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.
No comments:
Post a Comment