about doing less.  Ram is doing everything, and I’m just sitting back in the Atman and watching it happen.”  Trungpa responds “You’re not taking enough responsibility for individual differences.  That’s the work we need to be doing, and it’s constant.”

The balance they ultimately strike—and I find this to be true, even from a Catholic Perspective—is that human life is a “free-will sandwich.”  We’re liberated in the beginning and at the end, but the middle is chocked full of struggle.  We come from God and return to him, and a part of us remembers that with a force that occasionally renders it present.  And we remember too, how St. Paul says “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  Both are right.  Eastern religions call the middle part “our karmic predicament.”  To coin a catholic phrase, we might refer to it as “our purgatorial predicament," a way of doing our purgatory on earth.  In any case, the center is a toss-up between giving up our ego, or allowing it to entrench.  And there are certain laws that govern it.  We christians codify them this way: do, with others, as you’d have them do with you.  As you sow, so shall you reap.  There isn’t a person who’s given everything up that won’t receive a hundredfold (along with persecutions) in this present age.  The Middle is the exile of being particular.  We’re not God, and as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin says, in the middle part of life “union individuates.”  If we’re not careful, we end up simply refining our moral ass-clownery.   But even at best, even the process of becoming divinized is marked by painful separation.  

In the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, newcomers are commonly cautioned against using spirituality to do an end-run around this pain.  I began this post by admitting I did this for years, with great gusto.  Under the Influence should always be understood as a response to religious self-deception, as an effort to get honest.

A sobriety coin, for me, has two sides: on one, we need to acknowledge what gets in our way.  On the other, we need to realize that the intended end is the emotional sobriety of a non-dual mind: neither naming our pain, nor enlightenment is something that someone called "I" first does, then takes credit for.  For Under the Influence, this is to be understood as a hard and fast modus operandi.  For me, and for those like me, neglecting either side will end in the self-deception of spiritual materialism or weaving an identity from my resentments.

So Ram Dass is right. We’re all trust-falling into our Atman and smiling back up at the world while Ram soul-trains his way through his many incarnations.  We are slowly being divinized, and it is all God’s work.  But Trungpa is also right: we have a responsibility to face and individuate from our ego, or else live blind-folded while we whine about wanting to see.

Other than the above, Under the Influence has no spiritual method.  Ram Dass said, and this blog resoundingly echoes the assertion that all methods are traps.  It’s the spiritual equivalent, not of a doctor’s amoxicillin, but of a 1960’s harvard professor’s psilocybin.  If you’re here and you’re like me, you do what you do, you see what happens.  Faced with a panoply of divine remedies, you are honest about your symptoms—you take what works and discard what proves itself a placebo.  St. Paul boasted only of his shortcomings.  I’d chose a different verb for myself, but he was basically right on.  Under the Influence isn’t written to lay any variety of religious trip on anyone.  It’s written each week in the hope of making non-judgmental space for self-work.  It aspires to become non-dualist: to balance the “self” and the “doing” with “non-self” and “not-doing.” Spiritually, then, our shortcomings and our gifts aren’t good or bad.  Methods aren’t better or worse.  Saying that would be bowing, again, to dualistic thinking.  All these things just are.  They might have a particular purgatorial result or karmic effect in our lives, but God has that amply accounted for, and we needn’t be too worried.

I close with two little anecdotes.  In the first place, when I was a monk, I travelled to Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.  While there, I met the Buddhist Monk Tsering Phuntsok.  He was a delightful bloke, doing the speaker’s circuit in the States to raise money for improvements to his monastery back home.  I was struck by Tsering’s kindness, sure, but also by his gratitude.  Life in his home monastery was sustained by a diet of roasted barley and tea.  The brother’s eyes got Christmas-day wide the first time he went through the serving line for Gethsemani’s main meal.  Compared to tibetans, American monks lived high on the hog indeed.  This didn’t strike me as particularly kosher, so I gave what pocket money my monastery had given me to fund the improvement of Tsering’s.  He was moved, and fishing through his bag, he produced a dried leaf.  His holiness the Dalai Lama, he said, had planted the tree it came from, and had blessed the leaf.

The point is, I had that leaf for years.  It was, far and away, my “holiest possession”—I’ve never even owned a papally blessed rosary, but I had a leaf blessed by the 14th reincarnation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion.   When I left the monastery, I had the choice to either take the leaf with me, or leave it there.  Ultimately I decided to let it go.  I figured I had a greater gift from His Holiness in my detachment than I had in the leaf.

That leaf is everything, and everything is that leaf.  Which is to say, it’s just a leaf, as impermanent as our earthly existence or our ego, our spiritual methods or our value judgements. 

 Secondly, in a certain sense, I always dug the monastic habit a bit too much.  People had a whole host of assumptions about it: everything from the belief that my wearing it implied spiritual proficiency, to thinking I knew Kung fu.  For years, I would overtly admit I had clay feet, and that I wasn’t a Shaolin Buddhist.  Covertly I would enjoy the automatic assumption that I was a badass.  All the while, I wasn’t admitting how much I wanted people to see me instead of my clothing, and I wasn’t conscious of the ways I had yet to face myself. 

The last thing I want is for Under the Influence to become a virtual costume.  At the risk of filling my readers’ heads with cheeky little taboos: I won’t adopt a Franciscan Spirituality, but the Franciscan slogan applies here—nudus nudum Christum sequi.  If those to whom this blog appeals are like its author, they “nakedly follow the naked Christ.”  No, I don't intend to reduce life to a rock concert whose attendees dance best when they're naked and high.  I simply know my ego fits too tightly, and I hope to shed it.

In a sense, I’m sure I was born in the wrong generation.  Luckily, we don’t have to, as Joni said, “get ourselves back to the garden.”  God works to get us there, if only we admit we’re lost.  Quick, someone tell me to look inside of myself, before I start thumbing it to Woodstock.

Not Two: on the Non-Dual Mind of Christ

In Catholicism, as much as anything else, dualistic thinking is a problem. The Pharisees in Jesus’ time thought some practices holier than others, and felt free to judge those who didn’t behave as they expected. In modern times, to the extent that the Church’s teachings involve doing and thinking, they are prejudiced toward those whose mental and physical capacities are considered “normal.” Profoundly disabled people are excluded from “righteousness” by default. By mandating that the Eucharistic elements be “wheat bread and grape wine,” canon law excludes celiac alcoholics from the sacrament it calls “the source and summit of all we do.” I am gluten-sensitive and, as I’ve said previously, I've a slight disability and tendencies to addiction. What’s at stake in this post is an uncomfortable hair’s breadth away from being autobiographical.

If Vatican II’s universal call to holiness is to be a real, actionable concept, the Church will have to find a more direct way to understand the inter-connectedness of all things holy. There must be some way to understand breathing mindfully (if that’s what I’m capable of) to be just as salvific as the Church’s highest devotions. The Zen belief that does this work is formally called “the interdependent co-arising of cause and effect.” Thich Nhat Hanh has used the more succinct term “interbeing.”

For Christians, the answer, as always, is Jesus. Luckily his own non-dual consciousness is the doorway to unlocking a Christian understanding of “interbeing.” It’s a Zen term, but I hope, by and by, to make the non-dual aspects of Jesus’ own, culturally-Jewish mind clear. The Patriarchs of Zen summarize their non-dualist teaching in the phrase “not two.” This post will have succeeded if you guess that, upon hearing it spoken, HaShem, the Savior, and the Church built on his Rock would wax sympathetic, and all commence to clap singlehandedly.

The fact is, Jesus' non-dual consciousness didn't start with him. We should all hug his momma's neck, because she raised him right: his non-dual consciousness was his inheritance through her and Joseph, Anna and Joachim, and all the way back to Abraham. Nay, further: it goes all the way back to the One who called Abram to leave Ur, pioneer monotheism and have his own, divine mind.

What God remembers, exists. So it is God “remembering his people” that constitutes the 12 tribes as his prized possession. And it is God “remembering his servant” that psalm 119’s author says is the source of hope. When the Jews remember Passover, they’re back in Egypt, being liberated anew.

In Jesus second, desert temptation, the devil says he’ll give endow the Christ with glory and authority if he’ll only worship him. In response, Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:13 “worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” His words betray thoughts in the ballpark of Deuteronomy 6:4, which is often translated “The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” God is one, and the mind of Christ must be the same.

Paul would later question “who has known the mind of the Lord,” thereby implying that Christ’s non-dual perspective is part of the “solution” left to us by the Lord. Jesus says “you have heard it said ‘you shall not murder’…but I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” Jesus is taking the focus away from the future, and onto the emotional roots of the present moment.

With some notable exceptions, we are accustomed to hearing an implied comparison in Jesus’ metaphorical language. If we’re to bolster a potential Christian belief in interbeing, when Jesus says “I am the gate for the sheep” he means just that. Not “I’m like the gate for the sheep” or “I function like the gate for the sheep.” No, Jesus is the gate for the sheep, just what he said.

Further, what the messiah remembers is saved. So the Good Thief’s request finds immediate answer. St. Dismas’ says “Remember me when you come into your Kingdom” and Jesus responds “Today, you will be with me in Paradise.” This request’s immediacy of fulfillment shows that many of Jesus’ words do the same heavy lifting as Koans.

That Koanic dance consists of a few classic moves, said elsewhere, which warrant repeating. Such Zen riddles collapse all places into here, all times into now. Whatever our state of being will be, successfully answered koans convert into what we are. With some trepidation—because the insights are new—I am guessing, as well, that koans teach me that “All people are me: with or without a capital S, it is my self’s karmic grind to slowly dissolve into Brahma. Koans also use “sound” to attune the hearer to bodily sensations.

In the Catholic dispensation, we’d say our vocation is heaven. Eastern Christians would say we are meant to be divinized, and the West would remember the priest’s whispered request in the Mass: by the mingling of the body and blood of our Lord, that we might come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity. All of these requests are more dualist than Jesus’ mind was, and we can be confident that, when we are truly living our vocations, we will dissolve into the Trinity as easily as a Tibetan into the fabulously disembodied embrace of the Dharma.

To worship Satan, to identify with spiritual or material desires, is to have the dualistic mind. Forever after this, Christ will call his followers away from this. Later, Paul’s images of “one lord, one faith, one baptism” resound in a church that “partakes of the one bread” and is “one body in Christ.”

Similarly, Paul acts “in the name of Jesus.” After the resurrection he tells a beggar outside the temple to rise and walk in Jesus name, and the poor man complies. He tells a demon to leave the woman it’s possessing and the spirit departs from her. The name of Jesus seems to make miraculous healing powerfully present.

There's a Zen Koan that says "without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born." This is similar to the passage in John where "the Jews" ask Jesus "you are not yet 50 years old, and yet you have seen Abraham?" Jesus response could have sufficed for both questions: he looked at his questioners and said "before Abraham was, I am."

Seeing metaphorical language as a literal statement of interbeing is a foretaste of later theological developments. In order to surmount the dualistic mindset of his milieu, Aquinas came up with "transubstantiation." One substance (bread) is invisibly replaced with another, “Christ’s body.” The term does good work, and I wouldn’t want to replace it. But the term “interbeing” is the same kind of maneuver, which can turn not just bread, but all creation into God’s literal presence, then dissolve all creation into the Trinity.

It’s reminiscent of Thich Nhat Hanh’s words about bread, in his teaching about the Eucharist. He says, “the bread we eat is the whole cosmos,” and describes how we can, by looking deeply, see in our bread the soil and rain that sustained it, the workers who cultivated it and the people they descended from.

This is similar to the “Sacramental Lens,” a concept I encountered among the faculty at my first post-monastic teaching job. Quite simply, this was explained as ‘the ability to see God through what he has made.” In reality, the way it shakes out is in a deductive process whereby we follow a chain of causation back to Aquinas’ “Unmoved Mover,” the raison d’etre of all things.

I would like to suggest we strengthen this until, just as we say people become God in divinization, we can admit that Christ made all redeemed creation a part of God. So, when the people of Judea were looking at the all-too common gates that kept their sheep confined, we can say somewhat confidently that Jesus meant for them to experience his direct presence. When we mindfully look at a flower, we can see all things. When we are truly present to each other, it is God being present to us.

Of course, the minute I say God is present to us, I’m bowing to dualism between observer and observed. Jesus wanted to remove that distance as well, which is why his farewell discourse in John is so chocked full of intimate language. Jesus says to God “I [am] in [my disciples] and you [are] in me.” In this case, selves “inter-are.” A cautious observer might say that being “in” something is different than “being” something, but (amen I say to you) the love to which the farewell discourse calls us is messier than that. As the poet e.e. cummings said “who pays attention to the syntax of things/ will never fully kiss you.” The same is true of dissolving into God: when observer and observed both cease their seeing, they simply become part of the whole Trinitarian Godhead.

The Church refers to the inner workings of the Trinity as “perichoresis.” Quite literally, this means “dancing in a circle.” If interbeing coaxes buddhists toward nirvana, then Jesus teaching does Koanic work that can move his disciples toward the Triune God and heaven. It’s a waltz that doesn’t happen till it happens—but when it does, Jesus words prove true once again: the kingdom of God, he says, is within you. May our dance be empty enough to find it.