On names, renaming and the unnameable.

On Saturdays, working on koans over coffee is a near-sacred act. On the surface, it’s a lot of contradiction: Joshu’s dog on the one hand, buddha nature on the other. They’re in tension until they aren’t, and the reality of the phrase “NOT TWO” sits, barking in your lap.

Then, one particular Saturday, all that’s Holy said “HIS NAME IS HANUMAN DASS.”  Without fanfare, bells and whistles, or sound—the God of gods had renamed my friend Leo, bestowing the name from "beyond the beyond."

The Brothers left to right: Me, Hanuman Dass, Sepehr

I’ve talked about him before. Leo was one of the friends from my monastery days. Sepehr was the other. Collectively, I call them “the brothers” and they’ll forever be the other two-thirds of myself. Now, apparently, the Dharma was saying “HIS NAME IS HANUMAN DASS” and one of them would be, in my head, forever different.

I had no reason to doubt it. The process of explaining why will involve back tracking a bit.

I owe my love for koans to Sepehr. I’d come to the monastery because of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Living Buddha, Living Christ,” but Sepehr’s was the first life in which I’d seen the Dharma actually working. With his own practice, and without intending to, Sepehr taught me a thing or three. Much of what it affirmed in me was rather shallow. The Indian holy man Shirdi Sai Baba, in regard to his miracles, said “I give people what they want so that they’ll want what I give.” As great acts appeal to egos, so Sepehr's affirmations did a lot of good work on my Ego in our first years as friends. Eventually I’d learn that Ego had to go out the window with everything else (baby, bathwater, and the tub itself, for Christ’s sake) but Sepehr planted important seeds. Especially later, when I became allergic to the Eucharist, I would understand what the Jesus of John's gospel meant when he said “I have food to eat that you do not know.” The Eucharist nourished my knowing. Koans fed my unknowing. And koans would become my abiding sustenance.

By way of example: One day I asked Sepehr how he was doing. He said “I feel so dead. I was up way too late last night. How are you?” I replied, “I’m dead too. The trouble is, I keep thinking I’m alive, and I keep trying to get back there. I wish I’d just cut that out.”

Sepehr smiled, and his eyes widened, the way he does when he’s involuntarily nerding out about something. “That’s Buddhist as hell, man. Shakyamuni would love you so much right now.” I hadn’t planned to “sound buddhist.” But something in me stirred at his praise.

It happened again, once while we we were doing dishes. We were supposed to be doing them silently. Thoughtfulness had claimed Sepehr’s facial expression, though. I knew he was on the cusp of speaking. When he did, all he said was “Every time you open your mouth, you’re wrong.” I paused for a moment, then silently opened my cake-hole as wide as it would go.

Again, with the wide eyed fascination. "That,” Sepehr exclaimed, “was a perfect buddhist response.”

In retrospect, my imperfections are glaring. My insecurity latched on to being told buddha would love me. My self importance roused from sleep at the word “perfect.” But I also learned a few other important lessons, which I later presented to my students as part of “The steps to solving Koans.” Koans involve admitting your fear of being wrong. Koans involve making a non-verbal response. In the end, I’d learn that Koans involve a death to self, but remember how self absorbed I was back then, how self absorbed I still am if I don’t cultivate letting go, even of the one who does the letting go. That piece would take years to become actionable wisdom.

In the coming years, I’d come to some other conclusions. Koans, I thought, do certain kinds of work. I added a host of them to my list, and, of course, that list later became “Kairos, Koans and Conversion One.” It’s a stand-alone post, but I’ll mention one of its points. In short: koans collapse “process." They render all goals realized, they actualize potential.

Fast forward with me a bit. My other best friend (whose baptismal name was Leo) had, in the meantime, become a practitioner of bhakti yoga. Bhakti yoga, as I understand it, is devotional yoga. It makes two assumptions: first, that the gods one worships are mere manifestations of the godhead. Ram, the highest God, is merely a manifestation of the Brahman, and he knows it. There are sections of the Ramayana, (the Ramayana is a hindu holy book) in which Ram takes a guru. As God, he doesn’t need to, but as a manifestation, he does what manifestations do. Bhakti yoga’s second assumption is that dualism is, up to a certain point, helpful. According to Bhakti yoga, having something over there toward which to strive—well, it helps folks progress.

In bhakti yoga, my friend had become devoted to Hanuman. Along with Ganesha, Hanuman is one of the two Hindu Gods with the body of a human and the head of an animal. Ganesha has an elephant's head.  Hanuman, for his part, is a monkey. Ram Dass, the second teacher through whom I’ve learned what I know about hinduism, is fond of quoting Hanuman’s words to Ram: roughly paraphrased, Hanuman said “When I don’t know who I am, I serve you, when I know who I am, I am you.”

Since well before his first marriage fell apart, my friend had been talking about service. He is a consummate family man: in that milieu, service is, for him, as natural as breathing. In “Messiahs and Monkey Gods: A Mapping of Me” I said that Hanuman gave me a positive framework for “distance from God.” It’s a framework that my friend and I began talking about a lot. In short, I'd been taught that service and separateness was a consequence of sin.  In Hinduism, service is divine play, or “Lila.” I found, (and I feel like my friend and I would agree on this,) that shouldering my cross, serving, or separateness from God is a lighter thing—apologies for the impending pun-- when it’s a matter of “monkeying around.”

For me, self-will is too pervasive in devotion to be a totally comfortable. But I found Lila an important corrective.  It's drawn my friend in, though, hook, line and sinker.  He’s a big, mushy bhakti: if spiritual paths were television, he’d be the Hallmark channel. I kid, but whatever he's got is better than my perpetual 3 a.m. static.

The strength of his devotion was in the background on the day he called me with news. He had finally convinced his first wife to sign divorce papers (by now they'd been separated for years) and he’d had proposed to his present girlfriend. Her name was Mallary, and “Girlfriend” was too light a term for the role she played in his life. To give an example: I’d known Mallary, at least on the level of acquaintance, since Leo and I were monks together. She’d already known him for years, and would sometimes come to visit him. She had relatives in Illinois. In my post-monastery days, then, between her travels to the burbs of Chicago and my travels to South Carolina, I became a “fly on the wall” as the two of them grew closer. My friend Leo had been saying, for years that he “loved Mallary” and spent many years qualifying the words to within an inch of meaninglessness. Mallary and I would meet for breakfast and inevitably talk about Leo. With her too, it was “love love love: backpedal, nuance and qualify.” Fine. I wondered, though, how long it would be before the two allowed themselves the reality of their affections.

At the right time, in the right way, they’d admitted their affections. On the surface, my inner fly-on-the-wall was screaming “IT’S ABOUT TIME.” On a deeper level, Leo and Mal were being formed, just as Jackie and I were, on a timeline not their own. Their timing was absolutely perfect. When Leo told me, I made plans to travel down for their wedding.

I’d been reading everything I could by Ram Dass ever since I’d acquired a desire to see God from the standpoint of non-dual consciousness. For his part, Ram Dass was given his name by his guru, Maharaji. Of the name, Ram Dass said “Often Maharaji would call me 'Ram Dass' and I’d think he was speaking to someone over my shoulder. He was speaking, though, to who I would be when I stopped being who I think I am.”

Bear with me, here: when a practitioner is first given a Koan, freaking out at its contradictory, illogical nature is the typical, first response. Like laughter at a horror film, humor is often involved in handling the discomfort. Recall the post “One Hand Clapping: A Round of Applause from a Teacher who became a Student”: in that process, when I gave my students the "one hand clapping” koan to play with, many of them held up their right hands, snapping their fingers shut on the heel of their hands. “It makes a sound!” they said. “Cool,” I replied, “but you’re not dealing with the discomfort of contradiction.”

Given Leo’s devotion to Hanuman, given our common love of Ram Dass, I’d been kidding around with name changes for months. I grinned and tastelessly faked Indian accents as, in my head, I alternated between calling him “Leo Dass Baba” or “Hanuman Leo Dass.” At some point, it occurred to me that this was just the verbal version of a glib response to “one hand clapping”: too goofy, too rational, not slow enough. Putting the effort aside, like all bad jokes, I began, again, to deny the egotism in my own spiritual work, so I could really get down, for Christsakes, to the business of taking myself too seriously.

I’ve been working on a project I call “Second Didache” for almost as long as Under the Influence has existed. “Second Didache” is a collection of scripturally based Christian stories that do the same kind of work the Koans of the Zen collection Momunkan. I eventually plan to do the same with the other two collections of Zen, the Hekiganroku and the Pi Yen Lu. The intuitive mode of teaching therein, that relies on realization rather than reason, is an ancient one known to Judaism's prophetic schools. It has been lost since the rise of dualistic rationalism, and needs to be restored—or gifted in the first place—to Christianity.

I was sitting at this work when it happened. In the moment, mental noise was quieted, mental debate was stilled, and there was only the Truth. After the fact, I pieced the following explanation together: Imagine a cross. At the top of the dichotomy, imagine that you have Hanuman and Ram, at the bottom, my friend Leo. On the right side of the cross, imagine that you have service and distance from God. On the left side of the cross, imagine you have union and rest in God. I had been, for months, busying myself with the respective ends of the two dichotomies.

This was the moment of resolution: At the expense of the Koan I was “supposed to be working on” I saw my friend’s face in my head. And then the words “HANUMAN DASS.” Hanuman Dass. The words went with the image, as naturally as the word “chopsticks” goes with that infuriating thing westerners suck at eating rice with. The word isn’t a name given to the object. It’s less spacious than that. The word is the object.

If the Koan of my friend's name was a Cross, I was now centered on it, hanging quite still.  The renaming was "one hand clapping" again. The dichotomies were tense, but I had stopped snapping my fingers against my hand to audibly resolve them. I put the question to rest, next to my hands in my lap. By and by, I had heard the absence of sound. I knew I could be wrong. I was ok with that. I texted my divinely-renamed friend. I told him that, in a totally serious way, I had a feeling he needed to be renamed. I called him Hanuman Dass for the first time. As "one hand clapping" goes, this is the moment when the practitioner risks response, holding up an open palm for his questioners to see, regardless of rightness or wrongness, of words or silence, of form or of formlessness.

My friend wrote back. “In a totally serious way, I accept being renamed. I told Mallary about it. She likes it too.” With that, the koan that my best friend embodied found a solution. I did all the silly things, like change his name in my phone.

About a week after that Saturday koan-sitting, I rose at midnight. I’d taken some cough syrup at 4, so as to get some decent sleep before the 13 hour drive that witnessing Hanuman Dass’ marriage would require. My Jackie, the consummate night owl, was still awake. Before I left, we hugged long and hard. I planted a smooch on the tip of her nose, a disgustingly cute gesture I’d been doing since our earliest days of dating.

“Please tell Leo and Mallary I’m sorry I couldn’t take the time off work.” I said I would, but there was a flicker of discontinuity. First, Who’s Leo? Then, Oh, yeah. I told my sweet girl I loved her, then walked through the dark to the car.

Photo Credit: Tiffany Kuechenmeister, fraukuech@blogspot.com
twitter: @fraukuech, instagram: hellotiffanyanne 

In a gesture of total down-to-earthness, Hanuman Dass and Mallary were married in the living room of his parents' house. Mallary suggested we facetime my Jackie, so that she could watch the ceremony. Hanuman Dass, normally a colossal goofball, whispered his vows with the low tones of completely selfless honesty. I don’t even particularly recall what he said—and like the name of God, the words aren’t mine to repeat—I only know that, in all my life, I’d never seen him this vulnerable.

The gathering taught me something.  I suppose I’m learning that my relationship with Hanuman Dass is, itself, a koan. In South Carolina, I am part of his family. In the small context of the wedding itself, he invited me into family pictures, and introduced me as his brother, even though we knew we’d get questions from Mallary’s family. The next day, during what formally counted as the wedding reception, we temporarily reassumed our separate roles: he became Leo again, and I was just his good friend. After all, the names are reminders, not mandates, and our identities are, in large part, illusory anyway. We didn’t want to explain dozens of times why the term 'brothers' was true of us, despite his obvious Filipino heritage, and my Irishness. When I first met Hanuman Dass, my name had been Dismas.  I was comfortable becoming Josh, the family friend, again, and he reassumed Leo, because we didn’t want to explain that, in truth, his name was Hanuman Dass.  Polite conversation has no words with which to explain that I, for my part, was too cuddly with my non-entity to know who I am anyway.

In the early morning, before I left, we embraced. “Hanuman Dass, tell Mal I love her when she wakes.” He promised he would. “My Jackie and I will be back down this summer. I love you.” Then I stepped out into the dewy pre-dawn dark.

Initially I knew that, from koan to koan, God has nothing but patience.  I'm learning that, from embrace to embrace, there's nothing but love.  Slowly, I'm learning to let myself arise and rest, to let myself come and go on God’s schedule.  Nowadays, from darkness to darkness, there’s nothing but warmth.

Orthomorphosis: An Effort to Say the Whole Word

I woke up early, ultimately stumbling to the coffee maker as opposed to trying to go back to sleep. I’ve too much on my mind. Lately I’ve been getting a sense of what the whole cosmic game is. It makes me more certain of the work that Under the Influence has to do. The Catholic Wisdom tradition is good, and all of it valid and true. In the bejeweled collection of world religions, its Jesus-centered, incarnation-centered philosophy shines, bright and pivotal: among other things, it’s an important part of a tryptic, providing the most coherent social ethic of any world religion. It represents a middle ground between the theistic system of avatars and the atheistic system of buddhist enlightenment.

I suppose a well attuned reader can already hear the “but” coming. Here it is: But Christianity, as a wisdom tradition, is underdeveloped. Because of the council of Jerusalem’s divorce of church and synagogue, it is radically disconnected from its jewish roots. Because of its largely modern brand of monotheism, which combines the worst cultural defensiveness of the jewish exile with the rational and elitist view of the scientific revolution, it stands particularly unable to get over itself, and thereby learn from the traditions it came from, as well as those around it.

If there’s a purgatorial predicament writ large, onto the Church by its members, I believe that’s it. We would do well, though, to name this, to embrace both the limitation and the grace of our ecclesial moment. The Church’s unwilling deficiencies risk becoming willfully inflicted spear wounds in Jesus’ crucified side if we’re not intentional about learning from our brother-religions. At the very least, the entire job involves troubleshooting both the mind-body connection and our cosmology. Of the two posts I’m planning to begin this work, I’d like to address the mind-body piece today, outlining what a full tradition of orthomorphosis would look like.

A full tradition of orthomorphosis would involve 4 “negotiations.” That is, our relationships to four things would shift. In turn, we need to talk about self, desire, body and mind. After that it’ll be important to assess the transformative tools the Catholic Church already has, and those bits of wisdom that, if she’s to be true to her mission, she must assimilate from other religions.

Self: This negotiation is foundational. Without the giving up of self, we perpetually open one hand to renounce the world, while (with the other) we grasp at our system of commodified spiritual experiences. In other words, renouncing the self is the key to ultimate renunciation of desire.

If self exists, I’m certain of two things: we’ll be conscious of it until right before we’re divinized. Also, whether one knows the final door between us and God by Christianity’s “the eye of the needle” or Zen’s “Gateless Gate” we’ll lose at least the separate self-consciousness when we walk through it. Beyond that, we all have a false self, and Christianity was spot on in mapping it out. As I’ve said before, we unconsciously use the eight evil thoughts form an entire identity out of the misuse of things, emotions, others and ourselves. As for the true self, I have some abiding questions: for one thing, can we know anything about it without selfishly enthroning the “knower” and undoing some of the purgative work we’re trying to do? Most strains of buddhism, and some strains of hinduism, would ultimately answer with a big, karmic nope. I’m inclined to agree. St. Paul was careful to put questions of divinized self at a distance: to claim that his true self was concealed twice over. It was hidden, he said, with Christ, in God. To me, the final rule on self is: let go of what you know of it, and whoever you are will just be, and thereby be alright. It’s important to mention two things: first, having noticed that we’re selfish, the thing to do is not “try to give it up.” In the end, until a person is well acquainted with their purgatorial predicament, with the slice of the gospel their lives are designed to convey and with a way to give unforced attention—until they’ve gotten to know and cleaned up their Karmic game, say our friends in the East—only at that point will efforts be sufficiently detached as to bear fruit. Second, thoughts about self will happen even as we renounce them. As we become more detached, they’ll become less frequent, but they’ll still happen.

Desire: Attachment is a problem. On its account, Everything we desire is a possession, even if we don’t have it, and desire, in the end, possesses us. The “dark night of the senses,” the “dark night of the spirit” and the negative role “unknowing” plays in the Christian tradition are all eloquent and accurate descriptions of negotiating desires. It’s important to note that, whether or not they’re conscious of them, most people experience these adjustments. Sr. Ruth Fox, OSB was conscious enough to request that the primary mark of these negotiations be present in her life. “May God bless you” she later prayed, “with the gift of discontent.” People being purged of their attachment to the senses will find that things of the senses are either unsatisfying or an outright source of active affliction. Ram Dass, (apologies, babaji!) at the height of his hippie days, might say something like “When you’re finally getting your game straight, and the game is questioning the self and attachments underneath desire, you might go ahead and have a pizza, but it’ll cost you. It’s not free.” The rational mind tends to look at that element and apply modern psychobabble: if you’re sad because nothing does it for you anymore, it’s depression. If you’re numb because you’re forced to interact with things you don’t want, it’s that dead feeling they call “dysthymia.” In the life of the Spirit, that’s all part of the purgatorial predicament. It’s no big deal, if you can deal well with it. You’ll suffer a little only if you decide to grasp at what your being asked to let go of.

Of course, having “renounced sense objects,” the ego will attempt to re-entrench, treat spiritual things like they’re “commodities” the possession of which renders those who have it better or worse, higher or lower, more or less spiritual adept. This is a bold faced trap of spiritualized dualism. Imagining we’re separate enough from God to enduringly long for him will get us only so far: spiritual wisdom would exhort us not to get caught up in self on God’s account. God, our tradition ultimately says, is what’s left when we’re done with things like wanting and self. When Meister Ekhart said "I’ve often prayed to God to save me from God,” he was ultimately articulating something as native to Catholicism as bread and wine. St. Paul would agree, in slightly different terms, and with that mortar, he built a missionary church.

So, for instance, I can imagine that the 14th Century author of The Cloud of Unknowing got totally uptight about being the knower. in his classic meditation on the negative way of prayer, he spent a whole, thin tome asking us to offer all of our attachments into the cloud of unknowing. In Catholicism, knowing isn’t complete until the knower has disappeared, until there’s no subject object relationship between the knower and the known. Ram Dass would do ask us to meditate similarly around other aspects of our egotism. In other words, not just “The Knower” has to go. Other flies in the cosmic punch are “the experiencer” and “the collector.” “Whoa,” says the experiencer, “I just felt what the hindus call ‘kundalini energy.’” Or again, the collector might fill the space between insights typing his way through the blogosphere: “Holy Cow,” he says "I just learned that I can’t give up desire without giving up self.” The knower, the Experiencer, and the collector are just a few of the “spiritual roles” we’ve got to get rid of. That stuff isn’t free. Desire will take its pound of psychospiritual flesh.

Body Language: I was at a wedding recently, watching a photographer take pictures. If corralling the adults was a difficult task, reining in the children of the respective families was well nigh impossible. Those who could stay in one place wiggled. Those who couldn’t ran about. It had rained earlier that day, and one of the parents ended up taking their child to the emergency room after a slip on wet concrete dealt him a broken wrist. The best man and I stood in our tuxes, hoping it wouldn’t cast a pall over the bride and the groom and musing at how little awareness, to say nothing of control, the young have of their different bodily energies.

Adolescence is weird. Deepening awareness of body, mind, emotions and their respective energies manifests as anxiety, and it only turns into more creative energy when we’ve about-faced and accepted it. Too many kids are prescribed antidepressants, when what they need is a crash course on psychology, meditation, chakras and nutrition. In any case, adolescents either come out of denial or don’t. Those of us watching either call it maturity or repression when someone carries themselves calmly. In any case, the general movement begins, from involuntary fidgeting to a peaceful demeanor.

Those who negotiate adolescence by repression, whether out of sheer denial or hyper-vigilant self-preservation, become compulsive adults. The pain of youth is at the bottom of adulthood’s every bottle. I find it true, for what it’s worth and without pigeonholing people into methods, that adults either meditate or medicate. A friend of mine once said “wherever I go, I take me with me.” That is as true of chronology as it is of location. If there’s an eighty year old who never dealt with being eight, somewhere inside him he’ll still be that small child.

Mind: We’ve been taught to identify ourselves, not just with our mind, but with our most selfish, dualistic mind. It begins inside us and is constantly, societally reinforced. After a life of harboring an either/or perspective ("Either Faith or Works!" say unnuanced Lutherans. “Either light or dark!” says the earliest Christian catechism) we begin, perhaps, to allow a “both/and” perspective. Further still, we ask "who is the person doing the thinking?"


There are a number of tools with which Christianity goes about diagnosing things like mind and self, naming their deficiencies, and claiming whatever good they yield. For one thing, the body isn’t just something the mind is trapped in, it’s like a television that broadcasts the signals being sent between mind and heart. The tongue makes whatever’s in the heart rationally intelligible, the limbic system stores pain throughout the body, to be dealt with whenever we can get our developmental game sufficiently straight. The practice of a simple mantra can attune us to our heart. One hell of a long strange interior trip begins, for instance, when the Jesus Prayer’s two words (Jesus, Mercy) become synonymous with the in and out of a breath cycle. Vocal prayer says “come to God with words, until they begin to feel meaningless.” I have, and I've made too much of it, and will do it all again. Meditation says “come to God with thoughts and feelings and sensations, until they begin to feel meaningless.” I have, and I’ve made too much of it, and will do it again. Contemplation says “Come to God and be, until the one being begins to feel meaningless.” I have, and I’ve made too much of myself, and will do it again.

For me, at this point, Koans have pride-of-place as mental diagnostics. I’ve said it before: Koans make all times present, all people me, all places here, all sounds bodily vibrations. With the illogical, being and thought are divorced until they no longer depend on one another. Koans actualize potential, unite opposites, silence discursive thought and awaken intuition. For me, at this point, this is all needed overhaul.

Eastern religions don’t out-pace Western ones in much, but they definitely do so in at least two places. For one thing, Christianity works with beings and morals, thereby giving egos material for self-absorption. God is the highest being, bestest of the best. I am a worm, not a man. Furthermore Christianity aids in the delusion of spiritual materialism by the labels it places on spiritual work. Heaven is good. Hell is bad. Buddhism, specifically tantric buddhism, works with energy and its effects. No religion’s cornered the ego-market, but Buddhism’s lack of a deity doesn’t lend itself as easily to “Heavenly beings giving earthly beings celestial cookies for good behavior.” At some point, language like “purgatorial predicament” and “non-self” become important depersonalizers by which we slip the spiritual materialism trap.

Additionally, though there are bits of the Gospel that function like Koans, Koans themselves have no corollary Western tradition. Aiding this development is a primary part of the mission Under the Influence has taken on. This post is proves the need. When I woke up this morning, before I sat down to write, I thought to myself "I need coffee." I made it, and I started writing. As I’ve gone along, I’ve realized this post calls much of that into question. I don’t need coffee, I want it—that’s desire. Tripping over myself to get to the coffeemaker—that’s just the body language of dependence. And spending all this time with words, in which someone named “I” talks through it all—well, on some level, that’s all ego.

This post is the Koan unsolved, the cross yet to be carried.  Savior and Self are the same.  When we follow "Not Two" back through "Not One" we'll find both.  Koan, Christ and Cross are the same. They’re all different aspects of a single work, the becoming of the single being I'll only be on the other side of non-being. They’re the message behind the mishigas, the messiah my flesh will play manger for: it’s just they’re within me, and yet to be born.

Koans and Care: The Dangers of Dualism

In a post about Adult Children of Alcoholics, (Steps 4-11: Cleaning House)I talked about how dualism perpetually befouls the bedsheets of recovery for me. I’m realizing, though, that recovery’s not the only thing dualism left disjointed in me. Thus this post: in the tradition of the post “The Sound of Silence: Continued Corrections in Language,” I want to spend some time getting to the bottom of how dualism affects the way we use language.

In Part, this thesis came about because I was rereading Ram Dass. At one point in “Love Service Devotion,” Ram Dass is talking about the Gita, and he says something along the lines of “There comes a point when our choice isn’t between different forms of social and moral responsibility. It’s either social and moral responsibility or unitive consciousness.”

We’ll come back to that, but it got me thinking. Dualism is the sickest of consequences of the “rational gaze.” It makes us examine our surroundings as opposed to experiencing them. It makes our thinking Linear and surface-level, when our processes should be about depth. It gives undue importance to the beholder, at the expense of “the beheld.” It’s worth asking whether the rational gaze’s distance is worth the loss of an experiential mode of being. I tend to think not, and if that’s true, all of the above mentioned conditions are illnesses for which working on Logos is the healing medicine.

Practically, this messes with the way we use four words: God, Time, Remembrance, and Self. Let’s stop for a moment and talk about each one.

God: I’ve lightly touched on this already. “God” isn’t separate from “us” but in the dualistic mindframe, prizing separateness and distinction as it does, puts the rational gaze’s typical distance between the two. The trouble is, the things of God buck examination. Contemplation is a state of rest that eliminates the distance between God and the one experiencing it. It is the pre-verbal, lived experience of “I AM,” in a way that doesn’t permit a sense of self distinct God. However, as soon as you say “Wow, so this is what Contemplation is” dualism’s distancing tendencies reassert themselves. Another example of this is Emmaus. The disciples spoke with the stranger on the road until their hearts were burning within them. When the bread was broken, so were their hearts. But as soon as they recognized Christ, he disappeared from view.

Time: Now is the only moment that exists. To use an inadequate image for it, if time extends at all, it’s a matter of depth, not length or width. That is to say, in the now, we have our choices, and the psychological wounds and emotional formation that influenced our making them. Everyone’s choices have social consequences, and in each moment, we experience our “purgatorial predicament" the fruits individual and communal action. Some of it is helpful, some of it’s a penance to endure. But it’s all a “lawful” rolling out of the way we do our purgatory in the space of our current breath-cycle.

Thinking that time is linear, that there is a future or a past into which it extends, necessarily makes it a mental construct, not a lived reality. After all, the mind, the seat of illusion, is the only place such concepts of time can exist.

I’ve spoken in the past about how the west has a concept of "chronos time", a lineup of minutes our minds seem to be addicted to, and a "kairos time,” which is the present moment. It may be our inability to live in the present that accounts for the lack of a more permanent concept of enlightenment or absolute samadhi. The buddhist ability to identify enlightened people, folks who never really re-identify with the ego after an experience of contemplation, may be partially due to a buddhist’s increased ability to live in the present. Our western addiction to linear time might be part of what continually throws a wrench in the gears of more abiding states of contemplation. If the east is Joshu’s dog, which we learn has a viable buddha nature, the west is the same dog, in the throes of chasing a squirrel.

Remembrance: Our elder brothers in faith scooped me on this—everything I have to say about this word is gaffled straight from the Jewish people. It’s all true though: remembrance isn’t a calling up of an event into a mental television screen. It’s a re-entrance into the moment being remembered. Passover is the prime example here. The ceremonial question isn’t “How is passover different from other nights”—instead it’s “how is this night different from other nights?” Remembrance makes the past spacious, and renders it present. Catholics beg, borrow and steal, applying the thinking to the passover meal they redub “the Eucharist.” When we remember it, it’s not there and then anymore, it’s here and now.

Self: We have to understand this as a dynamic term. I don’t want to be inaccurate here. As a goal we constantly hold in front of us, non-self is pivotal. And given dualism’s tendency to separate the self from God, we constantly need to say, with Shakyamuni, “NOT TWO!” Truly, just as a buddhist or hindu has a self right up till they enter into Nirvana, so Catholics will have some form of “Selfhood” right up till the point that they’re fully divinized. But Shakyamuni is instructive here. “Not Two” is a procedural meditation, and has another step. Those who say “Not Two” have eventually to say “not one.” Just as we have to say we’re not separate from God, we have to eventually allow our “self-consciousness” to subside as well. This is the truth that’s embedded in the center of Divinization. If it’s true that we still have a self in God—I sincerely don’t know either way, and I’m not sure it matters—our consciousness of it has to subside completely.

In short, we need to question the way dualism messes up language. But there’s a way, too, that dualism warps choice making. It deserves equal scrutiny, and brings us, I think, kicking and screaming back to the Ram Dass quote mentioned above.

It’s not a direct quote, actually, but the sentiment’s his, and it stands: "There comes a point when our choice isn’t between different forms of social and moral responsibility. It’s either social and moral responsibility or unitive consciousness.” In light of this, in the true buddhist sense, whether we should serve the poor or have a beer becomes a non-question. That is to say, we certainly should serve the poor, and we will. We certainly should have a beer, and we will. What we choose to do with our Present Moment becomes unimportant in light of the way our purgatorial predicament will face us with a deepened consciousness alternating between selfishness and magnanimity. That’s just the way the spiritual journey works.

“How do I deal with the death of the ego?” For a person on the spiritual journey, this is the question of questions. In a way it's similar to the reactive and poor choices made by grieving people in denial: moral and social choices, made by people who are ignoring the death of the ego, tend to have unhealthy results.

Unitive consciousness is the result for a practitioner who, whether in stages or quite suddenly, has laid his ego to rest. Zen talks about Absolute Samadhi or enlightenment to point to this kind of permanent distance from the ego. In the Christian tradition this kind of self-realization is unnamed, and hasn’t been seen in the church on any grand scale since the aftermath of Pentecost.

Over and over, it’s Koans that get the work of “Egoic Death” done. And for those who think Koans only have a place in East Asian traditions, I would respond resolutely: Christianity has space for them as well. Christians have heard it said “Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation.” I say to them, “Koans collapse time, making all times present.” Christians have heard the same mouth say “The Father is always with me” that later screamed “WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?” I say to them that Christ crucified is the ultimate Koan, and Koans unite opposites. Christians have heard it said “Here I am, send me!” I say to them, “Koans collapse place, making all locations ‘here.’”

I say again: dualism is a sickness, the original mental illness. But the sacramental economy leads us out of our minds and back into our senses, and Koans lead us back to oneness with our source. With the right treatment, the prognosis is good: we who have the medicine needn’t fear the malady.