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.
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