Realm of Mystery, Hill of Calvary:

Ego, the “garment of flesh” in which we return to God, is not to be disparaged too loudly: but its pitfalls are glaring and unavoidable.  Regardless of liabilities, though: both in Catholicism, and in such hindu paths as jnana yoga—thought yoga—it’s possible to elevate the ego until it leads to God, the source of all things.

The post “On Removing Self from Knowing” basically said this: If you know truth with the ego, it will lead you astray. Unless they are grounded in fierce individual ownership of communal deficiencies, even our efforts to proclaim the communally gleaned “truths of the faith” will be treated as credentials or reasons to judge others.

From a certain perspective, both society at large and the Church as a whole have closed their eyes to this. "I think therefore I am,” a highly prized societal maxim, and “It’s right if you think it’s right” the battle cry our relativism—these grow from the same tree: the ego. They both sprout the same fruit: the false self. Even for those claiming to consciously live a spiritual path, interacting with the ego haphazardly commonly leads to mistaking the self for God. Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s “Spiritual Materialism” talks about the harm of turning spiritual goals into playthings for the ego, Under the Influence has spoken of the pitfalls of building an identity based on spiritual consolations and wisdom. Figures as prominent as St. Paul have said that the devil masquerades as an angel of light: in such malevolent hands, sources as pure as God’s law serve to take life as opposed to giving it.

We’ve paid lip service to absolute truth, then built towers to the heavens on the shifting foundation of Ego. The story of the “tower of babel” serves as a warning of the result: such self-sabotage will leave us with wreckage and misunderstanding every time.

And yet there are aspects of the Christian experience, often, at most, merely alluded to, that we’d be well served to take more seriously. Images such as Christ’s descent into hell, Benedict’s ladder of Humility, and Bernard of Clairvaux’s “Steps of Humility and Pride” suggest, as last week’s “Parkway to Paradise, Highway to Hell” post did, that ascending and descending use the same stuff, and happen simultaneously. Those we call great saints often have a degree of awareness of their own sinfulness that would be terrifying if not for God’s mercy, entirely eschewing the popular equation of perfection with faultlessness. Relativism officially feels icky. And yet it’s absolutely true that many of our categories are “relativized.” Behold, a mystery, the depths of which it’s in our best interests to plumb! (Huzzah!)

The question Under the Influence is concerned with today is whether there’s a more reliable way to interact with reality. Not while we’re caught up in ourselves as the “interactor” there’s not, but I get ahead of myself. Taking some catechetical cues from other wisdom traditions, I’ve come to the following conclusion: that something called the “realm of mystery” is an aspect of the present moment. Not only is it a non-egotistical starting point, it’s an ongoing foil to the false certainties of the ego, which ultimately connects us more reliably to Reality, helps us slip the trap of Abstraction, thereby creating silence full of God, Christ, and the Gospel, out of which we can speak if God wills. [bxA]

Before we begin talking about the “Realm of Mystery,” it’s important to make some distinctions. Ongoingly, the God we can describe isn’t God himself: so beliefs, or Articles of Faith like the Trinity, can’t take the place of belief, or trustful self-surrender to the indescribable Godhead. If, for the Word made Flesh, a historical incarnation was neither the beginning nor the end, then we’re bound to speak of the definitive nature, not only of Christ’s historical incarnation, but more fully of his presence in his ultimately-undescribeable mystical body. The highest words about Jesus are not the Eternal Word. The Self we wear around is not the person we are. And the highest of heavens is not a dualistic place: it’s the seat of divinization, a beatitude in which we lose the perception of ourselves as self-conscious or separate from God.

A good architecture for this comes from Meister Ekhart. He spoke of a “threefold birth of the word.” The Word was with God in the beginning. As such the Logos is a silent fourth member of the Trinity, (more a conveyor of divine intelligence than a person outright, mind you) but the tune being played nonetheless while the Godhead dances in a circle. The Word took flesh in the Virgin Mary, and lived a life of self-emptying and service. But the Word, then, takes flesh in us. Under the Influence has said it in the past: Jesus’ entire agenda in appearing as a stranger was to part the Apostles with their historically-rooted paradigm, opening them to the possibility that the strangers they share the road with are the messiah himself. This teaching came to full flower when St. Paul said his true self was “hidden with Christ in God.” Vamping on Catherine of Sienna’s words, (she said “all the way to heaven is heaven”) we might say “all the way to becoming Christ is becoming Christ.”

A wise reader can start to see a skeleton of the “realm of mystery” emerging. The “realm of mystery" is rooted in our present-moment personhood, and that’s important to keep in the forefront. Playing off the German terms for “Ground” (Grund) and “Abyss” (Abgrund), Meister Ekhart spoke of our being as the “Groundless ground” on which God and I behold each other. In a startling degree of agreement with Under the Influence’s “Five Sense Organs of the Body of Christ,” Ekhart says I share an “eye” with God, through which I see him, and he sees me. In the light of that “eye,” and bringing our dualistic God concept as close as it gets to the monistic, there is ultimately no discernible difference between us.

Under the Influence has talked in the past about suspension, the state that cancels opposites: high and low, crucified (in us) with christ, are one in the same. Being better and being worse, when nailed to the cross, yield to simply "being. True and false give up the ghost. Who I am, who I am supposed to be, all I believe about God and Christ and Heaven—all these die together, to be raised however God wills. If suspension’s the Cross, the Realm of Mystery is the place of the skull.

The realm of Mystery can be summed up like this: If suspension unifies opposites, the realm of mystery reveals Christ in paradox. In other words, since Jesus lived, died and rose in paradox, it’s in the lows themselves that we find highs. Our inner selves connect with the outside world because they, like everything, everywhere, obey Christ’s teaching of “interbeing.”

In the Realm of Mystery, we also “will by not willing” and “do by not doing.” Here’s what’s important about that: when our relativist and hedonist voices pipe up with “I say what’s right for me” and “if it feels good, do it” we students of the Way hear, in the words, the ongoingly problematic voices of egotism. A relativist might say “I had to sin to know goodness.” A student of the way would say “I’ve been there. I’m trying, lately, to remember I didn’t have to sin, though I did, in fact, sin a ton, and along the way I learned to avoid sin and embrace goodness without freaking out.” In the realm of mystery, we hope, at most, to transmute our egotistical energy, to use passive volition and be present to reality rather than controlling it. We hope to be so closely united to God that no distinction is found between him and us, his will and ours.

It’s the Realm of Mystery to which the “Aha moment” of finally solving a Koan points. It’s the Realm of mystery that teaches us how realizations, along with conscious use of entheogens and fulfilling desires—all of these things give us breaks from our ego, that’s part of their pull. The work that turns realizations into humility, Samadhi into enlightenment, is to voluntarily lay down the false self of which this life’s various desires, being satisfied, temporarily deprived us.

In short, the solution to false selves isn’t “true selves,” it’s non-self. Our confidence is not in the rectitude of our beliefs about God, but in the “belief" that undergirds it, a much more silent thing. God and Self and Belief are reliable only when they have done what Rabbouni did: died in the place of mystery. Work gets done, words are said, things are desired, but the “I” who’s doing it has changed. Even, if I can state this without any avoidance of responsibility, sins are committed—but in light of God’s mercy they acquire impersonal notes similar to Karma— we part with them as we part with our egos, and not before.

We may die with our boots on, I don’t know. Lord knows which hill I’ll make my last stand on, but if I’ve done it right, my physical death will merely be the final take of the egoic death I’ve run through many times. I could do worse than a realm in which living paradox crucifies every distinction between better and best. I could do worse than forgetting the I who’s expiring till St. Paul’s words “we will not all die, but we will be changed” ring out true and clear. I could do worse than letting the words I speak yield to the Word that can’t be spoken, worse than letting the last trumpet die, till I’m totally comfortable with the nothing that comes, quiet, and after the period.