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.