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.