Emptiness in the life of God: Resurrecting a Concept

The Original question that gave rise to Under the Influence was “How can we reconcile ‘being made in God’s image and likeness’ with the fact that we share none of his omnipotence, none of his omniscience, and none of his eternal life?” That lead very quickly to another observation: Decay—aging, death, suffering—gets a bad rap with Christians. To those of us raised with the understanding, decay is nothing more than a natural evil, a consequence of sin.

There was a further issue: seeing decay as foreign to a creative loving God led to misunderstandings. The Manichees, ancient rivals of St. Augustine, noted the fact that the God of the Old testament caused world-destroying floods. They contrasted that with the syrupy, New Testament God of love, and concluded it must be two separate Gods. The “image and likeness” we’re created in hasn’t much to do with eternity, or being all powerful or all-knowing. So I asked myself “What space is there, in the life of God itself, for the negative side of life that Christ’s self-emptying sacramentalized?”

I suppose the conclusion I came to takes a few liberties. I won’t go into great detail here, I’ll only present in-brief, the ground I originally landed on. Logos, the Word of God, I realized, was the paradox at the heart of Christianity. By way of comparison, it functioned like the negative principle “mu” in the Zen Koan tradition, or the Goddess Shiva in the Hindu pantheon: that is to say, it works a sort of foil, something to dethrone logic and awaken intuitive faculties.

That initial insight made me realize that a great deal more than the Logos might act in this negative way. In psychology, we talk about "metacognition.” In short, metacognition is how we think about our thoughts. This post is an exercise in meta-function: I warrant we’d be helped much more by the concepts we have if we allowed them to act in accord with the Logos to which we, ourselves, are subject.

It would be worth it, I think, to examine and tweak the meta-function of a number of concepts. I’m going to name a number of things, each of which is actually a non-thing, because of the way ushers us towards our own vacancy. Each of these things, in its own way, is an impetus for emptiness. Because I kinda dig lists, here’s a list of them:

Faith: Faith is an essentially negative thing. It’s the ability to calmly live with less. For a long time, I’ve had a bee in my bonnet about Faith. Most times, when the Church says “Faith" it really means “the Articles of Faith”—the intellectual content that’s actually the fruitof trust in God. Meant in this sense, Faith, we suppose, is a thing we can possess. “The Catholic Faith” as it’s professed in the Church, is a list of intellectual principles, not a process of transformation. To make matters worse, my own tendency treat religion as a credential made authors like Meister Eckhart start grabbing my attention. Eckhart said “I pray to God to save me from God.” If faith is "whitewashed self-righteousness”, as it has too often been in my life, then it will inevitably shrivel and die. Later, Ram Dass hit on the truth “faith is not a belief. Faith is what is left when all of your beliefs have been blown to hell.” So the whole game became about trust and transformation. Ultimately, what I’ve come to realize is that faith is not about having the right answers. It’s about asking the right questions. It’s not about the absence of anxiety or doubt, either—those can be important directionals, if we can learn.

The Holy Spirit: One of the central truths of Christianity is “The truth is a person.” Also, we’re dealing with a person of the Trinity, so we may only be able to see its work in retrospect. As we discuss the Holy Spirit, keep in mind we’re speaking of it like we’d speak of a great Matriarch at the family reunion. With that in mind: the post “One Year with the Logos: An Anniversary Dialogue” said that the Logos is one of God’s more enigmatic modes of communication, but it is, nevertheless, a form of intelligent, divine communication. That said, understanding the Logos involves giving our rational faculties a rest, flexing more intuitive muscles. The detachment to do that is the primary sign that the Holy Spirit has worked. I suppose that’s the simplest way to say it: the holy spirit is personal, and it's energy for letting go. Certain brands of “believer” might get hung up on “the gifts of the spirit.” Along with miracles and consolations, gifts of the Spirit exist to form trust and detachment. About the miracles he could perform, Shirdi Sai Baba said “I give people what they want so that they’ll want what I give.” Miracles, consolations, the gifts of the spirit—these aren't ours to pine for and that “longing” will just become another desire we have to let go of. The central gift of the Holy Spirit is trust, and detachment is the biggest indicator that it’s worked.

The Soul: Plain and simple, Self is the obstacle from which all other obstacles proceed. While Self may do a good bit of healthy, protective work, it ultimately has to be let go of. The Soul, (according to me, thank you very much) is totally understandable as Non-Self. We’ve been taught to act so quickly on thoughts of Self that it’s difficult to see them, much less let go of them. If our Ego were completely obliterated by two p.m. next Tuesday, Non-self would be what showed up at our dinner appointment that night. It’s “who we are” when we cease to have a separate self consciousness. Ultimately, we don’t need to see our face in the mirror to know we have one. We don’t need to construct a narrative about where we came from to be here, now. We don’t need a chorus of voices in our head to cheer us on for doing the right thing, or admonish us for doing the wrong one. Undoubtedly, self-will provides some energy, but it’s dwindling, a drug that quickly stops working. When that adrenaline high wears off, most people start self-medicating. The other option is just to let it go. The Soul will still get your body in a professional attire for your strategy meeting. If you decide to just let your spouse’s annoying habits exist unchanged, the Soul is what will continue to take out the garbage.

Forgiveness: The most important thing that I ever heard about this came to me in a spoken-word poem by Buddy Wakefield. The quote wasn’t original to him, but it went”Forgiveness is the giving up of all hope for a better past.” That’s true, but not for the reasons we think. The fact is, there is no past. Now is the only time that exists, and in the now, we can either cling to trauma or not. If we get to a spot where it is now, and we’re not mulling over our resentments in a vain attempt to control our sadness, we’ve arrived at forgiveness.

Apophatic Prayer: Apophatic, or Via Negativa prayer, is prayer that acknowledges that our thoughts can block us from experiencing whatever we’re thinking about. Depression taught me about this form of prayer. During my seven years in the monastery, there were times I was so depressed I couldn’t taste my food. At some point, I realized the depressed thoughts were optional, and that, in fact, all thought was. My thoughts about God can impede my being with him. My judgements of those around me keep me from being with them. It’d be best for me to cultivate awareness of when the returns of thinking began to diminish, to cut off the thinking, if I can, or simply let it come and go between my ears when I can’t.

Heaven: if non-self is the Soul, non-being is heaven. If I’ve given up my separate self-consciousness, then the last thing that remains is to be with God. If I can temporarily lean on St. Paul’s assertion that heaven has “levels”--Appearances of the honored-dead from beyond the grave prove that, to some extent, “the presence of God” may not be a permanent, non-negotiable ending of the journey. The fullness of heaven would be when the separate-self conscious state never re-asserts itself. Heaven, then would be “non-being” or the permanent union of my particular being and consciousness with the cosmic being or consciousness.


We are a desire of God’s heart, then we have an incarnation, then we make a journey—through several incarnations, perhaps,—away from separate self-conscious being and back to the cosmic consciousness. Even if everything is passing away, that doesn’t excuse us from dealing with the fact that, at this moment, things exist. Even if the Logos is a negative, paradoxical principle that shakes up the solidity of concepts, that’s not to say that nothing in the christian dispensation is positive. There are things we can take at face value, as accurately reflecting reality. Here are just 4 of them:


Grief: One of the central points of Jesus’ passion is this: every last idea, every emotion, every person place and thing on the earth is passing away. Our egos have endowed them all with permanence, so it’s a great shock to the system when we realize they’re changing. One of the strengths of the Catholic moral vision is our belief, for instance, that virtue and vice are a continuum not a dichotomy. Energy for Vice, amidst the long struggle to let go, simply changes to energy for virtue. It’s an old saying that “suffering is pain we’ve not yet accepted yet.” Jesus’ death is our death, and the death of all things: grief, then, is central to Christianity. This process of coming out of denial, of quitting the bargaining, of feeling the sadness and depression and anger until we’re done with it and coming to a still-point, it’s at the core of living with the reality of paradox.

Creation: When Christians say “in the beginning was the Word,” they mean we’re all manifestations of divine energy, particularly sounds. (The hindu disciplines of anahata yoga—the practice of working with sounds and vibrations—corroborates this.) On a sub-atomic level, everything is simply a manifestation of a single, cosmic consciousness. On a day to day level, we are solid beings who have an incarnation and the corresponding purgatorial predicament to work out. Trees exist. We exist. Going straight from “I have a physical body” to “I am just a sound made by God” may well be bypassing my purgatorial predicament. And if Under the Influence is right, and Christian Reincarnation is a thing, then I am bypassing owning up to many incarnations’ accumulated dissimilarity to Christ. We all have form, and we have to deal with that.

Via Positiva Prayer: To a point, we can trust the content of the prayer journey to lead us to God. If our prayer is marked by absence of anxiety, it is most likely leading us to God. That said, Via positiva prayer has always been understood as ultimately yielding ground to via negativa prayer. That is to say, even if via positiva prayer gives us much to think about or feel, even if it alters our consciousness or gives us heavenly visions, the goal of prayer is ordinary mind, ordinary being, and the experience of the senses without interposing thoughts.

Selves: Selves are like training wheels. We use them till we find balance. when we are being our false-self, we’re unbalanced, when we’re being our true self, we’re balanced but self-conscious, and when we’re divinized there may be someone on a bike, but he’s too busy having fun to think about himself. Ultimately, as long as it takes for us to deal with our incarnations without cutting corners, that’s as long as we’ll have selves. As long as it takes us to totally identify with cosmic consciousness, that’s as long as “God” will have a self.


If we’re not careful, unswerving belief in the permanence of things walks us right out of the main truths the Logos is trying to teach us: the fact is, we’re part of a larger creation that’s passing away. In addition to all that, though, attachment can rouse in us all kinds of fear and worry as it happens. If Christ’s passion teaches us anything, it teaches us that, when seen from a standpoint of conscious acceptance, suffering can be a medium, first for stillness, then for empathy.

In the end, whether it be destructive, constructive or paradoxical, concepts aren’t neutral, they do certain kinds of work. While we’re occupying selves (God willing, may the time be short) bucking the self-emptying our concepts could be doing—well it’s bound to cause suffering. If nothing else, it’s worth seeing the ways we’re making things worse for ourselves. At most though, we could find ourselves quite liberated: that’s a prospect that makes the whole mind-game worth it.

Permanence, Self and Christianity

In Buddhism, permanence—as a general phenomenon—is at least problematic, at most heretical.  It would be a strain to commit christianity to the same zealously held impermanence.  But evidence suggests that "thinking things are permanent" might be more a feature of western culture than it is a biblical teaching.  This is the question to which I hope to hazard an answer: in light of scripture and tradition, just how permanent must a christian profess his “self” to be?

The content of Under the Influence might show my hand before I even begin.  Let’s look at some of that content, as preface.  

As far back as the post “I think, therefore I am who I am not” it’s been no secret: I have beef with Descartes.  The famous caricature of his words goes: “I think, therefore I am."  Since then I’ve been railing against thought as the foundation of being.  A buddhist, quite properly, might ask Descartes, in return, “Now I’m not thinking.  Therefore what?”  The Implication: beyond pure perception, the forms we associate with it and the theories we build with them are optional. 

The Post “Removing the Self from knowing", asked “When the self stands between the beholder and the beheld, can we know anything?”  The suggestion, in the end, was that a self, at most, allows us to examine things—but examination falls short of “knowing” because a dualism endures, still between the beholder and the beheld. 

So in short:  We don’t need to think in order to be, and we don’t need a separate self consciousness in order to know.  In fact: thinking, and self-consciousness, actually impede being and knowing.

“Removing the Self from Knowing” also spoke of the 3 “selves” a Catholic can speak of having.  The desert fathers said the eight evil thoughts culminated in a prideful false self, called “the ego” from the days of Freud onwards.  St. Paul spoke of a “true self” which was hidden with Christ in God, to be revealed after the end-times.  The Christian east spoke of “Divinization” as a process by which, through deep humility, a person actually becomes God.

“Selves” seem a bit tricky.  They’re certainly not universally bad.  To hear Christians talk about them, though, it’s evident that we talk about selves the way we talk about Church: it’s easiest to point out the problems, the false self.  Benedict’s “ladder of humility” would say awareness of our faults indicates spiritual growth, and anyone who’s not treating Godliness like a credential would agree.  We make great effort to “be our better selves” when life gets rough, but honest self-appraisal bars us from claiming we’ve ever fully and permanently mastered that task. And then there are times when we forget about selves altogether because we’re so in the moment.  These foreshadow a conclusion: If being doesn’t require thinking, if knowing requires self-diminishment, then separate self-consciousness isn’t a requirement of personhood.

The post “On Suspension: Holding Non-Duality Together” spoke about the three effects that “being crucified with Christ” has on a person.  It dissolves opposites, it  calls cosmologies into question and it relativizes personal identity.  Further back, we talked about the “Dark Night of the Self” coming soon after Suspension, officially rendering self and desire the same as any other attachment of which we can easily let go.  

A theology professor of mine, answering the question “Does God suffer” had to answer in the negative.  Godliness is a nature, a type of being that the Father and the Son shared.  He concluded “natures don’t suffer, people do.”  So the person of Christ suffered, but he had that in common neither with the person of God, nor with the Nature they shared.  In a similar move, I’d like to suggest that “Selves don’t progress spiritually, people do.”  In the spiritual journey, “selves” are optional, and shedding self is a pivotal part of full, humanized personhood.  

The post "On Suspension: Holding Non-Duality Together" talked about selves being relativized as the people who have them move closer and closer to union.  It spoke of Suspension as the dressing room in which one takes off the old self, and puts on the new one. Selves may do a limited amount of good work. Perhaps we could properly speak of them as magnifying glasses that make conflicts in desire and attachment apparent.  But tool and task are not synonymous, here.  Both the healthiest ego, and the truest of selves, confine a person to dualism.  The distance between observer and observed always wiggles its way between God and his faithful.

On the other hand: peace, when all desires are united and at rest, is only found when selves are discarded.  I don’t know if either God or his people have “selves," in the immediacy of being who they are.  I’d stake my next meager paycheck on the claim that people, when they’ve given up separate self-consciousness, no longer need selves in the least.  God’s name, “I AM,” rather than being an indication of divine “selfhood," may merely have been a divine spilling of the beans: God may have been saying that, when we see our original face, we will both recognize Christ, and face God’s absence.  After all, what devotee can see a God who looks on the world from his own eyes?  And yet, if our whole bodies are full of light, that must mean something, and something significant indeed.

On Suspension: Holding Non-Duality Together

The post “Defining Terms and Filling in Gaps” reinforced an earlier point Under the Influence made about the "Dark Night of the Self", and suggested that a stage exists, in the Christian mystical and moral life, where opposites cease to be meaningful terms. We called the stage “Suspension” after Guerric of Igny, and suggested it might be analogous to Absolute Samadhi. In short, we stated that it’s an important preface to seeing our relationship with God from a Unitive standpoint.

Under the Influence takes as gospel Augustine’s quote “If you can understand it, it isn’t God.” By the same token, though, the “reframing of understandings” inherent in the Emmaus experience isn’t something Christians can get away from. Before they could see Jesus in the breaking of the bread, certain shifts had to take place. Their savior had try another messianic paradigm on for size. While they talked on the road, Christians found the judges’ view of salvation too small a garment. Indeed, in that view Jesus failed to oust external oppressors. The Christian community found a better fit in the prophets’ messianic paradigm. Ever-after, the savior who effectively took away sin by suffering willingly would be the T-shirt they bought and called a uniform.

Even for buddhists, whose practice absolutely negates thought as part of direct experience, “right concepts” are part of liberation. It would seem that a few such conceptual commitments would be useful to Christians as well. The assurance-- that the ways prayer unifies them with God won’t be too irreparably undone by thinking—is certainly worth it. And yet It’s also true that, by putting our finger on a conceptual basis for unitive thinking, we’re highlighting something that shouldfall into disuse as soon as possible. We run the risk of duplicating dualism’s error, that of preferring our religious thoughts over the realities to which they point.

Ultimately, suspension is the prerequisite for and preservative of unitive consciousness. To that end, its characteristics serve as a definition of “Right Concepts.” While I wouldn’t claim Suspension enfolds everything that has ever been considered orthodox, I’d make bold to claim suspension, as a state of mind, provides a glance into unitive consciousness that a great many orthodox beliefs don’t.

First, allow me to introduce the author of the concept, to let you in on the way it was originally used. Guerric of Igny spoke of it originally, saying "Fitting it is indeed that the people should be in suspense, as it were, between heaven and earth, unable as yet to grasp heavenly affairs but preferring even so not to have any contact with those of earth.” He used the “fixed” nature of Jesus Crucified to talk about non-duality, a view that doesn’t accommodate higher or lower, heaven and earth, spiritual or base desires. To be clear, he was talking about the expectation of the consummation of all things. Applying his category to all desire writ large is my move, but a fair one (if I do say so myself.)

We can only speak of unitive consciousness in the context of the prayer journey. Meditation and Vocal prayer involve a gap between God and the devotee that Contemplation closes. Prayer itself seems structured to teach that none of the mental content of vocal prayer or meditation—none of Christ’s mystery that is describable in words—is the contemplative rest of Faith Itself. Under the Influence would see every Christian as a practitioner, and prayer as a primary in that effort. At its best, Christianity deals in the healthy dualism of love; this implies knowing when to when to yield to unitive consciousness. This much needs to be said: when the content of meditation contains recognizable blocks to unitive consciousness, that meditation needs to be let go of more quickly than others. Unfortunately, a ten second examination of Christianity shows that this caution hasn’t been heeded.

Ultimately, suspension--and non-duality in general--is a three pronged effort: it breaks down opposites, it breaks down cosmologies, and it breaks down personal differences. However non-duality manifests, Christianity has no word for it: we have not gone through the Christian tradition and named, in a consolidated fashion, its own resources for non-dual consciousness. Let's briefly run through those now.

Suspension’s Non-duality dissolves opposites: The roots of this reality reach back into the old testament. Laban and Bethuel, when approached about whether their daughter can marry Isaac, respond “we cannot say anything to you, bad or good, the thing comes from the Lord.” When the people Israel, in the second temple period, were rebuilding God’s house, the scriptures relate the following anecdote. "all the people responded with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of henhouse of the Lord was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of families, old people who had seen the first house on its foundations, wept with a loud voice when they saw this house, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted so loudly that the sound was heard far away.” Almost as Dom Thomas Keating, former abbot and monk of St. Benedict’s monastery in Colorado, said once “There is a level on which pain is joy and joy is pain, because one is grounded in Divine Love.”

Suspension’s Non-duality dissolves cosmologies: Specifically, here, I’m referring to the Heaven/Earth/Hell cosmology, an essentially Greek belief set that Judaism adopted during the time of the Maccabees. In a way that, as far as I’m concerned, can be seen as definitive and permanent, Jesus equates heaven and hell with states of being. The words from St. Matthew are familiar: “everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” While still acknowledging an eternal dimension to heaven and hell, the sense of the words shifts a devotee's focus away from desire’s "afterlife consequences," and toward it’s yield in the here-and-now. The message—you are responsible for your desires, and the kind of atmosphere they create--shifts Jesus’ moral teaching. It acquires desire-centered notes that sound more like the immanent effects of Karma rather than the delayed, otherworldly rewards of cooperating with grace.

Duality sets up hard and fast distinctions between creation—possessed of, at best, non-rational souls—and humanity—rational souls, made in God’s image. A non-dual religious vision would relativize that distinction. Br. Lawrence of the Resurrection, in his Practice of the Presence of God, taught that everything that happens to you is God, attempting to reach you. Depending on how heavily we allow the particulars of the teaching to sit with us, this can look like “God speaking throughhis creation” to use the lightest touch, or more heavily "God being present in his creation,” and then, as heavy as it gets “God being present ashis creation.” The third perspective is the least dualistic, but Christianity hasn’t developed a fine enough vocabulary to understand the perspective as anything other than Pantheism, which it has already decided is bad. Short of that, God being present in his creation, and speaking through the Logos, is as near as the Church can get to a non-dual interpretation of Br. Lawrence’s teaching. Recent teachers like Dr. Jeremy Narby have concluded that God speaks intelligently through the metaphorical language of the Logos, and that this phenomenon is as cross-cultural as our willingness to grant it credibility will accommodate. The medicine for dualism is very much in the Church’s hand. It needs only to hear and answer Jesus’ question from John’s gospel “Do you want to be well?”

Suspension’s Non Duality relativizes personal identity: the life of the Trinity commits the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to a sort of cooperative inter-being. Jesus, in his great Crucifixion pregame show, said things like “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” and “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” At Under the Influence, our belief is “As with the Trinity, so with each believer.” As much as “The body of Christ” was a Pauline image to address the need for many functions in one body, it would also be rightly used to relativize one’s personal importance. A foot’s importance comes from its membership in the body. Individual consciousness derives its importance from Cosmic consciousness, not the other way around. Most importantly, the fact that God’s name is “I AM” should reorient the entire personal-identity game. If God’s name is “I AM” then who have I been busy being lately? Maybe I’ve been acting out a role that’s more like “false self” than “true self” or more “true self” than divinized “non-self.” These are all worthwhile questions to ask.

Suffice to say, suspension is an important prerequisite for and preservative of the non-dual riches contemplation hints at. Suspension is St. Paul’s "dressing room:" we take off the old self, and put on the new one. Without suspension, the final steps--the Dark Night of the Self, and Divinization--will become a house of mirrors, full of nothing but our own distorted image.