On the Doctrine of the Cross: Part 1

It’s long that Under the Influence has been building toward two statements: the first is “God, Savior, and Self are One.” This is an ontological distinction—it’s about being, about the fact that they all are exactly the same. The second statement is “Christ, Cross and Koan are One.” This is a functional distinction: Christ, Cross and Koan all do the same thing. The post “Staying with Suspension” introduced the idea of “theonoias” (or theonoiae, if you’re swanky about greek plurals)—these "building blocks of cognition" are the mechanics of explaining what enlightenment looks like, for a Christian. Under the Influence theorized that remaining with Jesus—and having his mind—this consisted of pure perception. It’s a crapshoot whether the self-concept or self-reflection that followed--the stuff of the second and third theonoias--hurt or helped the effort of remaining with Jesus.

And the method of Under the Influence has been the same from day one: take the architecture of wisdom that exists in other traditions as an indication of the different pieces that a Christian Wisdom tradition would need to develop or relocate amidst its own resources. Additionally, things like dualism, linear views of time, a way of knowing that assumes the permanence of the knower, and an over-emphasis on moral theology—all of these are culturally prevalent and have coopted Christ’s message. The effort is not to make theological fruit salad, here. Where there are differences, they need to be stated. In places where our own tradition is weak, and another strong, we should own up to it. In places where our own tradition is strong, and another weak, we should be humble about it, because we know ourselves and don’t need to treat truth as a credential.

Koans are quite likely to have non-verbal answers. After all, language is a logical tool, and Koans are illogical questions. Though some of Jesus words can function as Koans, we can be quite certain that the Judaism of his day didn’t have a lot of space for us to say Jesus intended them as such. It’s with maddening resignation that Under the Influence admits that the Cross itself is a Koan. It’s a nonverbal, performative answer to an illogical question, which demonstrates that Jesus, the responder, has been emptied of self. Personally, I find myself saying “You spent your whole blessed life using words to teach, and then got quiet when it was time to elucidate the core of your teaching. That’s great, Jesus. Just great.”

I’m being a bit cheeky. With my Lord and Savior. I know. My curiosity remains, though. We can only guess at what Jesus would say the Cross was meant to articulate. If he had done so, though, that message would have the role that the Four Noble Truths have in Buddhism. It would serve as a litmus test of Jesus’ Teaching—identifying the key points with which all teaching must agree in order to be Christian—the way the 4 Dharma seals do in Buddhism.

With a certain amount of fear and trembling, then, I’d like to propose doing two posts. Later, Under the Influence will need to address “The Four Gospel Seals” and the “Five Sense Organs of the Body of Christ.” For now, we need to lay a foundation. Today’s post, then, will talk about what I call “The Four Humble Truths” and the “Tenfold Way.”

The Four Humble Truths are: 1. Life is abstraction 2. Recapitulation 3. The Body of Christ and 4. The Tenfold Way. Let’s spend a minute with each of them.


All Life is Abstraction: If life were a movie, remaining at the first theonoia would be a matter of just shutting up up and watching it. Before the fall, knowing God was monistic, not dualistic. Walking with God in the cool of the day, an afternoon activity in the Genesis story, was a symbol of our particular consciousnesses existing, united and un-self-consciously, with Cosmic Consciousness. (The "Jawist Writers” of Genesis 2’s second creation story portrayed both God and Man with what appear to be selves, but that’s because they were writing as selves and projecting it into the story. The snake, too, is a projection: Dr. Jeremy Narby would say it’s a symbol of our own DNA, which receives, in code, both benevolent and malevolent spiritual messages.) The fact is, at the start of our lives, we listened to a malevolent spiritual message, and it caused us to think about being, instead of just being. Catholic mystical traditions agree with other traditions, and prove that analyzing states of mental rest compromises them. The new normal, then, was Abstraction. After the Fall God gives Adam and Eve “Garments of Flesh,” which are both Egos and physical bodies. Egos and Bodies can, and have become tools of abstraction, but can potentially serve the purpose for which they were originally intended: that is, in egos and bodies we can learn to take our life-cues from perceiving reality, rather than thinking or theorizing.

All is in need of Recapitulation: This is a term that means “all things being remade in God’s image.” Of course, since God’s creation isn’t omnipotent, omniscient or all loving, “God’s image” needs to be redefined in light of the Logos. Being “remade in God’s image” is being redeemed, being restored to the ability to remain at the first theonoia. This also means things like “Death is swallowed up by life,” and that “all things must empty themselves, take up their crosses and follow Christ.” The helpful Buddhist term “interbeing” is an important one in recapitulation. People who find Christ’s path end up doing as he did. They conquer death by dying, just as he did. It leads to life, and death will be deprived of its sting if we enter into it with Christ’s same conscious willingness. In part, things that seem opposed are recapitulated by being located, one in the other. Death is found in life, life is found in death. By willingly suffering, we find freedom from suffering. Christ is found in the Father, and the Father in Christ. I am united to my neighbor by realizing we inter-are, and he’s a mirror for me at best. Wounded though it may be, the Church both is Christ, and is a part of Christ.

The Solution is the Body of Christ: All of the ways Paul used this image—as a symbol of the church at large, and appreciation of complementary gifts—still stand. I’d like to suggest that, just as Christ’s historical body was subject to decay, just as “Christ’s body, the Church, has many members” all phenomena pertaining to incarnations are composite. For instance, all thoughts come from, and return to, ego and desire. Our sense of linear time is a product of the mind. This means that all phenomena exist, and are blessed—indeed, they’re the fullness of the body of Christ to which the Eucharist points—but also that they’re impermanent. When the second humble truth occurred to me, I thought of just calling it “impermanence” like the Buddha does. But “The body of Christ” is a good “deconstructor” just as “Logos” is a good meditation on impermanence. Later we’ll talk about “The five sense organs of the body of Christ.” Modernity’s bamboozled Christianity into thinking of things as permanent, and it seemed important to assert impermanence alongside all the things to which it applies. Also, on the level of concepts, buddhists may mean something I don’t, and I want to be seen as honoring the buddha, not coopting and bastardizing his terminology. To understand Jesus' full meaning about the lilies of the field, impermanence is as important to grasp as God's sustenance.

The Way of the Body of Christ is the Humble, Tenfold Way: The prideful misuse of Ego desire were the prime consequence of Adam and Eve’s “selfish, self-conscious” departure from cosmic consciousness. It’s the reason the “garments of flesh” they were given seemed to be a punishment. But Adam and Eve were “persons”—non-oppositional beings— before they were “selves"—oppositional beings. Re-learning that is the true function of the body, the gospel stitched into the very DNA of the garment of Flesh. Even the snake, our DNA, has its own gospel of impermanence: to shed “selves” entirely— until we are a divinized and un-differentiated part of cosmic consciousness again. In any incarnation, the way to do that is humility and the Tenfold Way.

1. Humble Prayer: This prayer comes from, and returns to need for God. It’s the prayer of the Publican who says “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” instead of judging the publican. It's the “Jesus Prayer” of the famous russian pilgrim that placed two words on the breath cycle: “Jesus, mercy.” It’s step one of every addict’s recovery.

2. Humble presence: This is passive volition: being without ego: willingly, not willfully, present to reality.

3. Humble intention: Abbot Timothy Kelly of Gethsemani said “humility is willing not to will.” Humble intention is wanting not to want, removing ego from all aspects of existence.

4. Humble Action: Humble action is the Christian equivalent of Taoism’s wei wu wei, “doing, not doing.” It’s action in cooperation with the Logos that admits the impermanence of all things but acts anyway.

5. Humble effort: This is conscious and willing participation in the Logos, not being willfully driven by forces of Ego or desire.

6. Humble speech: This is “speaking with” people, rather than “talking to or 'at'” a person. It assumes a mutual identification with the broken-heartedness common to all humanity.

7. Humble Work: Engaged in this, students of the way “work for the sake of working, in accordance with their vocations.” It means working non-manipulatively and non-transactionally, according to the gospel. Jesus forgave tax collectors, because he knew they were deluded. But he called them to collect no more than they were due. Jesus forgave prostitutes, because he knew they were deluded. But then he revealed his Way for them: that their body wasn’t currency, and generosity would be their support.

8. Humble Knowing: Perceptions of which “I,” the knower, am an ever diminishing part.

9. Humble Thinking: The humble student’s thought processes are driven by the reality of the gospel, not the insecurity of ego or desire.

10. Humble Belief: One engaged in Humble belief remembers that belief is trust. Beliefs are its intellectual expressions. Remaining at the 1st theonoia, we don’t assuming our conceptual beliefs are permanent.


For those of us who dig this kind of spiritual game, what got us into it isn’t what keeps us here. No jot or tittle of what these truths point to is meant to conflict with the Law, the prophets and the psalms. If I’ve thought humbly, then this is the “the narrow way that leads to life” of which St. Benedict spoke in Chapter 5 of his Rule. If I’ve believed humbly, it’s the “gate for the sheep” that Christ identifies as his own being. If I pray humbly, it’s what produces spiritual experience of the abiding sort, like the ones Alcoholics find in empathy filled church basements. If I’m able to act without getting in my own way, “The Fear of Isaac” might show himself to be God indeed, and I’ll have made a beginning of wisdom.

The Five Pillars of Catholicism

I’ve always been attracted to intentional living, and clean ways of explaining what the game is about. As a monk, just because I’d asked a visiting buddhist for a word that’d help us live our monastic lives, I watched him count out the four noble truths and the eightfold path on his fingers. After that I’ve always been attracted to simple ways of explaining core doctrines.

As an instructor of theology at a Catholic school, I often get questions about the bottom line. Ever interested in doing the least amount of work possible, my students will ask “What’s the least you have to do to call yourself Christian, and what if I differ with it?” The first time I got that question, I could only answer its second part. The next time I addressed it, I had an answer. After a bit of preface, I hope to address the answer I feel sums up Christianity’s bottom line. [bxA]

First, allow me to say how I arrived at the answer I give. On a level that’s 1/3 nerding out, 1/3 puppy love and 1/3 academic curiosity, I’m very much in love with Islam. I’m sure I wouldn’t escape being called grossly underinformed. But I love Islam because it has such extensive points of contact with Trappist monasticism. The movie “Of Gods and Men” will always move me deeply: the movie is about 7 Trappist monks who were martyred in Algeria, solely for being quiet Christians committed to their way of life, to living it alongside the local muslims they’d come to call friends. In that movie, the monks are shown praying 7 times daily, as I did for 7 years. Muslims pray five times daily. The monks are shown serving the poor who come to them. All muslims are duty bound to serve the poor. The movie shows the monks giving even their personal medications to the sick among the town’s muslims. History has answered questions the movie didn’t guess at: the monks were most likely executed by kidnappers from the French-backed Algerian Army, posing as jihadis from Jama al-Islamiyya. All indications point to the probability that the Algerian government needed a reason to go after the Jihadis, and found that reason in the murder, which acted as a sort of smear campaign against the jihadis.

Lambert Wilson and Farid Larbi,
as Of Gods and Men's Christian de Cherge and Ali Fayattia.
They shook hands to close their Christmas Conversation,
and departed less at-odds than they'd come.
I own no rights to this image

While refusing to fill in details unknown to history at the time, the movie is eloquent in exonerating the members of Jama Islamiyya. Their leader comes to the monastery on Christmas night, demanding that the monastery’s infirmarian—slightly trained, as he was, in medicine—come to care for their sick. The Abbot refuses, saying that their sick may come to the monastery like everyone else in the town. The abbot then explains the significance of the night the jihadi interrupted. But he does so using the Quran. This night is the Birth of the prophet Sidna Issa, he explains, using the Quran’s title for Jesus. The abbot explains the monks way of life, also quoting the surahs "you will certainly find the nearest in friendship to [muslims] (to be) those who say: We are Christians” he says. The head jihadi knows the quote by heart as well, quote continuing it "this is because there are priests and monks among them and because they do not behave proudly.” The head jihadi apologizes, the two shake hands.

To get back to my main point: lacking a Catholic answer for “What’s the bottom line?” I turned to Islam. Inshallah, I’ll say what little I know, and am attracted to: muslims explain their beliefs in terms of “Five Pillars.” Zakat (Generosity) Salat (Prayer, facing Mecca, five times daily), Shahada (A creed saying “There is one God, and Muhammed is his prophet") Sawm (Fasting, during the holy month of Ramadan), Haaj (The “once in a lifetime pilgrimage to Mecca.) If you don’t even contend with these, says Islam, you’re not a muslim. I wanted to boil Christianity down to similar basics for my kids.

I stewed on it for a while. As I thought about the strengths of Islam, new possible ways to package Christian Truth emerged. Soon, when a student raise next raised their hand and asked “What is the least she needed to do to be Catholic” I had a response. “The Five Pillars of Catholicism” are Prayer, Service, Creed, Seasonal Awareness and Practice of the Presence of God.

Prayer was obvious. We do it, I explain, both alone and together. It’s both Liturgical and free-form, and moves the mind and body back and forth between 3 different states. Vocal prayer uses words, Meditation uses thoughts—both help us to get to God. When words and thoughts become, as they inevitably will, a hindrance to being with God, Contemplation is our way to pray just by being with God. And we’re so close that we don’t even recognize a conceptual difference between God and the Self.

Service was essential, I explained. I talked about an assortment of “Works of Mercy:” the “Corporal” ones, like Sheltering the Homeless, Feeding the Hungry, Visiting the Imprisoned, for instance. You’d be drawn to do more of some, less of another, I said, and that’s how it’s supposed to happen. I talked about Admonishing the Sinner, Counseling the Doubtful, and since no one can give what they don’t have, the importance of doing Spiritual Works of Mercy for ourselves first.

Creed was liberating because it clarified “the ideas that all Catholics, in the end, accept.” Trinity (3 persons in one divine nature), the Four Marks of the Church (we say it’s “One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic) and the three beliefs about life, (One Baptism, Resurrection and the Life of the World to come.) Those ten beliefs are essential, I said. As a Catholic, you had to ultimately buy into them. But how you did so was up to you, I explained. What does the Oneness of the Church mean? Each of my students would have their own answer to that. And that was the real stuff of their freedom. “Think, for instance” I said “of Grace. On the books, grace is ‘the action of God.’ Most people think grace is an energy you’re given, like caffeine—they think Grace is a reason to overwork on Christmas and Easter. I think Grace is the ability to let go without anxiety. If we do less, God will do more. Jesus was the most graced human being ever. He died having lost everything. All he lost, all the emotions he felt—he experienced them without anxiety because, when we let go, God takes over. The sacredness of life is not manifested in doing more, it’s manifested in letting go of what you’re doing. This isn’t a conventional way of talking about grace. But I’ve just found that using grace as a reason to overwork is, to a great extent, about ego, and as a recovering egomaniac, I can’t afford that. So the principle is clear. If you describe yourself as Catholic, whether you believe is not optional. How you believe is. You can broaden this to all five pillars. Being Catholic means interacting, somehow, with all of them. If you want to be Catholic, you can’t choose whether to interact with them, but you can choose how.”

Seasonal Awareness was a tricky one. I tell my students “either you believe time is linear, or you don’t. The fact is, the life of Jesus made time sacred, no matter what kind of time you believe in. If you buy into linear time, seasonal awareness means knowing how the fact that it’s the season of Lent, for instance, changes what we’re invited to think about. If you don’t buy into linear time, seasonal awareness is means knowing what the different layers of the present moment are.” Take sadness, for instance, I say. At a certain point I realized that I felt so sad that I was starting to make myself sad because it felt familiar—because I was comfortable with it, and making much of my sadness got me attention. There are times, like Lent and Good Friday, that sadness is really appropriate. I do cling to things, and that does make me miserable. Even as I’m feeling that, though, it changes, because Jesus’ life teaches me to let go. And learning to let go of feeling is as important as learning to accept feelings in the first place.

I told my students “whatever you have to do to realize that the present moment is sacred, do it. We even have a way to remember that a particular part of the day is sacred. When I was a monk we used to think about every day as if it were the last day of Christ’s life. Our day was just a following of Jesus through his crucifixion. As we were getting up to pray at 3 in the morning, Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemani crying tears of blood. Apparently he didn’t like waking up either. As we were going out to work, Jesus was beginning his work of carrying his cross. At noon, when the day’s heat conspires with food coma to make you give up on life entirely, Jesus was being nailed to, and dying on the cross. As we get “taken” by the day, Jesus gets deeper into his work of dying for our sins. By the day’s last prayer, Jesus is being laid in the tomb, and that’s when we go to bed. When we sleep, he dies. When he rises, we do.”

The last Pillar was the big one. To me, it is the most important. The last pillar is “Practice of the Presence of God.” Ultimately, this is an exercise in letting our thinking yield to “just being.” The premise is that we are all attached to the Eight Evil Thoughts, the compulsive thoughts Under the Influence has talked about before, that give rise to the ego. “Practicing the Presence of God” is a way of seeing everything around us, not as a commodity to be consumed, but as an attempt, on God’s part, to be with us. It was a method of practice coined by Br. Lawrence of the Resurrection.  Most of us look at the world as if God is absent from it. The fact is, he’s there and trying to be with us. Giving egoless attention to that—simply being present to reality, rather than being hyper-focused on it—these are the “Present Moment Goals” of the spiritual life. We might find that our thoughts of God, of ourselves and of Heaven change in the process, but that doesn’t matter, I say. Just be present, and don’t let that goal make you uptight. The rest will take care of itself.

And then I make the students say it back to me: “What are the Five Pillars?” I ask. And I get the answers, one each from a different student, in rapid fire “Prayer!” “Service!” “Creed!” “Seasonal Awareness!” “Practice of the Presence of God!”

And I finish with a couple of questions “If you want to be Catholic,” I ask, "what do you have to do?” And they respond “You have to practice and believe.”

“But what part of that,” I ask, “is up to you?” And someone says “How to believe!”

And class ends. And I’m not sure if I’m right, or if I’ve done enough, or if my students totally get it yet. But until the bell rings, I try.

Remain in Me: The Theonoias, Belief and Beliefs

While Christianity has defined different types of prayer, it lacks an account of their effect on cognition. The most they’ve done is talk about the faculties involved: Christian Vocal prayer involves the voice, Christian Meditation involves the mind—contrasting, here, with Buddhist meditation—and Christian contemplation involves neither. All traditions, though, struggle to sustain, in daily activity, the prayerfulness of the Eucharistic Adoration Chapel, the Yoga Mat, the meditation cushion.

It’s the custom of Under the Influence to use the strengths of one tradition to highlight the areas of growth necessary for another. In that vein, a comment following the post “He Aint Heavy, He’s my Brother” clarified that "Absence is an ontological quality, opposite is a logical quality." Thinking is optional, the physical confines of our consciousness are optional, but merging back into cosmic consciousness is not optional. It goes on to clarify that the “Nens”—the Buddhist name for the movements from pure perception to cognition—have no Christian equivalent. Claiming that Mother Church would benefit from it, the post defines the 3 Theonoias—or theonoiae, if you’re a greek nerd. The first theonoia is pure perception: “The table in the center of the room” would be a fine answer to a theoretical or paradoxical question. The second theonoia gives names to phenomena, differentiating in the process: this is a table, that is a chair, each has its function. The third theonia weaves together theories about tables and chairs.

Too much thinking, as Christianity proves, conflates verbs with nouns, confuses “belief” and "beliefs.” The post “Emptiness in the Life of God: Resurrecting a Concept” talked about Faith as if, to quote Ram Dass, it was “what was left when all your beliefs have been blown to hell." Belief is trust in God, but it is too often assumed to be "the mental activity that comes from that trust". We have associated our identity with that mental activity, and trust with its own conceptual byproducts. We can, and should, trade in our “beliefs” for belief, and our “thoughts of self” for Being Itself.

Indeed, as was clarified post "Staying with Suspension: Christian thoughts on Wisdom, Cognition and Enlightenment,” we do well, who allow our mental activity to remain at the first Theonoia, the level of unexamined perception of reality. The point is, here, that only when it remains at the first theonoia does our believing express trust, rather than the panicked enumeration of “beliefs” that can be merely the ramblings of a threatened ego.

John’s gospel is paramount here, when it emphasizes intimacy with Christ, rather than imitation. "Remain in me” it says. “Stay with me.” This is a Christological expression of beliefs similar to the originally-Zen concept of “interbeing.” “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Later this message applies to the church. The Gospel of John portrays Jesus saying to God "I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me." That means communion with God is the point--in this life--rather than “doing God’s will”. Remaining at the first Theonoia is a sharing in God’s being which, once we have learned what we can from our physical existence, becomes the non-dual and self-extinguishing full-personhood of Divinization.

Remember: Christianity has a Monistic, or unified view of God and Personhood, and a dualistic view of selves and incarnations. This leads to something that, for lack of a better term, we could call "The “I AM” predicament.” When God said his name was “I AM” he was talking about shared personhood here on the level of being, not shared selfhood, on the level of thinking. Selves are separate, self-conscious manifestations that can become idols when we cling to them. Because selves are constructs, God’s “self” and our “self” will have difficulty sharing the sandbox. Personhood is a locus of consciousness, but it isn’t dualistically opposed to cosmic consciousness, or the Divine nature. The “I AM predicament” arises because we’ve confused selves with our personhood, and in the process we’ve made a few errors that history is right not to let us forget.

Aided by dualism, I can too easily mistake personhood (being made in God’s image and likeness) for “selfhood” (separate self-conscious bastardizations of my own existence). This leads too easily to divinizing my own selfishness. Conversely, it helps me bypass personal responsibility. Divinized human flaws range from “slavery must be God’s will, because it’s biblical” to “women must be silent in church” to “we’re only certain Jesus ordained men, so women can’t be ordained.” All of these are egotistical statements endowed with divine will.

The “fragmented nature of selves” is the problem here. Instead of figuring out “what parts of me become God,” the solution’s to be found in the Dark Night of the Self. The answer to many Koans involves allowing the query’s illogicality to get rid of the “me” who’s asking. After all, Ego is just this incarnation’s best defense mechanism. As I work out my purgatorial predicament, I troubleshoot my thoughts: I will cling to being “immoral” less as I let go of substituting a projection of myself for “being myself.” Lacking a self, I don’t cease to be. I simply cease to be divisive. The dark night of the senses, of the soul, and of the self—all of these are spiritual movements that can cleanse belief of its errors. We fight them because non-belief threatens our self concept, but the self concept needs to go, too.

Lets return to the above statement about “belief” and “beliefs.” Belief is remaining at the first theonoia. It’s ontological. But whether you are a Theist or an Atheist or an Agnostic, whether a jew or a hindu or a Jain, your “beliefs” are intellectual movements: an expression of the third theonoia. When we’re ontologically detached, living on the level of being, . That is to say, for those who don’t cling to the business of thinking because your focus is on merging back into cosmic consciousness, atheism doesn’t affect God’s existence in any way. Atheism isn’t a threat, identifying our being with our thoughts is. Being open to the coexistence of opposites is, in fact, a sign of the dark night of the self. Non-belief is a state in which one increasingly depends upon God, in which one increasingly leans on the Christ till he’s ultimately identified with the self. The man in Mark’s Gospel who, through tears, said “I believe, help my unbelief” is to be envied for his doubt, not just his confidence. He was obviously in the midst of the dark night of the self, and was all the more prepared for divinization.

There’s a confusion here about what constitutes love, and it affects belief negatively. Obsession, when its positive, produces the feelings we call “being in love.” When obsession is negative we learn the truth, that obsession comes from insecurity, and giving up “being in love” is the key to loving. If I am in the living room, but I’m worrying about whether my sleeping spouse really loves me, I’m unable to be with myself. If we’re both in the kitchen, if she’s telling me what she thinks about something, and I nod and smile while I’m mentally differing with her, I’m being with my own opinions instead of with her.

In love, as in belief, we’d be well served to eliminate blame, projection, dualism, superstition and egoism. The hazards of blame and dualism are obvious--and Under the Influence has treated them elsewhere. But when I attribute insecurity onto a sleeping spouse, I need to seriously question whether I’m not simply projecting, foisting my own insecurity onto her. If I'm a married man, and my taking out the garbage is done with an implicit expectation that I can later obligate my spouse to do the laundry for me, I’m reducing love to superstition.

When love is purged of these errors, our homes become a space of spiritual practice. When our God concept is purged of those five errors, we’re able to rest in God more easily. When that happens, God first becomes impersonal—we relate to him as a cosmic consciousness or ground of being. Later he disappears altogether. A short exercise will show, by analogy, the truth of the matter. If my eyes work well, I don’t spend all day long thinking about them. Only in the presence of a mirror (or ocular pain) do I even realize I have them. It’s similar with the distinctions between persons. Selves and desires that differ, (sometimes violently) are the way people substitute separate self consciousness for the reality of being a person, a locus of consciousness.

To vamp on a couple of helpful bits from the gospels: duality is the “Log in my eye” that separates me from others. I can’t see my enormous faults because I’m too busy noticing the tiny faults of others. Non-duality is the light that is within me because my eye is clear. It is also the “great darkness” of which Jesus spoke when he said “if the light that is in you is darkness, great is that darkness. It is both because the God we’re communing with on the altar of reality is presence in absence, both being and non-being.

Keep in mind that, from the bits about love, onward, I’m dealing with the “Third theonoia.” I’m dealing with a unity of God and self, (the first theonoia) that’s first “abstracted and objectified by being named” (the second theonoia). Then I've theorized about it. The task of returning to the first theonoia is why I need disciplines such as what the west calls “metathinking,” or what the east calls jnana yoga. These help us to ask if our thinking is divisive. In short, the Logos leads to adjusted thinking—concepts like “self” and “Holy Spirit” and “heaven” and “forgiveness”--the “right concepts” addressed in “Emptiness in the Life of God” that lay the foundation for the permanent humility.

It’s a strength of Christianity, the way remote goals are relocated in immanence. In teaching about heaven, Jesus links eternal reward, or lack thereof, with the most minute shifts in disposition. Call you’re brother a fool, he says, and you’re in danger of hell. Therese of Lisieux took it a step further, saying “All the way to Heaven is Heaven.” The theonoias take it a step further. If your mind and perception are clear, you and the cosmos and others are all one. Christians are apt to substitute being for a sort of bastardized “thinking about being.” Taking pure perception with us, and we will avoid the abstractions involved in sin—we may be “good and evil” but we won’t mull over “knowledge of good and evil” constantly in our heads. Remaining at the first theonoia, we will simply exist, and have a chance to fulfill Jesus request. “Remain in me,” he said, “and I will remain in you.” If, in the present, this is the object of our meditation, the future will be fruitful indeed.

Staying with Suspension: Christian thoughts on Wisdom, Cognition, and Enlightenment

I’ve claimed, in “On Suspension: Holding Non-Duality Together,” that suspension is the preserver of contemplation and the precondition for “humility-become-permanent” or Christian enlightenment. Christianity entirely lacks a word to describe the steps involved in cognition.  In this life, such an impediment hinders our ability to describe “the mind of Christ” which all saints come to share.  In the next, it gets in the way of describing what is “subtracted” to enable saints to be divinized.  I’d like to spend a bit more time on that today, because the resources of the Church, on this score, exceed even her own awareness.  This involves looking at at least one concept, gnosis, that gets a bit of a bad rap, and two others from Buddhism—the Nens and Samadhi.

At the outset, an admission: my first point about gnosis is borrowed, almost entirely, from Cynthia Bourgault’s The Wisdom Jesus. She says something true: Gnosticism, which she identifies as a philosophy Church authorities condemned as heresy, gave gnosis, or wisdom, a bad name. She argues that equating the two isn’t a fair move. I agree.

Gnosticism, which flourished in the second century, claimed that there were two Gods: one who made the earth, and was a rather angry little deity, and one who sent christ, who spent his off time caring for the lilies of the field and being compassionate. Gnosticism claimed that some people were given the “secret knowledge” of God, and that others weren’t.

The problems with this are obvious: it divides God, and divides humanity. But no unpleasant human emotion, such as the anger we project on our God-Concept, is foreign to divinity. And wisdom is not the special possession of a few in society. It’s not like private jets for the one-percent. Wisdom is like air, available to all, and in fact, constantly partaken of by all.

Consciousness of Wisdom, however, is acquired. This is where Bourgault’s point becomes sword-sharp in precision. Gnosticism’s condemnation notwithstanding, experience remains, in the Catholic view, particular to those who’ve had it. What Ram Dass summed up quickly remains an inter-religious truism: to those who’ve experienced transformation, no explanation is necessary. To those who haven’t, none is possible. It is God who bestows wisdom. I can claim that there are things one can do to pre-dispose oneself to wisdom, but some who do those things never receive it. This is usually because there are bits of egotism running the game, attempting to make God’s grace a reward for changed behavior. Those who fully let go, who let go of duality and ego: these don't cling to desire and become fully open to Gods gift. Such emptying is a possibility for all. Indeed, even if it’s apparent to none, it may still be happening. (So the transformed don’t get to sit in judgment of those they deem “untransformed.”)

To sum up: We can do some work to avoid eliminating the Logos’ creative tension in our lives, but when wisdom comes, it comes as a gift and belongs to God. Jesus’ wisdom, the gnosis of the incarnate logos, deals particularly with life and death, unwillingness, sin and suffering, and those whose hands cling to nothing have room for it. Thoughts will come and go, and I can note the (hopefully increasing) ease with which I let them go when they arise, but that’s about the extent of my work in the matter. The rest is up to The Transcendent One.

Buddhism has its ducks in a bit of a straighter row when it comes to explaining prayer’s link to cognition. The dharma includes the teaching about the “nens” which are mental “building blocks.” The first nen perceives. On this level there’s no duality between the perceiver and the perceived, there’s just the perception. In the second nen, duality holds sway as we start naming things: this is me, that is you, this is up, that is down. I am the walrus. You are the egg man. Cuckoo Kachoo. The third nen is the level of narrative: my being the Walrus, you being the Eggman, these imply certain things. It needs to be said that abstraction and illusory thinking held sway from the second nen onwards. In the buddhist system, enlightenment is to remain at the first nen. This is enlightenment, and when it’s complete we’re freed from the need for future incarnations. We may delay final entrance into nirvana out of concern for other sentient beings—that is, we may take the bodhisattva vow—but we don’t, in and of ourselves, need to incarnate again.

Catholicism, I’d like to suggest, has yet to ask questions about cognition and faith. This is linked, I’m sure, to the ways in which modern psychology is mere guesswork. Finding a solution to that deficiency, strangely enough, may involve a collaboration between the scientific revolution and the present era of inter-religious dialogue.  As I'm prone to claiming, religions other than Catholicism have tackled this problem, and we'd be well served to employ a bit of humility and take a few cues from them.

The concept I'm working with here is the Buddhist "Nen."  Tradition already uses the word “logismoi” to speak of the “evil thoughts” that work together to generate the ego. But there is another, long neglected side of cognition that deserves attention. I would suggest that “theonoia”—thoughts that unite us with God—is a term we need to get skilled at employing. If “nen” has a corollary christian term, this is as reasonable as any other. The theonoia of Catholicism, from first to third are: God/Self, Logos/False Self, and Creation. If the Logismoi are thoughts about God, analogous to the heat of the engine, the theonoia are "Divinations"—parts of the engine that help achieve return-to-God, not byproducts of it. Whereas logismoi are an end-run around reality, theonoia are a reality-aided encounter.  Where the logismoi are disempowering, the theonoia empower. They are the way individual beings proceed back to Being, that individual consciousnesses merge back into cosmic consciousness. As such they are not thoughts, but a way of using them, a means of embracing reality as the Logos makes it plain. When Jeremiah reported that he saw a boiling cauldron, tipping away from the north, it was a vision of reality. But it is a prophetic message precisely because it’s a divine double entendre, the poetry of logos. The cauldron was a symbol of the impending exile in Babylon.

I’d like to suggest that for Catholics, non-dual experience of the Godhead is the First Theonoia. On the level of experience, on the level of the first theonoia, there is no difference between us and God. With regard to God, I don’t want to say “Trinity” or “perichoresis”—however correct these concepts are, they are an intellectual abstraction of experience. It’s important to say, though, that all other bits of reality are included in the Godhead. With regard to us, please remember that “whole personhood” is antithetical to a separate, self-conscious self. My personhood is part of God. The elm tree out my window is part of God. But the separateness of those things into selves and subject and object is a function of the second theonoia, and remember, remaining at the first theonia is the ideal.

The second theonoia, for Catholics, then, goes in two directions.  On the one hand, when its power is abdicated, the logismoi result, begetting ego and desire.  Full of these thoughts, I enflesh fragmented being.  Under their sway, I’ve departed, in some sense, from being a whole person, and developed an objectified view of myself. In other words, I’ve started to say “look at me being myself,” and I’ve begun thinking about being, as opposed to just being, who I am. Quite literally, I’ve abandoned myself, and it leaves me with an abstracted self-concept later tradition would recognize as ego. This is so hidden, even from the Church, that when J.P. Caussade wrote his excellent book “Self Abandonment to Divine Providence,” what he actually meant was “Abandoning the false self, for the sake of the divine, with the help God extends through creation.” In other words, our acceptance of "selves-abstracting-from-being" is so complete that we accept them as real automatically and bypass whole-personhood.  

Allow me to tell you about our savior, the Mighty Quinn

When our theonoia work in accord with the Logos, we return to God.  To a christian, this is fullness of being.  The theonoia are non-dual.  God and I are not two, being and non-being are not two, up and down are not two.  Doing and non-doing are not two.  And when the choice is framed as "Either God, or me" then I am not one--cosmic consciousness is non-oppositional, though both God and I are each a locus of it,  and no ego should obscure that.    

God speaks in his Logos as a remedy for ego. All creation speaks of Godhead and return and oneness, it just does so in the coded language of wisdom that experience alone can grasp. In the Logos, God reveals himself. He gives himself the confines of a name, telling Moses “I AM has sent [you] to [the Egyptians.]” Such confinement grants power. If I raise my voice and say the name of a student who is sleeping in my class, she will immediately pick up her head. For the sake of liberating Israel, Moses was empowered to do great miracles and articulate God’s law. Because its spoken, God’s law itself foreshadowed Christ’s incarnation and self-emptying. To anticipate a criticism, it is totally wrong to blame the Law for the universal suffering false selves cause, or to blame those who follow the law because self-emptying is no carnival. The Gospel is just the Law, seen through he lens of self-emptying. If the two seem contradictory, we should be very quiet, and attend to the work of self emptying. From the perspective of the soul, the view of “non-self,” the Gospel and the Law are one. It’s just that we are not-one. In the Soul, or non-self, separate self-conscious selves yield to personhood again.

After false self and logos, the third theonoia is creation: and God said “let there be bodies and silver spoons and bathroom windows.” Both all creation, and we, ourselves, are pronounced ‘good’ from the beginning. Even the ego, the "garment of skins” God made Adam and Eve does good protective work from the outset, preparing us to learn wisdom, find humility and accept salvation. But all creation along with the ego is also a vehicle of selfish desire and attachment.  This is why our destiny is found by following non-self, or the soul, back to fullness of being.

As stated earlier, the different states of prayer are simply a vehicle of remaining on the first theonoia. In buddhism, the realm of the absolute is where we experience the suspension of opposites. An-atman is the spiritual muscle that leads to enlightenment. The different levels of samadhiare Savikalpa Samadhi, Nirvikalpa Samadhi, and Dharmamegha Samadhi. The first two samadhis are simply a withdrawal of person from the faculties of senses and thinking that ego has Identified as self, on the one hand, and from the duality between himself and the world, on the other. Nirvakulp samadhi is the temporary taste of the absolute, in which our “personhood” withdraws from our faculties and is subsumed in cosmic consciousness. Sahara samadhi, also known as Positive Samadhi, carries equanimity and detachment into our use of our faculties, our daily life and work. This positive samadhi happens in between nirvikalpa and dharmamegha samadhi. Enlightenment is nothing but a permanent state of egolessness. Dharmamegha Samadhi withdraws our personhood even from the desire to know God or become enlightened. Buddha nature ceases to be something we have, and becomes something we are—we rest perpetually at the first nen.

In Catholicism, suspension is where you experience the union of opposites. The soul, or non-self, is the muscle that leads to humility. When vocal prayer and meditation—both of them good, in their own time—yield to contemplation, we withdraw our personhood from sense and ego and knowing. The Dark Night of the Senses, the Dark Night of the Soul, and the Dark Night of the Selfall fit inside these categories. Sense objects, the content of faith, and both ego and desire: these all present themselves to us. With our attachments made clear as the light of day, we can begin to take a dispassionate. Contemplation is the temporary taste of humility. Obedience is equanimity, carried into action. Enlightenment is nothing but the permanent humility of Benedict’s 12th step. Whether we’re aware of it or not, we're totally united wth Christ. And if we know it, it’s not a big deal. "When an ordinary man acquires wisdom," says Ram Dass, "he becomes a sage. When a sage acquires wisdom, he becomes an ordinary man.” Jack Kornfield’s book is perfectly titled, to sum up such normalcy: “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.”

In the end, we’re tied to other people by the unflattering reality of shared weakness. If we can see ourselves wandering away from being, watch as we endow the logismoi's "thinking about being” with far too much permanence, then we can realize the extent of our predicament. The “Theonoia” are the way back. If I’ve stood in the creative tension of the Logos, and have perhaps been given wisdom, it’s so that I can serve others. If my eyes have been opened to self and desire and attachment, it’s so I can let them go. God willing, the prospect of divine union will be so dizzying that we lose a sense of who the name “I AM” applies too. Wherever we are when that happens, may we all be there together.

He ain't heavy: He's my brother

Brad Warner—who despite his name, falls short of kin to me—qualifies his answers well. In his book There is no God, and He is Always with You, he says (to paraphrase) “When asked ‘do I believe in God?’ I reply ‘that depends on what you mean by ‘I,’ by ‘belief,’ and by ‘God.’” Under the Influence would say something similar: whether I believe in the persons of the Trinity depends on what you mean by “person.” And the ways in which I avoid “relativism” and believe in a “moral code.” depends on what you mean by ‘I,’ by “relativism” and by “moral code."

When not authoring books, Brad Warner is a
Soto Zen priest, and bassist in a punk band.

Allow me to explain: Catholic moral theology does a bit of violence to the human psyche, and it flies in the face of the contemplative tradition of the Church. There is, most certainly, a separate, self-conscious realm in which our actions are either “bad or good”—moral theology is full of road maps useful for that locale. But as Under the Influence said in “On Suspension: Holding Non-Duality Together,” there is an entire mode of being in which things are neither good or bad. Perhaps they could be usefully evaluated by waxing utilitarian, asking if their results are healthy or unhealthy, but in the end, they just are. And that mode of being is just a preparation for something deeper still, which is connected to a more accurate vision of trinitarian theology—the fact that, in this life, personhood need not imply separate self-consciousness, and if the next life is separate from this one, that “just being” is the garment we must be wearing to gain entrance to heaven.

Relativists make an ultimately-failed effort to associate rightness with desire. They’re absolutely right to locate the responsibility for choice making with the actor alone—his meat can be placed in front of him by the Church, but for her to cut it for him would be infantilizing, and he alone can chew and swallow. It should be said that relativism is an understandable reaction against an authoritarian vision where we’re told simply to implement a supposedly exterior code of conduct. Their distaste is justified, at how completely that disempowers individuals, how completely it flies in the face of the ultimately religious freedom to learn the good by slowly deciphering what’s written on their heart. But relativists are not right in making my desire and thought the sole criteria for rectitude. Under the Influence will always claim ego and desire are part of the problem, not the solution.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in making God the final arbiter of rightness, might have been slightly more accurate than the relativists, but the saint fouls up other matters. When the church contents itself to say, along with him, that "who we are" is the sum of our habituated deeds, we lose a number of important distinctions. The labels we place on actions are not the actions themselves. The actions are not the same as what motivated them, and what motivated our actions isn’t “who we are.” Aquinas, who's actually baptizing Aristotle, assumes conscious effort is enough to get the job done. He might, as all good saints do, tip his hat to “the help of God” and quote “there but for the grace of God go I,” but the fact remains that the help of God is easily dismissed by the conscious mind, whose end-stage pride bucks the acceptance of both divine and human aid. The Church’s moral theology is accurate to say that, when it remains on the level of the conscious mind, doing is either bad or good. But the conscious mind alone isn’t the whole picture of the cognition, and advising people to remain there is actually injurious to personhood. Bill Wilson would later locate the root of addiction in "self will"--egotism, or the stuff Under the Influence called "active volition”—in other words, the inadequate fuel that caused all good habits to result in a spree, crashing into an exhausted pile of remorse before waiting for desire to kick in again. Ego, it seems, can use desire to get a good bit done, but both will always be a mask concealing a great deal of force. Enduring sobriety rests on “passive volition”—or being humbly present to reality, without trying to run things.

Identifying the crux of the problem means taking issue with another classic theological definition. Augustine said “Evil is the absence of Good.” By conflating opposites and absences, Augustine glosses over the wisdom of the Desert Fathers, who discovered that unconscious wounds foul up the best attempts at building habits. Aquinas was borrowing from Aristotle here, whose categories don’t reflect awareness of the layersin the psyche doing the choosing. Our wounded system of basic needs is concealed just below the Ego. Underneath the wounds, underneath all questions of “what kind of self we’re acting with,” the option exists to just be. By conflating “Non-action” with “Bad action,” Augustine loses an opportunity to say that humility (non-self) and obedience (non-self in action) bear the riches of contemplation into the world. He could have taken the opportunity to heal a rift that was opening between contemplation and action. Unfortunately he didn’t, and the rift between prayer and action exists to this day.

When not beautifying the Degobah System, Yoda succeeds in
horribly misquoting John Lennon.

As Under the Influence said in the post “Emptiness in the Life of God: Resurrecting a Concept," passive volition is a mark of non-self, or the soul; it’s the soul’s way of "acting in obedience with," or "acting as if present to" reality. Heaven is totally understandable as Non-being. Augustine’s definition obscures the fact that it’s possible—nay, required for serenity—to be totally devoid of separate self-consciousness in our being and action. When we are at our best, we are returning to non-being. Our best selves are non-selves. Without speaking, the humble prove that egotistical “separate self-consciousness" isn’t part of being a person. When action doesn’t compromise our serenity, it’s because our “doing” encompasses “non-doing.” The 1,000 hours a shaolin monk puts into his kung fu make his movement an extension of his being, his non-self. His hard work is ultimately to part with the self that wedges itself between his body and fluid motion, and when his actions are empty of self, they look easy. Because "he isn't," they're easy indeed.

Ultimately, for moral theology to remain relevant to an ongoing spiritual evolution, it will have to grow past selves and their dichotomous desires. In order to do this, it will have to confront the inadequacy of Trinitarian theology. The unity of the trinity’s unconflicting roles—the perichoresis—isn’t the only way they cooperate. The balancing act of particularity and oneness involves differentiating between “selves” and people, but to do so will fold humans into the life of the trinity in a (perhaps uncomfortably) direct way. God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit might be different loci of consciousness, but they are not different “selves.” A self is separate and self-conscious. There are people in the Trinity, not selves, The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all of them individual loci of consciousness with non-oppositional links to cosmic consciousness, or the godhead. Upon admitting that, we remember, though, that humans are “people” too. In the end, the lesson of the Logos is that personhood is the way we're united to God. So it is a truism to say “selves are not divinized, people are.” And that very personhood—that individual locus of consciousness—is what we, when we’re completely humbled, find familiar about the prospect of becoming God.

If there’s no opposition between individual loci of consciousness and the whole of cosmic consciousness—if separate, self-conscious selves are optional masks people wear—then we need to do a better job in talking about morality, the link between contemplation and action, and the difference between opposites and absences. In the light of cosmic consciousness, absence might be a much more useful category than we previously admitted. And in that light, too, Brad Warner and I might be, after a fashion, kin indeed.