Remembrance, heaven and the first theonoia.

Ever since my days in the monastery, when I took his name, I’ve been a devotee of St. Dismas. That classic interaction between the Crucified Christ and the Good Thief—Dismas says “Remember me when you come into your Kingdom” and Jesus responds “Today you will be with me in Paradise.”—the words “Remember me" still make me sit up and listen.

If “Staying with Suspension” has it correct, Contemplation, Enlightenment, humility and “having the mind of Christ are all a matter of remaining at what it calls the "first theonoia,” a place of pure, unanalyzed perception. Normally, we think of memory like it's a mental maneuver that fishes insights or experiences out of the file cabinet of who we used to be-- in the service of who we currently think we are. If such egotism is ultimately a mask we have to get rid of, "memory" has some limitations.

Aspiring to the first theonoia gives the Jewishness of Christianity’s origins a run for its money. Remembrance is absolutely pivotal to Judaism. The answer to the Passover question “Why is this night different from all other nights” begins with the words “we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt.” For Jews, Remembrance is a way of actualizing God’s saving potential, an act that gave their lives freedom and law and promise. The Scripture frequently says “Remember, O Lord, your people.” In psalm 25, the poet says “Remember not the sins of my youth.”

This all builds on a single assertion: What God fails to remember does not exist. And it broadens easily. When Dismas said “Remember me, when you come into your kingdom,” he was teaching us that “What the messiah fails to remember is not saved.”

But if past and future don’t exist, if the first theonoia is worth remaining at, the way we throw around the word “remember” needs to be workshopped. Taking everything Under the Influence has said about cognition into consideration, it makes sense to say “Remembering is a dismembering of the Self.”

It follows from this that past and future are deconstructed too. The past and the future are about actualizing potential and being grateful. The only reason the passover meal and the eucharist claim to make the past present is to live in accord with God’s will right at this moment. The only reason the future is something to aspire to is because we want to hope in God’s providence, and be grateful for it, in the now. If we can’t do that, then our rumination about past and future become unreasonable attempts at control: we mull over the past and feel anxious about the future. We cultivate expectations about how life should be—sometimes, much to our own dismay, we even call those expectations themselves ‘hope' and it creates myriad resentments. Remembering where I came from, hoping for the future have become excuses for living in remorse and anxiety, for seeing the worst parts of my “self” hemming me in, in front and behind.

So remembrance is a dismembering of the self. But Remembrance, in Jewish thought, leads to heaven. Jesus response to Dismas was “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” Heaven is another concept that needs to be workshopped. In the post “Emptiness in the Life of God: Resurrecting a Concept," I’ve identified Non-being as heaven. It can also be God—whether we mean God as "personal deity", or God as “impersonal ground of being.” Hazrat Inayat Khan, the late 19th and early 20th century sufi teacher wrote "Non-existence Sings with the Song of the Harp. To Him we return.” In this case, Non-existence, which I have Identified with Heaven, is identified as personal—analogous to the higher power. Ultimately, the point is that heaven, at the very least, is living on resources that aren’t self—something bigger and more free than ego and attachment and desire. It’s Nonself, or the Soul, that gets the work done. Non-being, beyond the confines of an incarnation, is heaven.

There’s a Koan that addresses this: case 29 in the Hekiganroku, the second of three famous collections of Koans. It says “A monk asked Daizui “When the Kalpa fire flares up and the great cosmos is destroyed, I wonder, will ‘it’ perish or will it not perish?” Zui said, “it will perish.” The monk said “Then will it be gone with the other?” Zui said, "it will be gone with the other.”

Katsuki Sekida, editor of the collection of koans I work out of, processes this Koan as an understandable attempt to figure out what happens after we die. It is, in essence, three questions: first, it asks if we will be gone. Then it asks if we will be alone when we’re gone. And if we won’t, it asks what will happen to the others.

As is typical of Koans, that’s not all that’s happening. Remember that Koans collapse time. When Daizui answers “Will it be gone” by saying “it will be gone” he’s asking, in essence, why the self that is “us” isn’t gone already. When Daizui answers says it will be gone “with the other” he’s assuring us that “the beyond” is at least an experience of non-self, but we realize too that what we are, with the other, is gone. Nothing of “self or other, here or there" is left for us to cling to. The answer to the Koan, indeed, heaven itself, is the first theonoia. It’s either pure perception in the here and now, or it’s nothing.

If we take the theories of Under the Influence, the Jewish sense of remembering, or the work of Koans seriously, past and future cease to matter because all the potential of the present is actualized. This vision of Heaven accords with the four humble truths of Jesus, mentioned in last week’s post. If heaven is anything, it’s non-being. And the way to get there, in this life, is non-self and the Tenfold Way. When those teachings translate into actual, practical ways to remain at the first theonoia, then what Therese of Lisieux said is true: “All the way to heaven is heaven.” All that’s needed, I suppose, to wake me from my denial, is the deafening hush of one hand, clapping.