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.

The Original Child, my First and Latest Teacher

At first, I superimposed my dysfunctional view onto religious characters, pretending it was some kind of supernatural insight.  This was back in the monastery, when I had the mind and emotional life of an addict, but no insight as to why.

Take my thoughts during one Advent, for instance.  I was working in geriatric care on behalf of our senior monks back then, many of them bedridden.  That was only on of my 3 different high-profile jobs around the monastery.  Stress management was a constant concern

I remember the day.  I was passing the senior wing’s eucharistic adoration chapel, and had turned to reverence the divine presence.  I “realized” that Mary must have felt somewhat disappointed on discovering that her savior was to come as an infant.  I intuited, perhaps rightly, that pinning one's hopes for salvation on a child who can’t communicate without crying and needs his diapers changed—well, a certain amount of disappointment would accompany that, if I were Mary, as I switched my messianic paradigm from “someone who takes care of me” to “someone I care for.”

Looking back, I don’t know if I was right about Mary’s motivations.  I had subsequent “insights” about how growing up poor—and if the legends about Joseph’s early death are true, fatherless for large chunks of time— both of these must have given Jesus complex ptsd (the kind from repeated trauma, like abused children, as opposed to the kind from periodic trauma, like a soldier).   I thought Jesus’ followers must have had ptsd, since the communal trauma of the Crucifixion was so pivotal in the Christian journey.  It’s telling that the insight came to me as I was coming to identify as an adult child.  It took me years to hear and identify with the program’s cautions: don’t, it says, use the spiritual life to do an end-run around your pain.  

It didn’t occur to me that seeing PTSD in everybody and everything might indicate the pertinence of the diagnosis for myself.  Nowadays I see my error.  In short, this post is an attempt to set the record straight, to get honest about the roots of my own case of PTSD, which is both mediocre and certain:  mediocre, because my premature birth was no more taxing than those of any premie, and certain, because even the slight dysfunction of my family served to confirm it.  Growing up, PTSD was the drain around which all water swirled, and it seems prudent to name that.

Of the earliest pictures taken of me, only a couple of them—as far as I can remember—predate 3 months old.  One particular picture shows me in a small, clear plastic incubator: I was covered in tubes and IV’s and medical tape holding it all in place.  This is because I happened into the world twelve weeks premature, and spent my first three months in an oxygen rich environment.  The following detail is important:  I was born before my lungs were fully formed.  In that oxygen tent, hobbies that filled my spare time included allowing my lungs to continue baking, and learning to breathe with them.  A few times, for a few minutes, I decided the task was beyond me.  I stopped breathing, and the resulting oxygen deprivation made for a mercifully-mild case of cerebral palsy.  

I’ve written about my two brothers from the monastery—the jewish buddhist and the ex-con turned cabinet maker.  They can testify to the fact that, at some point during the my time at the monastery, I developed nervous ticks involving breathing.  This is weird, but let me explain: I was down in the basement of the monastic library one morning, farting-around with Yoga magazine while I should have been praying.  My mindless leafing through its pages stopped eventually on an article about the bandhas, or “locks” that align the core and enable multiple yoga positions. The Mula Bandha is a contraction of the perineum. The Uddiyana bandha contracts the abdomen into the rib cage. The Jalandhara Bandha tucks the chin close to the chest.

In short, as I read about these, I tried locking them.  To this day, I’ll always remember how it felt to bring my chin close to my chest: the ensuing ease of breathing struck me as so novel.  It made my head pin-drop silent.  I was so used to my breath being influenced by nerves, and so used to my head racing with compulsive thoughts, that discovering there was a remedy became the subject of a compulsive need.  After that day, my brothers began to notice me compulsively chin-tucking, trying to recapture both the ease of breathing and the clearheadedness.  Even after the monastery, they’ve noticed that I do it less as I’ve progressed in self-awareness.  It’s a strong argument that the lungs are chief among the places I store congenital pain. 

In her book Emotional Sobriety: from Relationship Trauma to Resilience and Balance, Tian Dayton quite plainly states that “the body is the unconscious.” I read these words only recently, but they named what my hour-long morning meditations in the monastery began to show me: that the body stores the pain of old trauma, trauma that comes out sideways in our actions till we face, and begin to integrate it.  During those meditation hours, I began to be conscious, for the first time in my life, of bodily sensations.  Even before I named my trauma specifically, I knew it was there.  And the few times “sitting with my pain, then releasing it” resulted in relief—well, just like flexing the bandhas did, it led me to the misconception that I could reproduce the experience by effort, and another compulsive need to do so.

I'm unable to find the photo to which the post refers.
Hopefully this gets at the sense of it...

George David, a pseudonymous nom de guerre for the forward-thinking nurse with two first names, whose periodic assistant I became in monastic geriatric care, convinced my superiors to allow me a once per week trip out of the monastery for aggressive massage therapy.  Far from being relaxing, this kicked my ass.  Combined with the monthly visits of a specialist in “active isolated stretching,” these treatments began to rewire the muscle tissue that cerebral palsy had spent my life rendering cattywampus.  In any case, both of these most likely contributed to what I’ve come to call “Om Day.”

“Om Day” was incredibly ordinary.  I simply remember being in the monastic church, chanting the psalms with the monks. At one point I consciously attempted to align my bandhas.  Suddenly I had a feeling that I equate to “unzipping:” a sensation that started at the top of my head, and extended down through my mid-thigh.  It created a feeling on the skin like “Icy Hot” does.  To this day I don’t know what created the feeling.  I only know that it did, for my body, what glasses do for people with poor eyesight.  An optometrist once said to me “People who finally get glasses say ‘Before glasses, I could see the trees.  After glasses, I could see every leaf on the trees.”  Well, before Om Day, I could move my shoulders.  After Om Day, I could feel my trapezius muscles—by being present, in fact, to any muscle, I could experience them from, as it were, the inside out.

For three days after Om Day, I thought I was experiencing what would become a “new normal.”  But, as the actual event receded into the past and I attempted to prolong it by thinking too much about it, I began to lose the loose, conscious and particular body awareness Om Day came with.

I continued to attend ACA meetings, to notice and interrupt the ways childhood pain was affecting my adult relationships.  Breathing became what it remains to this day— an increasingly terrible tool for focusing during prayer, as mine was so often constricted by nerves.  In any case, as far as I’m concerned, this led to my first remembrance of a sensation that I’d long-ago lost to infantile amnesia.  One day I was at prayer in that same senior wing chapel.  It wasn’t going well.  For reasons I don’t know, I was so nervous I couldn’t breathe.  At one point it was so bad I began to panic.  Quite spontaneously, I became conscious of the open space in the chapel, its alive and dynamic character.  Br. Hugh of New Melleray, a friend who spent his first years as a monk of Mepkin, called it “the presence of absence.”  In any case, I spoke into the abyss.  “Help me,” I found myself saying aloud, “without you I can’t breathe!”  With the utterance of that prayer, my panic calmed, my breathing slowed, and my head filled with the pin-drop silence that would remain for the next 24 solid hours.

Something about this prayer triggered deja-vu.  I’ll never be absolutely certain that I’m correct, but it struck me that “Help me, without you I can’t breathe” is the first prayer I’d ever prayed.  Something in my body remembered the panic of not being able to breathe.  And then something else: I knew for certain that God was the reason I could breathe.  It occurred to me that this might have been the prayer I prayed for those initial three months in the oxygen tent.  However much I might be wrong about this, something about it feels right.

The suppositions with which this post began—about the motivations of the holy family and the effect of the crucifixion on Jesus earliest followers—they all seem, in later light, to be projections of pain I’d not yet dealt with.  

They were wrong, most certainly.  But Jesus wasn’t done with me: it amounts to yet another reason why I remain Christian.  When I came into full awareness of my ego and its negative effects on my life, rather than striking me as traumatizing, Christ’s crucifixion seemed to be his own authentic confrontation with the pain of his own egotism and others’.  For him, this was his “egoic death” that should, for all people, precede physical death.  To accept his cross, I see now, was the truest manifestation of the mahatman, his true self.  This recast, in a positive light, my own journey of becoming aware of ego, to say nothing of what Ekhart Tolle called the “pain body” we each keep as a repository of woundedness.  If egolessness is a goal, facing these sorts of things is certainly a means to that end.

My own increasing consciousness of potential early childhood emotions showed me that, while I would have once supposed that Jesus’ humble beginnings were painful, they, too, were revealing a paradigm.  Through ACA, I had experienced my own inner-wounded-child, my inner dysfunctional adult, and my inner healthy adult.  Jesus was trying to guide me, though, to my Original Child.  By now, I’ve had a total of a single experience of it.   Its meaning is as full of guess-work as the event itself was certain.  It’s easiest to describe in distinction to the wounded child.  My wounded child is full of panic and helplessness.  My inner original child is free of both family trauma and disability, and he looks on the world with the non-dual perspective that’s my life’s work to reclaim.  Because his inside and his outside are the same, he looks on the world with pure, fascinated awareness.  Because he’s not yet learned that some things are negative, and some positive, he looks on his experiences undividedly, with total acceptance. 

So, in the Monastery, when I read the Big Book’s testimony, the one that famously said “acceptance is the answer to all my problems today,” it resonated with me because it stirred impulses that would, by acceptance, lead me back to the Original Child within. My original child was the one who breathed when I first locked the Uddiyana Bandha.  My original child was the one who breathed when I spontaneously admitted I needed God to do so.  Interestingly enough, “Original Child Bomb” is the literal translation of the Japanese name for the “Atomic Bomb.”  This is helpful: it makes a strong argument that the “original child” is something I might access when I accept and let go of what psychology has written on my atoms.

My name, Joshua, means “God saves.”  Orthodox Jews, who don’t pronounce God’s name, theorize that “YHWH” is actually the spelling of a breath cycle: that “yah” is our first out-breath when we leave the womb, and “weh” is our last utterance before the death-rattle ushers us into Abraham’s bosom.  They say we’re constantly and automatically saying it our whole lives, and that to cease doing it would certainly mean death.

I went to an ACA meeting on the same day the “Help me, without you I can’t breathe” thing happened.  To that precious group of my fellow crazies, I said something that I sometimes forget, but that was foundational.  I described the experience to them and said “The program tells us we have a higher power.  I don’t believe it, now, because it’s a recovery saying.  I believe it because God has always been both the reason I’m alive in the first place and the reason I’m here now.”  Heads nodded, and a few people thanked me for saying something that resonated with them.  If this is the “conscious contact with God” that step 11 is always telling us to cultivate--and if it is only a way of echoing what God did, first, within us, then there is no more worthwhile thing for which to hope.