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.
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