We're made in the image and likeness of God: seen healthily, our portrayals of God are a map of our own mind. God formed us from the dust of the earth, breathed the breath of life into our nostrils. We were asked to live on every word that came from the mouth of God, but instead we indulged desire. Our mind rehearses the steps constantly: the steps which, in light of sin, have hardened into ego. We were given every fruit bearing tree, now we hide behind its leaves. We remember naming the animals. Now--however inaccurately, in the end--we can't stop naming and labeling everything. We remember reaching for one who fit the hole in our side. One minute we said "this alone is flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bone;" and now we can't stop theorizing connections between things, accurate or not. God created us and called us good. We created desire and craving and sin, interacted with thought instead of reality, and whether we called our surroundings good or bad, we related to them by the sweat of our brow. [bxA]
The flaw we called "abstraction." It was an exercise in bypassing "things as they are" for the sake of what we wished them to be. No sooner had we labeled than we blamed. First we said "This one shall be called woman; out of her man this one was taken" and then, on its heels we pointed fingers: "the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate." No one--not even the serpent--told us we were naked: that judgment was ours, and we covered ourselves with mental pictures of our own being, concealing ourselves as with sewn-together fig leaves. Desire and craving, fulfillment and ego played naming and labeling and theorizing on continuous loop. Blame and remorse, othering and exile were just the cost of our indulgence.
But we wondered, if we mapped out the flaw and retraced our steps--even if it meant carrying a cross--could we follow the way back to oneness? Could we find the still mind of Christ just by owning our missteps down the turns of our own? We'd been taught that a quiet mind was a gift from God--and this is true--but in our worse moments this kept us from claiming whatever quiet we, with humble and persistent work, could have laid hold of. Students of the Logos searched the traditions of the world, trying to find a method--as Ram Dass called it--of "using the mind to beat the mind." We worked at it, learned how to use the tool we were creating, and gave it a name. Borrowing a structure from Buddhism, we called it "the theonoias."
Like wattage in electricity, the Theonoias are units of mental force. In and of themselves, they are morally neutral--they can express either straying from or returning to oneness. The first theonoia is total mental rest. In the Christian Tradition, contemplation is a temporary experience of the first theonoia, and humility is the first theonoia carried into action. A mind at the first theonoia is the "mind of Christ" St. Paul described. To stay in this quiet state is to "remain in Jesus" as the Gospel of John referred to it.
The second theonoia is naming and labelling: the mind divides the world into this and that. Everything has its own name, its own characteristics. An arm is not a fish, and neither are a sports arena full of people. Noting differences, judging and dividing the world--these become the constant work of an ego too unwilling to admit to its own vulnerability, much less sit with it patiently.
The third theonoia is theorizing: the mind supposes connections between what it has just labelled. This is hard when we're not focusing on ourselves--it can lead to every manner of insecurity and egotistical angling--and it's hard when we, in fact, are focusing on ourselves--a few modest successes and our ego gets clingy again, this time narrating a string of spiritual successes to distract us from the emptiness within and without.
Here's the trick: the theonias are nothing but an expression of the flaw if we get caught in thinking they're permanent. We got ourselves into a terrible mess by failing to admit that the mind's compulsive workings aren't a problem and don't need care and attention. We had to learn the saying "sometimes, things that aren't your fault might still be your problem."
But, rooted in impermanence, with the right amount of letting go, the theonoias help us realize that our mind's grasping for control won't make our lives better. if we focus on the small things we're able to change and admit we're powerless over the things that make us anxious--then we can use the theonoias as a road map to the solution, following them backwards to mental quiet. Let's take a look at a scriptural example of how this works.
Once, while fleeing conflict, Elijah asked God to end his life. God directed him to self-care: "get up and eat." This moved the prophet's focus from threats he couldn't control to the self-care he could control. Elijah travelled to the mount of God and took shelter in a cave: there, the Lord spoke to him. God simply asked "what are you doing here, Elijah?" The prophet offered an explanation full of how zealous he'd been, how shocked he was at the life-threatening nature of the whole thing. Elijah was working with the third theonoia. He had to let go of his theories--about himself, and how the world worked. Then he had to get past some distractions. There was an earthquake, a strong wind and a fire--but Elijah intuited that "the Lord was not in" any of what he was experiencing. The Scripture mentions nothing but what the different phenomena were called. To the student of Rabbouni, this points to the second theonoia--the need to let go of names and labels.
Only after letting go did Elijah hear the sound of sheer silence-and he covers his face and walks to the mouth of the cave, ready to meet God. For followers of the Logos, this is the first theonoia. It's rest in God, the mind of Christ, and the height of humility. In terms of practice, here's the the take-away: if we simply continue to ask "what is my mind doing here," --so long as we're grounded in impermanence--then we turn naturally away from what we're powerless over and toward self-care. We let go of theories, let go of labels, and eventually rest in silence.
Sometimes the help of grace is a call to work. Sometimes God appears absent in order to tease out a deeper hustle from his people. Sometimes all God does is lay the steps out in front of us till we wait in quiet. Then the scriptures ring in our own silent ears: you shall hear a voice behind you saying "this is the way, walk in it." And all creation will mirror the path back to us. Our eyes will, indeed, see our teacher. But his face will look like our own.
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