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.