Where we've been so far: The Basic Teachings of Under the Influence

Under the Influence hopes to impart the equanimity of the Messiah. With the Church, Under the Influence considers Christ to be a definitive revelation. If the Church should choose to claim exclusive rights to rectitude, however, Under the Influence will go quiet: when people know who they are, they can let others be a little bit right as well. When people know their liabilities, they dispense with attempts to convert others, and instead they're eager to troubleshoot their own denial.

Knowing the usefulness of their own tradition is, in the end, the very reason people of faith examine the resources of other traditions. Under the Influence reminds the Church of its own words: Nostra Aetate’s claim, for instance, that "The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in [Non Christian] religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. Indeed, she proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ "the way, the truth, and the life" (par. 2).  

In other words, if a teaching is the way, the truth and the life, that teaching is Christ, whether it comes from Buddha or Torah or Hanuman. This curiosity to know other faith traditions is an obligatory part of being a Catholic, but being Catholic is a help to salvation at best—by the Church's own admission: Those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his Church, but who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart, and, moved by grace, try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience - those too may achieve eternal salvation." CCC 847

This is no mere "tolerance:" rather, Under the Influence would have the Church join students of all traditions who have taken their seat at the feet of Wisdom. There may but one path for each of us, but there are certainly many paths for God. We are not Students of the Way until this tension renders us quiet. We have not heard Rabbouni’s voice until he speaks to each one of us alone, about each one of us alone. We are not Students of the Way until we’ve seen that Wisdom is equally accessible to all, and that we need the mirror of others to clearly see ourselves.

Among teaching tools for Wisdom, Koans—driven by paradox, as they are—these have pride of place. In a Koan, the Cosmic Consciousness wields creative tension like a sword: the Divine calls our own consciousness to expand. Koans do certain "transformative work:" they render all places “here,” make all distances nil and all times “now." They render all people “me,” and obscure the lines between hearing and feeling. They make all processes realized, and divorce stimulus from response. They unite opposites—and as such, heal the divisions in the human psyche that began in abstraction, continued in sin, and embedded themselves in cultural deludedness.

So far, this is what Under the Influence has discerned to be true:

God is a person-with-a-nature, not a person-with-a-self: God’s attributes are the closest thing he has to a self. I, too, am a person, not a self. My Ego is a false self. I wear an ego around town, the combined projection of the eight evil thoughts. Due to these mutually donned disguises, God and I are distant. I over identify with ego and attachment. Morality holds sway: some paths are holier than others, heaven above is a remote goal, just as hell below is a fear. I substitute examination for experience. I substitute beliefs for belief. As I move out of denial, through the dark night of the senses and the spirit, I become my true self more and more. In the healthiest of dualisms, we practice the presence of God. Christ has no body but ours, no hands but ours. In the healthiest of dualisms God perceives us through the body of Christ: we see Time, Desire, Reality Thought and Paradox, but through them God sees us. We realize that our “beliefs” about God are largely a system of blame, projection, dualism, superstition and egoism—and that was echoed in the culture: in its own dualism, in its projection of time into past and future, in its moralistic equation of humanity with its actions. We hoped there might be a way to stop abstracting, to cease acting out of the false self. God’s gaze entices us.

At first we asked for a bottom line. And we found an answer in the five pillars of Catholicism: Prayer, Service, Creed, Seasonal Awareness, and the Practice of the Presence of God. After a while, the bottom line became less important. It wasn’t because we’d obtained what we’d desired, but because both the desiring, and the person doing it, diminished in importance.

The Cross, the place of Suspension, is the first Theonoia. It is the logos: symbolized by the serpent, it was with God in the beginning, just in the coded messages of the prophets and the psalms. The Logos is the truth to which the Sacraments point: Though concealed, God is literally present in all creation.The logos asks that broken-heartedness be a permanent reality for us. Humility is the natural tendency to remain at the first theonoia—a place of pure perception once confined to contemplation—and the foundation of Christian enlightenment. Inhabiting suspension empties us of self, and our desire of attachment. God, once distant and accessible only in ecstasies, draws closer as our humility becomes permanent.

As we move from dualism to monism, God sheds his attributes, his self to become the ground of being. No paths are better or worse, they just are. Working out our purgatorial predicament, our disposition alternates between times of serenity, when we feel united to God, and times of anxiety, when we feel distant from him—but the changes aren’t up to us, and have little to do with our desire. As holiness grows, holiness becomes less of a merit badge, and consciousness of sin grows alongside our knowledge of God’s mercy. But we don’t interact with God as a person, the way we did when dualism held sway. Now God is as close as our breath: it’s us who live far from ourselves.

And that is how it was, in the beginning: God and humanity were one. Then it fragmented, thought about existing instead of just being. All life became abstraction.  People were given bodies to learn to return. God sent rabbouni to recapitulate all things, remake all creation in God’s image. His teachings all had the four Gospel Seals: impermanence, non-self, acceptance and interbeing. We were given the Humble Tenfold Way—so that we could gradually embody the lessons of the logos and the teachings of the Cross. And in the end, (perhaps after multiple lifetimes) in the breaking of the bread we see the body of Christ: the strangers we were to ourselves show themselves to have been Christ the whole time.

Divinization is just that, becoming God in unity with our true selves, the Christ within. When we saw it as the end of a moralistic journey, heaven seemed like a reward, where we, at best, sat on clouds with God. Eventually, perhaps after many lifetimes of Christ being reborn in us, we saw it as the end of a journey of humility: heaven was a merging of our own consciousness back into Cosmic Consciousness.

Though Wisdom bucks logic, some concepts support its work better than others. In pursuit of union with God and the Crucified Christ, then, Under the Influence presents these core teachings. Suffering is not understandable or controllable by logical constructs: as such, it’s the perfect mouthpiece of the Logos. However, Under the Influence makes bold to claim that, were the Cross to enumerate its core teachings, these would be them.



The 4 Humble Truths

(On the Doctrine of The Cross, Part 1 and 2)

All life is abstraction
All is in need of recapitulation
The Vehicle of recapitulation is the Body of Christ
The Way of the Body of Christ is the Humble Tenfold Way


The Humble Tenfold Way

(On the Doctrine of The Cross, Part 1 and 2)

You do what you want, but I remember these using this acronym: Practice Perfects In All Eating, So We Knead The Bread.


Humble prayer
Humble presence
humble intention
humble action
humble effort
humble speech
humble work
humble knowing
humble thinking
humble belief


The 5 Sense Organs of the Body of Christ

(On the Doctrine of The Cross, Part 1 and 2)


Monistically, all these things are Christ’s Real presence, union with a God and True-Self in naked reality. Dualistically they’re how God perceives us.  I remember them with the acronym "True Divinization Really Takes Presence"


Time
Desire
Reality
Thought
Paradox


The 4 Gospel Seals

(On the Doctrine of The Cross, Part 1 and 2)

All Christian teachings will agree with these principles. These are the “marks” of Christian Transformation.

Impermanence
Non-self
Acceptance
Interbeing


The 5 Pillars of Catholicism

(The Five Pillars of Catholicism)

These are the 5 things with which every Catholic has to contend. Whether to contend with them is not optional, if we would call ourselves Catholic. How we contend with them is up to us.

Prayer
Service
Creed
Seasonal awareness
Practice of the Presence of God


Spiritual Stages

(On Trendy Brunch Spots and The Dark Night of the Self,
Defining Terms and Filling in Gaps)

Denial
Dark Night of the Senses
Dark Night of the Spirit
Suspension
Dark Night of the Self
Heaven/Divinization

The Theonoias

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

1st theonoia: No difference between God and who I AM.  Non theorizing about either of them.  A state of pure perception

2nd Theonoia: Everything gets names and Labels.  Man gets a "garment of Flesh" or an ego. The False Self believes it, and the world, are permanent.  The True Self knows everything "Inter-is" in everything else, that the whole world is just patterns of energy, and people are just patterns of energy wrapped around consciousness.

3rd Theonoia: We string our labels together to get theories and physical laws and rules.


Self:

(On removing self from knowing,
Permanence, Self and Christianity)

Because all life is abstraction, self is synonymous with ego.  It can be, by degrees, healthier and unhealthier.  It is an abstracted identity, the net effect of the eight evil thoughts.  The eight evil thoughts are gluttony, greed, sloth sorrow, lust, wrath, vanity and pride.

The evil thoughts are, first and foremost, expressions of original sin--in that sense, they're universal, more a cause for compassion than anything else.  And only problematic if we willfully and habitually follow them.