Permanence, Self and Christianity

In Buddhism, permanence—as a general phenomenon—is at least problematic, at most heretical.  It would be a strain to commit christianity to the same zealously held impermanence.  But evidence suggests that "thinking things are permanent" might be more a feature of western culture than it is a biblical teaching.  This is the question to which I hope to hazard an answer: in light of scripture and tradition, just how permanent must a christian profess his “self” to be?

The content of Under the Influence might show my hand before I even begin.  Let’s look at some of that content, as preface.  

As far back as the post “I think, therefore I am who I am not” it’s been no secret: I have beef with Descartes.  The famous caricature of his words goes: “I think, therefore I am."  Since then I’ve been railing against thought as the foundation of being.  A buddhist, quite properly, might ask Descartes, in return, “Now I’m not thinking.  Therefore what?”  The Implication: beyond pure perception, the forms we associate with it and the theories we build with them are optional. 

The Post “Removing the Self from knowing", asked “When the self stands between the beholder and the beheld, can we know anything?”  The suggestion, in the end, was that a self, at most, allows us to examine things—but examination falls short of “knowing” because a dualism endures, still between the beholder and the beheld. 

So in short:  We don’t need to think in order to be, and we don’t need a separate self consciousness in order to know.  In fact: thinking, and self-consciousness, actually impede being and knowing.

“Removing the Self from Knowing” also spoke of the 3 “selves” a Catholic can speak of having.  The desert fathers said the eight evil thoughts culminated in a prideful false self, called “the ego” from the days of Freud onwards.  St. Paul spoke of a “true self” which was hidden with Christ in God, to be revealed after the end-times.  The Christian east spoke of “Divinization” as a process by which, through deep humility, a person actually becomes God.

“Selves” seem a bit tricky.  They’re certainly not universally bad.  To hear Christians talk about them, though, it’s evident that we talk about selves the way we talk about Church: it’s easiest to point out the problems, the false self.  Benedict’s “ladder of humility” would say awareness of our faults indicates spiritual growth, and anyone who’s not treating Godliness like a credential would agree.  We make great effort to “be our better selves” when life gets rough, but honest self-appraisal bars us from claiming we’ve ever fully and permanently mastered that task. And then there are times when we forget about selves altogether because we’re so in the moment.  These foreshadow a conclusion: If being doesn’t require thinking, if knowing requires self-diminishment, then separate self-consciousness isn’t a requirement of personhood.

The post “On Suspension: Holding Non-Duality Together” spoke about the three effects that “being crucified with Christ” has on a person.  It dissolves opposites, it  calls cosmologies into question and it relativizes personal identity.  Further back, we talked about the “Dark Night of the Self” coming soon after Suspension, officially rendering self and desire the same as any other attachment of which we can easily let go.  

A theology professor of mine, answering the question “Does God suffer” had to answer in the negative.  Godliness is a nature, a type of being that the Father and the Son shared.  He concluded “natures don’t suffer, people do.”  So the person of Christ suffered, but he had that in common neither with the person of God, nor with the Nature they shared.  In a similar move, I’d like to suggest that “Selves don’t progress spiritually, people do.”  In the spiritual journey, “selves” are optional, and shedding self is a pivotal part of full, humanized personhood.  

The post "On Suspension: Holding Non-Duality Together" talked about selves being relativized as the people who have them move closer and closer to union.  It spoke of Suspension as the dressing room in which one takes off the old self, and puts on the new one. Selves may do a limited amount of good work. Perhaps we could properly speak of them as magnifying glasses that make conflicts in desire and attachment apparent.  But tool and task are not synonymous, here.  Both the healthiest ego, and the truest of selves, confine a person to dualism.  The distance between observer and observed always wiggles its way between God and his faithful.

On the other hand: peace, when all desires are united and at rest, is only found when selves are discarded.  I don’t know if either God or his people have “selves," in the immediacy of being who they are.  I’d stake my next meager paycheck on the claim that people, when they’ve given up separate self-consciousness, no longer need selves in the least.  God’s name, “I AM,” rather than being an indication of divine “selfhood," may merely have been a divine spilling of the beans: God may have been saying that, when we see our original face, we will both recognize Christ, and face God’s absence.  After all, what devotee can see a God who looks on the world from his own eyes?  And yet, if our whole bodies are full of light, that must mean something, and something significant indeed.

On Suspension: Holding Non-Duality Together

The post “Defining Terms and Filling in Gaps” reinforced an earlier point Under the Influence made about the "Dark Night of the Self", and suggested that a stage exists, in the Christian mystical and moral life, where opposites cease to be meaningful terms. We called the stage “Suspension” after Guerric of Igny, and suggested it might be analogous to Absolute Samadhi. In short, we stated that it’s an important preface to seeing our relationship with God from a Unitive standpoint.

Under the Influence takes as gospel Augustine’s quote “If you can understand it, it isn’t God.” By the same token, though, the “reframing of understandings” inherent in the Emmaus experience isn’t something Christians can get away from. Before they could see Jesus in the breaking of the bread, certain shifts had to take place. Their savior had try another messianic paradigm on for size. While they talked on the road, Christians found the judges’ view of salvation too small a garment. Indeed, in that view Jesus failed to oust external oppressors. The Christian community found a better fit in the prophets’ messianic paradigm. Ever-after, the savior who effectively took away sin by suffering willingly would be the T-shirt they bought and called a uniform.

Even for buddhists, whose practice absolutely negates thought as part of direct experience, “right concepts” are part of liberation. It would seem that a few such conceptual commitments would be useful to Christians as well. The assurance-- that the ways prayer unifies them with God won’t be too irreparably undone by thinking—is certainly worth it. And yet It’s also true that, by putting our finger on a conceptual basis for unitive thinking, we’re highlighting something that shouldfall into disuse as soon as possible. We run the risk of duplicating dualism’s error, that of preferring our religious thoughts over the realities to which they point.

Ultimately, suspension is the prerequisite for and preservative of unitive consciousness. To that end, its characteristics serve as a definition of “Right Concepts.” While I wouldn’t claim Suspension enfolds everything that has ever been considered orthodox, I’d make bold to claim suspension, as a state of mind, provides a glance into unitive consciousness that a great many orthodox beliefs don’t.

First, allow me to introduce the author of the concept, to let you in on the way it was originally used. Guerric of Igny spoke of it originally, saying "Fitting it is indeed that the people should be in suspense, as it were, between heaven and earth, unable as yet to grasp heavenly affairs but preferring even so not to have any contact with those of earth.” He used the “fixed” nature of Jesus Crucified to talk about non-duality, a view that doesn’t accommodate higher or lower, heaven and earth, spiritual or base desires. To be clear, he was talking about the expectation of the consummation of all things. Applying his category to all desire writ large is my move, but a fair one (if I do say so myself.)

We can only speak of unitive consciousness in the context of the prayer journey. Meditation and Vocal prayer involve a gap between God and the devotee that Contemplation closes. Prayer itself seems structured to teach that none of the mental content of vocal prayer or meditation—none of Christ’s mystery that is describable in words—is the contemplative rest of Faith Itself. Under the Influence would see every Christian as a practitioner, and prayer as a primary in that effort. At its best, Christianity deals in the healthy dualism of love; this implies knowing when to when to yield to unitive consciousness. This much needs to be said: when the content of meditation contains recognizable blocks to unitive consciousness, that meditation needs to be let go of more quickly than others. Unfortunately, a ten second examination of Christianity shows that this caution hasn’t been heeded.

Ultimately, suspension--and non-duality in general--is a three pronged effort: it breaks down opposites, it breaks down cosmologies, and it breaks down personal differences. However non-duality manifests, Christianity has no word for it: we have not gone through the Christian tradition and named, in a consolidated fashion, its own resources for non-dual consciousness. Let's briefly run through those now.

Suspension’s Non-duality dissolves opposites: The roots of this reality reach back into the old testament. Laban and Bethuel, when approached about whether their daughter can marry Isaac, respond “we cannot say anything to you, bad or good, the thing comes from the Lord.” When the people Israel, in the second temple period, were rebuilding God’s house, the scriptures relate the following anecdote. "all the people responded with a great shout when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of henhouse of the Lord was laid. But many of the priests and Levites and heads of families, old people who had seen the first house on its foundations, wept with a loud voice when they saw this house, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that the people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people’s weeping, for the people shouted so loudly that the sound was heard far away.” Almost as Dom Thomas Keating, former abbot and monk of St. Benedict’s monastery in Colorado, said once “There is a level on which pain is joy and joy is pain, because one is grounded in Divine Love.”

Suspension’s Non-duality dissolves cosmologies: Specifically, here, I’m referring to the Heaven/Earth/Hell cosmology, an essentially Greek belief set that Judaism adopted during the time of the Maccabees. In a way that, as far as I’m concerned, can be seen as definitive and permanent, Jesus equates heaven and hell with states of being. The words from St. Matthew are familiar: “everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” While still acknowledging an eternal dimension to heaven and hell, the sense of the words shifts a devotee's focus away from desire’s "afterlife consequences," and toward it’s yield in the here-and-now. The message—you are responsible for your desires, and the kind of atmosphere they create--shifts Jesus’ moral teaching. It acquires desire-centered notes that sound more like the immanent effects of Karma rather than the delayed, otherworldly rewards of cooperating with grace.

Duality sets up hard and fast distinctions between creation—possessed of, at best, non-rational souls—and humanity—rational souls, made in God’s image. A non-dual religious vision would relativize that distinction. Br. Lawrence of the Resurrection, in his Practice of the Presence of God, taught that everything that happens to you is God, attempting to reach you. Depending on how heavily we allow the particulars of the teaching to sit with us, this can look like “God speaking throughhis creation” to use the lightest touch, or more heavily "God being present in his creation,” and then, as heavy as it gets “God being present ashis creation.” The third perspective is the least dualistic, but Christianity hasn’t developed a fine enough vocabulary to understand the perspective as anything other than Pantheism, which it has already decided is bad. Short of that, God being present in his creation, and speaking through the Logos, is as near as the Church can get to a non-dual interpretation of Br. Lawrence’s teaching. Recent teachers like Dr. Jeremy Narby have concluded that God speaks intelligently through the metaphorical language of the Logos, and that this phenomenon is as cross-cultural as our willingness to grant it credibility will accommodate. The medicine for dualism is very much in the Church’s hand. It needs only to hear and answer Jesus’ question from John’s gospel “Do you want to be well?”

Suspension’s Non Duality relativizes personal identity: the life of the Trinity commits the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to a sort of cooperative inter-being. Jesus, in his great Crucifixion pregame show, said things like “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” and “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” At Under the Influence, our belief is “As with the Trinity, so with each believer.” As much as “The body of Christ” was a Pauline image to address the need for many functions in one body, it would also be rightly used to relativize one’s personal importance. A foot’s importance comes from its membership in the body. Individual consciousness derives its importance from Cosmic consciousness, not the other way around. Most importantly, the fact that God’s name is “I AM” should reorient the entire personal-identity game. If God’s name is “I AM” then who have I been busy being lately? Maybe I’ve been acting out a role that’s more like “false self” than “true self” or more “true self” than divinized “non-self.” These are all worthwhile questions to ask.

Suffice to say, suspension is an important prerequisite for and preservative of the non-dual riches contemplation hints at. Suspension is St. Paul’s "dressing room:" we take off the old self, and put on the new one. Without suspension, the final steps--the Dark Night of the Self, and Divinization--will become a house of mirrors, full of nothing but our own distorted image.

Defining Terms and Filling in Gaps.

For a minute, let's remember that wisdom is “Transmitted.” Not for nothing do Buddhist teachers speak of the “Lineage” their teaching is a part of. When a disciple cannot locate the a living tradition to reference, some wise figure from outside needs to awaken it. In this case, the case of rediscovering and reviving Wisdom, Solomon’s run in with the Queen of Sheba is paradigmatic. She visited and saw his wealth and wisdom for herself, she asked Solomon to produce his best wealth, then added some of her own.

Unfortunately, the storehouse of Christian Wisdom has gone so long unopened amid Enlightenment cries of “I THINK THEREFORE I AM” that disciples need other Wisdom traditions to remind them what they’re looking for. Christ’s words—that calling your brother a fool is hell itself—are drowned out amid Dualism’s “Hell below is worse than Earth, Heaven above is better than both.” Inter-religious dialogue, given the impediment Christianity is facing at the hands of wider society, is a needed wake up call.

In the wisdom traditions, pieces of a transformative journey tend to be the same across faiths. Buddhism had about 500 years to find its words before the birth of Christ—it stands to reason that it would be slightly quicker in identifying the turns on the map of changed consciousness. Since both major revivals of my Christian faith have happened at the hands of Buddhists (Thich Nhat Hanh at first, and then the Koan tradition) I will always feel that Shakyamuni is an other-christ, and revere him as such.

Just to keep the game straight, we should do a “comparative terminology” post, placing buddhism side by side with Christianity. Because I want to be able to describe the way of transformation fully, I’m finding this effort increasingly necessary. Often I’ll read about spiritual states in Buddhism and realize that Christianity’s corresponding state is either undeveloped or non-existent. Then I’ll re-examine the Christian tradition, realizing that descriptors for spiritual states have been there the whole time, we just never took the time to point to them.

It’s instructive that on the Christian side, at least two states of being had to be entirely fished out of the previous Tradition. This is a difficult state to be in, for Christianity. Imagine a buddhist and a christian are both in Toledo Ohio. If the Buddhist knows the word Toledo, if he’s spent time there, he’ll be able to be honest—and not terribly freaked by where he’s standing. If the Christian is busy thinking the Buddhist is wrong, that there’s no such thing as Toledo, he’ll appear judgmental—because why would the buddhist lie-- and deluded—because he himself is standing in Toledo and doesn’t know it.

So I’d just like to run down a list of Buddhist terms, and talk about their Christian equivalents.


1. Positive Samadhi: Samadhi is a state of mental equanimity that is undisturbed by desires. So long as one is sitting in meditation, this is fairly easy to rouse. Positive Samadhi is the state of equanimity enduring even though one has risen from meditation. (As a sidenote, positive samadhi is composed of Ki (Call) and Kyo (Response). The "Call Narrative" is a biblical device, a story composed of call, refusal, request for a sign, assurance of divine help and final obedience.  The story form is evident in the lives of such characters as The Exodus leader Moses and the Prophet Gideon.)  In Christianity, we're given a visual for the equivalent of Positive Samadhi in Jesus’ Via Dolorosa.  We merely use a different term, calling it "obedience."  The only problem with locating positive samadhi at the Cross is that obedience itself can look like attrition. In short, it can seem like the primary stressors in obedience are the external demands being made. In fact, in Christian obedience, the stress is interior: it comes from egotistical inability to accept the situation as it is. In buddhist terms, generally, the only stressors are internal ones: Ego, attachment, etc. These are the very stressors the passion narrative shows Christ as dealing with (If it is your will, let this cup pass from me= renouncing attachment. Not my will, but yours be done= Ego renunciation.) The truth is, suffering is pain we’ve not yet accepted.  In the christian story, the passion's external drama distracts Christians from the internal one.

2. Sati (mindfulness): Mindfulness, as far as I can tell, is the ability to do things in a space of presence between forcefulness and automatic pilot. In short, it’s a space of willingness, rather than willfulness. Instead of running the show, or going somewhere else in my head, I’m letting the situation guide me. The corresponding Christian category is called “recollection.” This is a state of not letting reality, not desire, guide action.  To be cheeky, recollection recalls the words of Master Yoda.  "Already have you, that which you need."  Recollection says that we need is God, and he isn't outside of us.

3. The 5 skandhas: The first three Skandhas are form(matter) feelings(whether we find something material pleasant or abhorrent) perceptions(the internalization of a thought-form related to an object, like the car I have in my head when you say “Mazda.”) The last two are mental formations(what “I” feel I “should” do with X) and Consciousness(the separation of a whole object into its aspects or component parts.) Suffice to say that a major objective of Buddhism is to stop Egotistically identifying with the 5 skandhas. The Christian Equivalent of this is the Dark Night of the Senses. This is when you find yourself not wanting the “stuff” you used to want. Television is boring, compulsive eating is overrated, compulsive sex takes too much work and isn’t the intimacy you’re looking for. It’s basically a state of “The whole world’s going crazy about X, and I don’t get the hype." The Dark Night of the Senses might be present if a student feels, among other things, anxiety, boredom or numbness in relation to a desire. It’s a sign of deepening “selfhood”—I take my Identity from “who I am” more than I do from desire and fulfillment.

4. Nirvikalpa Samadhi: This is a prayer state characterized by the withdrawal of the self from sense and awareness. To the outside observer, as I understand it, someone in Nirvikalpa Samadhi might fail to hear the bell at the end of meditation. The Hindu scriptures are full of people who followed their prajna energy through their Chakras, only to reach the Sanhasrara Chakra and go off-radar for a while. Nirvikalpa Samadhi’s Christian equivalent is Contemplation, a state of prayer marked by absence of words, thoughts, concepts or duality. 

5. The 5 Realms: Buddhists speak of 5 Realms. The God Realm and the Human Realm are the 2 “top” or “good” realms. The Animal realm, the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts, and the Hell Realm are the bottom three. When we’re reincarnated, we’re reincarnated into one of these realms. Just like the skandhas, our objective is to ultimately dis-identify with these realms to attain nirvana, a state exempt from rebirth. The nearest Christian equivalent of this is “interacting with things themselves, not our thoughts about them." We have lots of ideas about God, but none of those ideas are God himself. St. Augustine said “If you can understand it, it isn’t God.” St. Paul spends a whole long time at the beginning of his letter to the Romans talking about how people substituted their concepts of God for God himself, then exchanged the creature for the creator and fell into idolatry. To be emptied of our attachments to our ideas about divinity is to undergo the Dark Night of the Soul.  We have ideas about heaven and earth and ostriches and spooks, but none of them are the things themselves. It’s important to note that for the Christian, freedom from “our concepts about things” and communion with the thing itself leads to a non-dual relationship with it. To an observer, I am looking at the flower, but from the inside out there is no “I,” no “flower” and no “seeing.” To use a Buddhist term, the flower and I are simply “interbeing."

6. Absolute Samadhi: This is a stage of spiritual growth, a bona fide part of the truth that leads to Nirvana. In Absolute Samadhi, there are no higher or lower truths, no better or worse practices. Better or worse, higher or lower—these are all labels imposed by selves according to desires, and in Absolute Samadhi, selves and desires begin not to be active. This is where, shockingly, we discover that CHRISTIANITY HAS NO EQUIVALENT TERM. I’ve decided to call the Christian equivalent “Suspension.” The term comes from St. Guerric of Igny, who said that a person who’s crucified with Christ has neither the things of earth, nor the things of heaven. On account of the nails, a crucified man can no sooner draw near to his redeemer than he can avoid the undesirables among his fellowmen. We see signs of this in the book of Genesis, when Rebekah’s parents Laban and Bethuel respond to Isaac’s marriage proposal with the words “We cannot say one thing to you, bad or good. The thing comes from the Lord.” This is important. As one becomes closer to God-as-he-is, opposites disintegrate. Morality ceases be a matter of conforming to a disembodied system of rules. An action is moral based on whether or not it worsens our attachment to self and desire. At first blush, this looks like “relativism--“ morality with no objective reference point at all. But remember that self, desire and attachment are the reference points. Just as, in absolute Samadhi, the dharma runs the game so Buddha Nature can emerge, so in Suspension, the gospel helps our inner-other-christ emerge.

7. Enlightenment: This is a state of increased humility, or deepening non-self. This is another place where Christianity entirely lacks an equivalent term. Two weeks ago, an Under the Influencepost referenced the Dark Night of the Self, a term of its own devise. The Dark Night of the Self was intended to troubleshoot our relationship with our false selves, and the desires that create them. The premise is that sometimes, even a healthy ego isn’t the solution to a wounded one. Better desires aren’t necessarily the answer to unhealthy ones. Non-self and Non-desire need a Christian voice, if we’re going to take those things on. Humility, then, is the best concept we have for this, but we should be careful not to define that as “my desire not to be so prideful.” Still, there, self and desire run the game. There might be a way to “cut off thoughts of self and desire,” but at worst, in trying to eliminate the thoughts, we might get caught up in them. The better way to handle thoughts of self and desire is to treat them like blades of grass to a man in need of glasses. They arise, we don’t go nuts about them, and we let them be “backdrop” for what’s really going on. Nothing to see here, folks...

8. Nirvana: To a buddhist, this is a state when all the karmic clinginess has been cleansed from a person. Rebirths are not necessary, because no part of a person’s self-consciousness, no clinging to the skandas remains, it has all yielded to cosmic consciousness. The nearest that a Christian comes to this is Divinization. When a Christian is divinized, separate self-consciousness ceases to distinguish Christ from the faithful, the faithful from God. If my speculations about Christian reincarnation are are right, a Christian, thus fully transformed by Christ’s paradigm, would need no further incarnations.


When two equally competent masters meet, they don’t compete.  They battle to better one another: if there's an element of "showmanship" involved, it's so the other sees, when sitting at the feet of a particular tradition, what's best about it. When the queen of Sheba saw Solomon’s wealth and wisdom, the scripture says “there was no more spirit in her.” Both came bearing gifts—par for the course among equals— and both went away richer than they’d come.

As the search for Wisdom goes, we could do worse.

A Revised View of Time: Christian Reincarnation Revisited

To start a sentence with “I believe” and end it with “in Christian reincarnation” is perhaps, at this point, more than I’m ready to commit to.  I, myself, have no recollection of past lives. If we see time as linear, the sheer number of myriad Catholics, whose myriad incarnations would proceed from time’s beginning till now—these all make Christian reincarnation a dizzying possibility to consider. The objective of the post “Crucified and Risen: A theory of Christian Reincarnation” remains a good one—seeking, as it did, to explain the experiences of the Christians I’d known who’ve remembered living past lives. But doing so requires that we look critically at our view of time, at the Christian view of spiritual actualization, at who precisely is the one—in a proper view of Christian reincarnation—who is constantly being reborn, living, giving and receiving teachings, suffering, dying, rising, manifesting as a stranger, identifying with all creation, and ascending.  In light of all that, saying that "Christ's perpetually incarnates" is another way of expressing Christian Reincarnation.  Similarly, time, when it flows, does so in a circular pattern, and present moments have more to do with detaching from falseness than Christianity has previously admitted.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the Church has the resources to buy in to Christian reincarnation. The Church already condemned the “Preexistence of Souls” back when Origen wrote about it. There wasn’t a time when souls existed before they became human, said the Church. But the crux of this issue isn’t about existence—in this moment, no two people having a discussion doubt their own existence. “The Preexistence of Souls” is really about whether times other than now exist. In short, whether souls existed before bodies would matter less if we could figure out whether “before and after” exist. As it was, the Church busied itself excommunicating those who believed souls existed before bodies, thereby missing its opportunity to proclaim that neither the past nor the future exist, that “now” is the only moment there is.

The Church’s linear view of time is a problem—as the post “Koans and Care: the Dangers of Dualism” said. The Church sees time as a linear and dualistic medium in which God, who is in heaven, chooses a particular historical moment to take flesh in Christ, who is on earth. The Church condemned Arius for saying “there was a time when [Christ] was not.” This argument could have taught that“now” is the only existing moment, but it became, instead about whether Christ existed before “now.” In maintaining this dualistic view of time, Christ’s de facto absence from certain portions of time reasserts itself.

A more helpful way to frame it, and the model I’ve come to use personally, is this: rather than being linear, time is a circular double helix. On that double helix, Christ’s historical incarnation is one of the “rungs,” just as all of our incarnations are. But Christ is also the entire circular double helix. Furthermore, we speak of Kairos time and Chronos time, the present moment and the successive string of moments respectively, as moments in-and-out of which God bobs. That’s the “Deus ex machina” argument with little interruptions—that God wound up time and creation, and basically left them to whirl about except for the 33 years Jesus took flesh—when God issued some correctives. Hear the dualism in that idea: God “took flesh” when all flesh was God’s in the first place. God chose “the fullness of time” to come, and yet all time was his in the first place. God “came to redeem all creation—“ had God been previously neglecting it?

This is in fact, not the case. To kairos time and chronos time, it seems important to add a third category. To use a phrase that means “The Master’s Time,” I’d like to suggest we begin to speak of Kyrios time: the time when individuals become their true selves, which is at once “hidden with Christ” and is Christ. Christ was born, lived, suffered died and rose in the now. Christ appeared to his apostles as a stranger in the now, his students to recognize him in each other in the now, ascended in the now because the teaching was his body too. There is no part of time from which the body of Christ was absent, and eventually the Church’s task is to become that Body.

One of Christ’s biggest objectives in taking flesh was to show them that time itself had been Christ’s mystical body the whole time. Kairos time, the now in which Christ manifests himself, and Chronos time, the history Christ recapitulates, are both preparations for a now in which we see that Christ is our true selves. Christ has been reality the whole time. “In the beginning was the Word” simply means that the Logos is a set of laws each incarnation, living in the now, obeys. “The fullness of time” of which the bible speaks actually means “the fullness of this particular chronological understanding of history.” Were time as full as scripture claimed, there would be nothing left to actualize. Properly understood, the “fullness of time” is the point at which we all realize, (right now, the only time that exists) that we are Christ. Additionally, that “Christ was with the Logos in the beginning” is simply a statement that the laws Christ’s incarnation followed were paradigmatic of all incarnations. If there is, in the present moment, a progression, it’s in the individual believer’s consciousness: from denial to consciousness, through the working out of their “purgatorial predicament.” Each believer moves, by and by, from individual consciousness to cosmic consciousness.

Time as a circular double helix is not a new idea, just an old one reapplied. In a move that retrieves the snake from the blame for universal human sinfulness, Jeremy Narby claims, with Shamanic tribes, that the mother of the Logos is a snake. He claims that mystical experience grants shamans access to certain “inner senses” with which they see biological structures like cells from the inside out. DNA is the “snake” who is the foundation of all life. I’m simply claiming that the circular double helix is also time itself: it’s the present moment (kairos time), it’s the apparent “flow of moments” that comes from our being stuck in a purgatorial predicament (chronos time), and it’s every event by which Christ teaches us to come out of denial and become his body ourselves (kyrios time).

Kyrios Time is not a new concept, just an old one, more accurately labeled. St. Paul thought the physical world would end, that a messiah separate from the believing community would return in his lifetime. The messiah apparently failed to do that—which is itself a perfect expression of the self-emptying implied in the Logos—causing Paul to expand his theory of the end times, his eschatology. The trouble is, he expanded it in a dualistic, illusory direction. Instead of his former immanent eschatology—saying the end is now—Paul and the Church began to employ “delayed eschatology”—saying the end is later. The fact is, the end was more about telos—purpose or potential—than it was about the ceasing of chronological time. What Paul was speaking about was Kyrios time, with its invitation that all people cease to identify with their falseness and become Christ in this moment.

Seen in a non-linear fashion, and in light of the perpetual incarnation of Christ, time seems ripe to accommodate Christian reincarnation. It isn’t “particular souls” that are reborn. Instead, Christ is all time and all potential, realized in each life. Insofar as birth is a perpetual happening, Christ is the one who is reborn. He is, for all people, perpetually present, perpetually doing all of the incarnating, living and teaching dying and rising, all of the identifying himself with our own true nature. We experience ourselves as “selves” distinct from Christ because we’re still attached to bits of our false selves. Those bits of “false self” may even seem like the accumulated sensation of “past lives.” If we spend the now which is our lifetime disentangling from those attachments, the Christ we truly are might come to light. If we become further entangled, that Christ will be obscured.

Tradition already hints at this. The term “alter-christus,” a way of speaking of the priest as “another Christ” is, properly and rightly these days, broadened to all Christians. Therese of Liseux said “Christ has no body now but yours.” The post-resurrection appearances of Christ teach us nothing if not that we, with the constant help of grace and the outpouring of the spirit, are Christ as well.

It’s important to clarify: Christ is consciousness, not self-consciousness. One who self-consciously claims that he is the Christ, and everyone else isn’t—that person might be a maniac with a savior complex, or an idolater. To paraphrase Ram Dass, “when an ordinary man pursues wisdom, he becomes a sage, when a sage pursues wisdom he becomes an ordinary man.” The enlightened one, at the moment of kyrios time may “realize he’s Christ” or he may not. If he realizes that he is Christ, he also realizes that everyone else is Christ as well—and that each moment and all time is Christ etc., etc. In short, the man who is Christ is like everyone else.

If he does not "realize he’s Christ” a student may still experience Kyrios time. As I wrote about in “Orthomorphosis: An Effort to Say the Whole Word,” he may either realize the illusory nature of self, desire, mind and body. Or, as the “Drawing from the Old Wells” posts claimed, It may manifest as it does in St. Benedict’s “Ladder of Humility.” A student may realize the full extent of the tension between his sinfulness and God’s love. All of those ways are one in the same. They all produce Christ.

Let me end by revealing why this is all a personal question for me: I have often wondered why I was born with a disability. Shallow as it is, I’ve tried to make meaning out of “what I did to deserve it.”

In the gospels, Jesus dismisses the old belief that disabilities in children are due to the sins of parents. For a while I believed that there was a causal link between what my parents left “ungrieved” and the sadness I felt. I had grand notions of learning the Jewish prayer for the dying, saying Kaddish for former generations. While that might be applicable if we look at my life in terms of limbic resonance, limbic regulation and limbic revision, it ultimately doesn’t help me much. My mom and dad have their own, heavy purgatorial predicaments to negotiate. There’s no use in my owning what isn’t mine.

In the same Gospel story, Jesus says these things happen so that God’s glory would be revealed: with apologies to my close and personal savior, I find that inadequate too. Particularly because I am disabled, don’t want to ride the short bus of my own uniqueness into God’s consoling arms, I want to be normal and anonymous. God wouldn’t wish something bad on me so that he could grandstand or showcase his awesomeness. He wouldn’t call me special as a way of highlighting my isolation. These days, the most adequate explanation I can find for “why I am the way I am” is that every sensation in my body, painful or otherwise, with which I’m preoccupied is an attachment from a past life, stored in my body. Every thought to which I’m too attached was gained in a past life.

In this way, the reasons for who I am are nobody’s fault but mine, but the kindness of my own purgatorial predicament comes to the fore. It’s a mercy that I would see my attachments to forms at all—as “Orthomorphosis: an Effort to Say the Whole Word” said, it’s a mercy that I would at all perceive the invitation to let go of self, desire, mind and sensation and the body. I don’t know “who I was” in any of my theoretical past lives, and it absolutely, completely doesn’t matter. I was what I am, and what everyone was and is: Christ himself, just with enough clingy bits that I, and a number of other “Christs” missed the truth of it entirely.

In this incarnation, I am disgustingly aware of spiritual realities. If this has yielded anything true, that is a party bonus: but it’s more accurate, meanwhile, to say, with St. Augustine, “si comprehendis, non est Deus.” If you comprehend it, it isn’t God. Near as I can guess, the defining characteristic of my present purgatorial predicament, of the calling that seems my slice of this moment’s vocational pie, is to look honestly at it all. If my intuition is right, (inshallah, may it be so) whatever honesty I can muster in this life is a letting go of accumulated denial from past lives. If I can be more conscious, more at home in the present moment, the semi permanent egoic distance that the Dark Night of the Self grants, which seems to be my lot to yap about—it might be more fully accomplished. The Divinization that is the culmination of shedding false selves—when, (if I’m right about Christian reincarnation) the cycle of rebirths ceases and separate self consciousness no longer separates me from the Triune Godhead—may God keep me awake for it.

As to how true any of this is, I don’t know: God knows. I’m looking forward to it, and by forward, forever within and within and within.

On Trendy Brunch Spots and the Dark Night of the Self

I met the Hafe, and his wife of two weeks, at one of Greenville, South Carolina's trendy farm-to-fork brunch joints. By accident of providence, my “college best friend”--the Hafe himself--and one of my two “monastery best friends” both lived in Greenville, and they both married their respective wives last May. It was the morning before Hanuman Dass--one of the "monastery best friends"-- was to tie his own knot. I’d been in Greenville two weeks ago, serving as a groomsman in Hafe’s wedding to Mrs. The Hafe. I hadn’t known her previous to the wedding weekend—and wedding weekends will forever be crappy opportunities to actually connect with brides and grooms. This was to be my first chance to get acquainted with her, and a long overdue chance to connect with my former college roommate.

I called him “the Hafe.” My Jackie was stunned to learn, when I once called him Bryan—his first name— that I’d actually been talking about him for years. The Hafe shared a chill degree of Church-nerdery with me: we spent college ending up at the same daily Masses, praying morning and evening prayer daily, and pilgrimaging to monasteries for silent retreats over our breaks.

Me and The Hafe (El Haferino, if you're not
into that whole "brevity" thing.)

A couple weeks earlier, when they made the mistake of yielding the rehearsal-dinner MC mic to me, I looked directly at Mrs. the Hafe and told the following story. “Without saying too much, my family,” I said, “puts a little bit of the ‘fun’ in dysfunctional. Hafe graduated a year after I did, and I remember a day, when I was home on break during his Senior year. All things ‘family’ were conflicted enough one night that I felt I couldn’t go home. I asked the Hafe if I could crash on his dorm room floor. He said I could. I fell asleep that night having borrowed one of his pillows. When I awoke in the morning, Hafe had covered me with the blanket from his own bed. He’d covered himself with the trench coat he kept hanging on the back of his door.”

I looked at Hafe's wife-to-be, debated how honest to be with strangers, and the degree to which I wanted to publicly embarrass the Hafe. What I said was “You’re marrying a good man. Take care of him, because he’ll bend over backwards to take care of you.” Draft one, in my head, had gone "You’re marrying Jesus. Don’t forget that.” But I thought better of stating the truth too strongly. With strangers, that kinda thing can get creepy fast.

Back to bougie brunch venues, two weeks later. I sat down with the Hafe, and Mrs. the Hafe. “I’m really glad we’re getting this chance to connect. I also realize we don’t know each other’s back stories. How much has Hafe told you? Like, did he mention I spent 7 years living in a monastery?” For better or worse, this is the detail to which all others are footnotes.

Mrs. the Hafe said “Yeah, Bryan told me a bit about that. But I have lots of questions.”

All of this was fairly predictable. I’ve been telling “the monastery story” to first-time acquaintances for years. I was glad to be telling it to Hafe’s wife—at least the “retelling” was to someone I could, for Hafe’s sake, trust implicitly. “A lot of people are curious about that." I said "Can you identify the things you’re most curious about?”

She led with another classic curiosity: “I guess I’m wondering what would have made you enter the monastery, and what would have made you leave.”

“Thanks for asking me to tell the story. It always helps to retell it.” In the first place, my intended major was English, right up to the middle of my senior year. That year, when my parents divorced, I switched it to theology. A lot of different things went in to that. I’d just made a few humdinger adult mistakes, and was, on some level, trying to avoid facing them. I was losing parental stability, and the Church stood in to provide structure. Of course, that all happened when I was 18, and it took me till I was 27 to see it. On top of that, after the writings of a buddhist monk taught me a way to meditate, my prayer life absolutely ignited. A person’s initial forays into intentionally bettering their prayer life are often eventful: they’re full of tiny run-ins with altered states of consciousness. Such was the case with mine, and I began, subtly, to change my entire life and identity because of all this. None of this is any different than anyone else in the initial stages of the spiritual life, but I thought I was unique indeed. I lived all of college, and met your husband, during this time.”

By the end of college, I was becoming more and more depressed. There weren’t many of the typical joys of life that were untouched by that depression. Hafe, do you remember the birthday party you threw me, senior year of college?”

He nodded that he did. “That was a great party” he said.

“You’re right,” I agreed, “it was a great party. I was surrounded by people who care about me. But I couldn’t connect with them. That kind of thing—not being able to connect with the good things right in front of me-- would become an issue more and more. Later I’d realize that, broadly, my depression was showing me the difference between compulsive thought (which eventually expresses itself in compulsive action) and deliberate thought. As college ended, I used the only language for that material that I had: the "wrestling with demons" language of the desert fathers. I read Malachi Martin's book Hostage to the Devil and it terrified me. See, it portrayed demonic possession as happening because of the routine turnings of the mind. So now there were two reasons to continue to pray: an attraction to the consolations I was experiencing in prayer and an aversion to potential demonic possession.”

“Let me just stop you there—“ Mrs. the Hafe interjected, cradling her visibly furrowed brow in her non-coffee mug hand. “I just want to say that I find the demonic terrifying. To the point that it’s hard to talk about.”

“I do too,” I said. “But that was part of the good contribution monasticism made in my life. Even if we all cooperate with evil a little bit, and we all do, God’s help is ultimately the thing that people need to stay safe from total, overt demonic possession. So it was a comfort to begin prayer 7 times a day with the same words. Hafe knows them, we prayed them all through college.”

I pointed at Hafe, who chimed in “O God, come to my assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me.”

“Right.” I said, "So I guess, in order to handle my fear of evil, I try to stay in that space of resorting to God’s help. The hows and whys of doing that have been difficulty to learn, but it’s how I’ve handled the risk."

Hafe got up to warm up his coffee. "Let me preface this next bit by saying: I wish Catholics weren’t so Dualistic. I wish they didn’t give away so many Religious Hero Cookies to people in the midst of spiritual transition. We usually use John of the Cross’ category of “Dark Night of the Senses” to describe a stage where great saints start to care less about the world. I don’t know if I’ve been through it, and I don't care.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it. In any case, after that first period, when people described the Dark Night of the Senses, I could empathize. When I began to pursue religion, I formed my whole identity around it. I referred to it as my “vocation” and I entered the monastery because of it.

"I found in the monastery, that I could lengthen the effects of consolations by interior pushing and self will, I found I could lengthen grace by way of adrenaline. This move was ultimately more of a substitution than anything else. Also, though, part of the 'substituting adrenaline for Grace' maneuver of putting myself above other people. It’s the 'my life is graced and I'm surrounded by assholes' move. For a long time, this made my life with the brothers difficult. What I eventually found is that I had made a god out of my own thoughts about God, and I had made a a drug out of the adrenaline of self-will, calling it all Grace. This, too, is a pretty typical move: St. Paul experienced something similar when his relationship to the Law soured. I realized then that I had left my upbringing and psychological wounds unaddressed, that I’d begun using region addictively because of it, and that the whole thing was affecting my entire adult worldview. This led me to join Adult Children of Alcoholics. I got honest about the ways I was treating prayer like a drug and not facing the trauma I’d been left with. The “Power greater than yourself” language of the 12 steps was important. It confirmed for me that, if I’m thinking about God, I might well be going in the right direction, but I haven’t, by any means, arrived. In part, I left the monastery, because all I could see was how selfish and idolatrous my previous use of it had been. I couldn’t find a way to work with it healthily."

"Let me run and get a glass of water real quick." Hafe's wife said "Does anybody need anything?"

“No worries, and I'm fine” I replied, “This will give the overly-talkative former college-roommate a chance to shove some food in his face.”

Mrs. the Hafe said “You’re not overly-talkative. I actually think you should write some of this down. I think it would help people.” I made a mental note to talk up my blog, after I was done talking up myself.  I was starting to annoy myself.  I was monopolizing the conversation and I knew it, but I hadn’t “told my story” this fully in years. It was good, and anyway here we all were, having this conversation. Later, I’d shut my fat cake hole. For now, I continued.

"Again, leave Spiritual Hero Cookies aside: I don’t know if I’ve been through the Dark Night of the Soul. But I can empathize with it. For years, after leaving the monastery, I couldn’t think of God without getting a headache and feeling nauseous. I grieve in a real PTSD kinda way, storing tension in my body. Add into that mix the gluten allergy I was diagnosed with after leaving the monastery, and what you’ve got is a person who feels a bit weird about the things of the world—I only want them when I’m insecure and self-comforting—you’ve got a bloke who feels weird about anything perceptibly Spiritual, and you’ve got a bloke who started out highly devoted to the Eucharist, only to become allergic to it. It doesn’t leave me a lot to hang on to.”

At that point, Mrs. the Hafe reached across the table with her right hand, knocking over her coffee. “Oh God,” She said, “I’m sorry.” We found every paper napkin within 20 feet in a matter of seconds.  No one got terrifically wet.

"No harm, no foul," I said, "So alright, if we can call what I went through the dark night of the senses, I detached from possessions. But then started treating things of God like they were possessions. I ran the game when I was attached to the world, and ran the game when I was attached to God. And eventually, both things lost their lustre. All of this is normal--I came to see it's just how desire works.  Sometimes that happens because I've obtained the thing I want. But I’m coming to see that it can also happen when I’m being asked to question myself—the one who’s doing the wanting, in other words."

"If I’ve been through the dark nights, they left some work undone. Until recently—and still today, if I’m not careful—when thoughts of self came up I shoved them down, tried to deny I was having them…because it’s good to be selfless, yada yada yada. What that really is, though, is using the self to repress thoughts about self. Whoever 'I' am, I’m still attached enough to thoughts of self to react negatively to them. Nowadays it’s hard to think about devotion to God, because it seems to do two things. First, it relies on my actions, not God’s, and second, it puts God at a distance from me."

"What I’ve come to see about Catholicism is that, though we have the dark nights of the senses and the soul, we need a third category: the dark night of the self. Ultimately, this would account for the way the spiritual life relativizes the self and desire. The fact is, sometimes labelling things as “better or worse, higher or lower, good or evil” gets old. Sometimes the distance implied in so many parts of religion gets wearisome—when we see heaven as above us, hell as below, when we call out to or think about a God who is always distant from us—well, sometimes that happens because we think dualistically. It has nothing to do with God, and everything to do with the egotistical dividedness of the the one doing the thinking."

"The Desert Fathers taught that end-stage Pride, a mixture of all the preceding evil thoughts, created a false self. All of the desires we gratify shore up that false self. Helpfully, the Church later adopted Freud’s term 'Ego.' All of our numerous thoughts about self come from that. St. Paul went in the direction of questioning self, saying 'my true self is hidden with Christ in God.' He said it would be revealed when Christ is revealed, and we saw him as he was. Contemplatives have, for centuries, been saying that the dualistic subject-object relationship between supplicants and God goes away in contemplative prayer. If there are separate selves, we cease to be aware of them. The Christian East has said that our common destiny is to be 'Divinized.' I don’t know all the details—because I’ve only just begun intuiting this, let alone experiencing it— but it stands to reason that, for the divinized, imperceptibility of separate selfhood is fairly permanent."

“Wait,” Mrs. Haffey interjected. “Doesn’t that make us into Gods, and isn’t that the sin of Adam?”

“This is why it’s key to allow concepts like ‘God’ and ‘self’ to diminish in importance” I said. “In this life, at his moment of fullest divine union, Jesus was nailed to a Cross and screaming ‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’ The end-stage of Benedict’s Ladder of Humility says that a person who is united to God doesn’t know it. He’s just a guy who knows his shortcomings, for whom life in the world isn’t a come-on. And furthermore, a person united to God knows that divinization is everybody’s reality—that everybody is God, and we’re all supposed to know it eventually. It’s not ‘I’m the only one who’s God.’ It would be a sin if it were a source of specialness or manipulation."

“The Dark Night of the Self would mean a couple of important things. It would mean that our thoughts about things aren’t the things themselves. Self-consciousness gets in the way of consciousness, in other words. The God who can be named is not the Eternal God. The World that can be analyzed is not the reality of the world. If we know that we know something, we don’t really know it."

"The Dark Night of the Self would begin to reveal God everywhere. Br. Lawrence of the Resurrection, whose 'practice of the present moment' taught that God used all things to connect with us, and Jeremy Narby, who more recently taught that God was communicating, intelligently and metaphorically, through the Logos that pervaded the world—both of these would be important keystones of the Dark Night of the Self. If the 'self' has ceased to treat God as 'other,' then it isn’t just some things that speak of God. It’s everything. We mightn’t be able to tap into that—bid trees to bloom in winter, as St. Francis of Assisi did—but it all serves as proof in the pudding."

"The Dark Night of the Self would render God a bit more all-pervasive, less specifically subjective. The Trinity, 'The Godhead,' is a more useful object for our meditation than any one person of the Trinity—because we’ll lose track of the three for the sake of the one as we’re more fully divinized anyway. The full force of the Name of God hits a person here. When I’m not thinking of myself, but am instead being myself, then I touch that part of who I AM that has always been part of God."


"Along with loss of identity, all the force drains out of our tryingto do good and avoid evil. The dark night of the self emphasizes the 'purgatorial predicament:' that is, the doing of a certain amount of our purgatory on earth, in this life. Though we’re subject to God, not to fate or destiny or determinism, it seems to be God's modus operandi to make people look fully at their own faults. Even though religion says sinning is bad, there’s a long history of spiritual practitioners getting handed over to the Pauline 'thorns in the flesh' for humility’s sake. The Apostles’ desertion of Christ wasn’t their finest moment, but it happened, and God used it to teach them. Those alternations aren’t good or bad, and they aren’t brought on by our efforts. We’re subject to them, just as we are to God’s love. In the end, it seems to be the gentlest way God has found to get us humans, who are stuck in denial and fearful of truth, to safely face ourselves.”

I paused. By now, my coffee was cold, the breakfast crowd was starting to securely yield to the early lunch folks, and I was realizing that what I was saying was a lot for me to handle, much less someone else. "I should probably be getting back to my other two soon-to-be newly weds”

“This is all good stuff” Mrs. the Hafe said, draining her latest cup of lukewarm coffee.

“What gets my goat is that it’s nothing new.” I said "The Church has always taught these things. But the Dark Night of the Self boils them down to Self and Desire, its two central issues. This kind of Spiritual Stage would leave us 'in the world, but not of the world.' We will always interact with the things of the world. It’s our Egos, and our Attachments to the world, that the dark night of the self would troubleshoot. The reality of God will always be the entire solution, but we need a way to identify thoughts of God and religion—at least for those of us still caught in our Egos—as part of the problem. My ability to let thoughts of self and possessions go, my ability to refrain from manipulating emotions or people based on my ideas of good and evil, perhaps detaching from these would happen faster if I knew there was no way I could affect them by force. But enough—enough of my rambling. Kerstin, don’t ever give a church nerd license to theologize. And I really hope that next time, I’ll give myself over to more listening.”

Bryan, coffee finished and poised to leave, said “We’ve got to find a way for you to be down here more permanently.”

I hugged him, and told him I’d work on it. Then I turned toward his wife “I sometimes forget how important telling my story is in the process of living it. It’s a providence to find someone so willing to listen. Next time I want to hear yours.” She promised it would happen, and we parted. To close, it only remains to promise one thing: Mrs. the Hafe, you have my word. Yourlife story won’t become my next blogpost.

On names, renaming and the unnameable.

On Saturdays, working on koans over coffee is a near-sacred act. On the surface, it’s a lot of contradiction: Joshu’s dog on the one hand, buddha nature on the other. They’re in tension until they aren’t, and the reality of the phrase “NOT TWO” sits, barking in your lap.

Then, one particular Saturday, all that’s Holy said “HIS NAME IS HANUMAN DASS.”  Without fanfare, bells and whistles, or sound—the God of gods had renamed my friend Leo, bestowing the name from "beyond the beyond."

The Brothers left to right: Me, Hanuman Dass, Sepehr

I’ve talked about him before. Leo was one of the friends from my monastery days. Sepehr was the other. Collectively, I call them “the brothers” and they’ll forever be the other two-thirds of myself. Now, apparently, the Dharma was saying “HIS NAME IS HANUMAN DASS” and one of them would be, in my head, forever different.

I had no reason to doubt it. The process of explaining why will involve back tracking a bit.

I owe my love for koans to Sepehr. I’d come to the monastery because of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Living Buddha, Living Christ,” but Sepehr’s was the first life in which I’d seen the Dharma actually working. With his own practice, and without intending to, Sepehr taught me a thing or three. Much of what it affirmed in me was rather shallow. The Indian holy man Shirdi Sai Baba, in regard to his miracles, said “I give people what they want so that they’ll want what I give.” As great acts appeal to egos, so Sepehr's affirmations did a lot of good work on my Ego in our first years as friends. Eventually I’d learn that Ego had to go out the window with everything else (baby, bathwater, and the tub itself, for Christ’s sake) but Sepehr planted important seeds. Especially later, when I became allergic to the Eucharist, I would understand what the Jesus of John's gospel meant when he said “I have food to eat that you do not know.” The Eucharist nourished my knowing. Koans fed my unknowing. And koans would become my abiding sustenance.

By way of example: One day I asked Sepehr how he was doing. He said “I feel so dead. I was up way too late last night. How are you?” I replied, “I’m dead too. The trouble is, I keep thinking I’m alive, and I keep trying to get back there. I wish I’d just cut that out.”

Sepehr smiled, and his eyes widened, the way he does when he’s involuntarily nerding out about something. “That’s Buddhist as hell, man. Shakyamuni would love you so much right now.” I hadn’t planned to “sound buddhist.” But something in me stirred at his praise.

It happened again, once while we we were doing dishes. We were supposed to be doing them silently. Thoughtfulness had claimed Sepehr’s facial expression, though. I knew he was on the cusp of speaking. When he did, all he said was “Every time you open your mouth, you’re wrong.” I paused for a moment, then silently opened my cake-hole as wide as it would go.

Again, with the wide eyed fascination. "That,” Sepehr exclaimed, “was a perfect buddhist response.”

In retrospect, my imperfections are glaring. My insecurity latched on to being told buddha would love me. My self importance roused from sleep at the word “perfect.” But I also learned a few other important lessons, which I later presented to my students as part of “The steps to solving Koans.” Koans involve admitting your fear of being wrong. Koans involve making a non-verbal response. In the end, I’d learn that Koans involve a death to self, but remember how self absorbed I was back then, how self absorbed I still am if I don’t cultivate letting go, even of the one who does the letting go. That piece would take years to become actionable wisdom.

In the coming years, I’d come to some other conclusions. Koans, I thought, do certain kinds of work. I added a host of them to my list, and, of course, that list later became “Kairos, Koans and Conversion One.” It’s a stand-alone post, but I’ll mention one of its points. In short: koans collapse “process." They render all goals realized, they actualize potential.

Fast forward with me a bit. My other best friend (whose baptismal name was Leo) had, in the meantime, become a practitioner of bhakti yoga. Bhakti yoga, as I understand it, is devotional yoga. It makes two assumptions: first, that the gods one worships are mere manifestations of the godhead. Ram, the highest God, is merely a manifestation of the Brahman, and he knows it. There are sections of the Ramayana, (the Ramayana is a hindu holy book) in which Ram takes a guru. As God, he doesn’t need to, but as a manifestation, he does what manifestations do. Bhakti yoga’s second assumption is that dualism is, up to a certain point, helpful. According to Bhakti yoga, having something over there toward which to strive—well, it helps folks progress.

In bhakti yoga, my friend had become devoted to Hanuman. Along with Ganesha, Hanuman is one of the two Hindu Gods with the body of a human and the head of an animal. Ganesha has an elephant's head.  Hanuman, for his part, is a monkey. Ram Dass, the second teacher through whom I’ve learned what I know about hinduism, is fond of quoting Hanuman’s words to Ram: roughly paraphrased, Hanuman said “When I don’t know who I am, I serve you, when I know who I am, I am you.”

Since well before his first marriage fell apart, my friend had been talking about service. He is a consummate family man: in that milieu, service is, for him, as natural as breathing. In “Messiahs and Monkey Gods: A Mapping of Me” I said that Hanuman gave me a positive framework for “distance from God.” It’s a framework that my friend and I began talking about a lot. In short, I'd been taught that service and separateness was a consequence of sin.  In Hinduism, service is divine play, or “Lila.” I found, (and I feel like my friend and I would agree on this,) that shouldering my cross, serving, or separateness from God is a lighter thing—apologies for the impending pun-- when it’s a matter of “monkeying around.”

For me, self-will is too pervasive in devotion to be a totally comfortable. But I found Lila an important corrective.  It's drawn my friend in, though, hook, line and sinker.  He’s a big, mushy bhakti: if spiritual paths were television, he’d be the Hallmark channel. I kid, but whatever he's got is better than my perpetual 3 a.m. static.

The strength of his devotion was in the background on the day he called me with news. He had finally convinced his first wife to sign divorce papers (by now they'd been separated for years) and he’d had proposed to his present girlfriend. Her name was Mallary, and “Girlfriend” was too light a term for the role she played in his life. To give an example: I’d known Mallary, at least on the level of acquaintance, since Leo and I were monks together. She’d already known him for years, and would sometimes come to visit him. She had relatives in Illinois. In my post-monastery days, then, between her travels to the burbs of Chicago and my travels to South Carolina, I became a “fly on the wall” as the two of them grew closer. My friend Leo had been saying, for years that he “loved Mallary” and spent many years qualifying the words to within an inch of meaninglessness. Mallary and I would meet for breakfast and inevitably talk about Leo. With her too, it was “love love love: backpedal, nuance and qualify.” Fine. I wondered, though, how long it would be before the two allowed themselves the reality of their affections.

At the right time, in the right way, they’d admitted their affections. On the surface, my inner fly-on-the-wall was screaming “IT’S ABOUT TIME.” On a deeper level, Leo and Mal were being formed, just as Jackie and I were, on a timeline not their own. Their timing was absolutely perfect. When Leo told me, I made plans to travel down for their wedding.

I’d been reading everything I could by Ram Dass ever since I’d acquired a desire to see God from the standpoint of non-dual consciousness. For his part, Ram Dass was given his name by his guru, Maharaji. Of the name, Ram Dass said “Often Maharaji would call me 'Ram Dass' and I’d think he was speaking to someone over my shoulder. He was speaking, though, to who I would be when I stopped being who I think I am.”

Bear with me, here: when a practitioner is first given a Koan, freaking out at its contradictory, illogical nature is the typical, first response. Like laughter at a horror film, humor is often involved in handling the discomfort. Recall the post “One Hand Clapping: A Round of Applause from a Teacher who became a Student”: in that process, when I gave my students the "one hand clapping” koan to play with, many of them held up their right hands, snapping their fingers shut on the heel of their hands. “It makes a sound!” they said. “Cool,” I replied, “but you’re not dealing with the discomfort of contradiction.”

Given Leo’s devotion to Hanuman, given our common love of Ram Dass, I’d been kidding around with name changes for months. I grinned and tastelessly faked Indian accents as, in my head, I alternated between calling him “Leo Dass Baba” or “Hanuman Leo Dass.” At some point, it occurred to me that this was just the verbal version of a glib response to “one hand clapping”: too goofy, too rational, not slow enough. Putting the effort aside, like all bad jokes, I began, again, to deny the egotism in my own spiritual work, so I could really get down, for Christsakes, to the business of taking myself too seriously.

I’ve been working on a project I call “Second Didache” for almost as long as Under the Influence has existed. “Second Didache” is a collection of scripturally based Christian stories that do the same kind of work the Koans of the Zen collection Momunkan. I eventually plan to do the same with the other two collections of Zen, the Hekiganroku and the Pi Yen Lu. The intuitive mode of teaching therein, that relies on realization rather than reason, is an ancient one known to Judaism's prophetic schools. It has been lost since the rise of dualistic rationalism, and needs to be restored—or gifted in the first place—to Christianity.

I was sitting at this work when it happened. In the moment, mental noise was quieted, mental debate was stilled, and there was only the Truth. After the fact, I pieced the following explanation together: Imagine a cross. At the top of the dichotomy, imagine that you have Hanuman and Ram, at the bottom, my friend Leo. On the right side of the cross, imagine that you have service and distance from God. On the left side of the cross, imagine you have union and rest in God. I had been, for months, busying myself with the respective ends of the two dichotomies.

This was the moment of resolution: At the expense of the Koan I was “supposed to be working on” I saw my friend’s face in my head. And then the words “HANUMAN DASS.” Hanuman Dass. The words went with the image, as naturally as the word “chopsticks” goes with that infuriating thing westerners suck at eating rice with. The word isn’t a name given to the object. It’s less spacious than that. The word is the object.

If the Koan of my friend's name was a Cross, I was now centered on it, hanging quite still.  The renaming was "one hand clapping" again. The dichotomies were tense, but I had stopped snapping my fingers against my hand to audibly resolve them. I put the question to rest, next to my hands in my lap. By and by, I had heard the absence of sound. I knew I could be wrong. I was ok with that. I texted my divinely-renamed friend. I told him that, in a totally serious way, I had a feeling he needed to be renamed. I called him Hanuman Dass for the first time. As "one hand clapping" goes, this is the moment when the practitioner risks response, holding up an open palm for his questioners to see, regardless of rightness or wrongness, of words or silence, of form or of formlessness.

My friend wrote back. “In a totally serious way, I accept being renamed. I told Mallary about it. She likes it too.” With that, the koan that my best friend embodied found a solution. I did all the silly things, like change his name in my phone.

About a week after that Saturday koan-sitting, I rose at midnight. I’d taken some cough syrup at 4, so as to get some decent sleep before the 13 hour drive that witnessing Hanuman Dass’ marriage would require. My Jackie, the consummate night owl, was still awake. Before I left, we hugged long and hard. I planted a smooch on the tip of her nose, a disgustingly cute gesture I’d been doing since our earliest days of dating.

“Please tell Leo and Mallary I’m sorry I couldn’t take the time off work.” I said I would, but there was a flicker of discontinuity. First, Who’s Leo? Then, Oh, yeah. I told my sweet girl I loved her, then walked through the dark to the car.

Photo Credit: Tiffany Kuechenmeister, fraukuech@blogspot.com
twitter: @fraukuech, instagram: hellotiffanyanne 

In a gesture of total down-to-earthness, Hanuman Dass and Mallary were married in the living room of his parents' house. Mallary suggested we facetime my Jackie, so that she could watch the ceremony. Hanuman Dass, normally a colossal goofball, whispered his vows with the low tones of completely selfless honesty. I don’t even particularly recall what he said—and like the name of God, the words aren’t mine to repeat—I only know that, in all my life, I’d never seen him this vulnerable.

The gathering taught me something.  I suppose I’m learning that my relationship with Hanuman Dass is, itself, a koan. In South Carolina, I am part of his family. In the small context of the wedding itself, he invited me into family pictures, and introduced me as his brother, even though we knew we’d get questions from Mallary’s family. The next day, during what formally counted as the wedding reception, we temporarily reassumed our separate roles: he became Leo again, and I was just his good friend. After all, the names are reminders, not mandates, and our identities are, in large part, illusory anyway. We didn’t want to explain dozens of times why the term 'brothers' was true of us, despite his obvious Filipino heritage, and my Irishness. When I first met Hanuman Dass, my name had been Dismas.  I was comfortable becoming Josh, the family friend, again, and he reassumed Leo, because we didn’t want to explain that, in truth, his name was Hanuman Dass.  Polite conversation has no words with which to explain that I, for my part, was too cuddly with my non-entity to know who I am anyway.

In the early morning, before I left, we embraced. “Hanuman Dass, tell Mal I love her when she wakes.” He promised he would. “My Jackie and I will be back down this summer. I love you.” Then I stepped out into the dewy pre-dawn dark.

Initially I knew that, from koan to koan, God has nothing but patience.  I'm learning that, from embrace to embrace, there's nothing but love.  Slowly, I'm learning to let myself arise and rest, to let myself come and go on God’s schedule.  Nowadays, from darkness to darkness, there’s nothing but warmth.

Orthomorphosis: An Effort to Say the Whole Word

I woke up early, ultimately stumbling to the coffee maker as opposed to trying to go back to sleep. I’ve too much on my mind. Lately I’ve been getting a sense of what the whole cosmic game is. It makes me more certain of the work that Under the Influence has to do. The Catholic Wisdom tradition is good, and all of it valid and true. In the bejeweled collection of world religions, its Jesus-centered, incarnation-centered philosophy shines, bright and pivotal: among other things, it’s an important part of a tryptic, providing the most coherent social ethic of any world religion. It represents a middle ground between the theistic system of avatars and the atheistic system of buddhist enlightenment.

I suppose a well attuned reader can already hear the “but” coming. Here it is: But Christianity, as a wisdom tradition, is underdeveloped. Because of the council of Jerusalem’s divorce of church and synagogue, it is radically disconnected from its jewish roots. Because of its largely modern brand of monotheism, which combines the worst cultural defensiveness of the jewish exile with the rational and elitist view of the scientific revolution, it stands particularly unable to get over itself, and thereby learn from the traditions it came from, as well as those around it.

If there’s a purgatorial predicament writ large, onto the Church by its members, I believe that’s it. We would do well, though, to name this, to embrace both the limitation and the grace of our ecclesial moment. The Church’s unwilling deficiencies risk becoming willfully inflicted spear wounds in Jesus’ crucified side if we’re not intentional about learning from our brother-religions. At the very least, the entire job involves troubleshooting both the mind-body connection and our cosmology. Of the two posts I’m planning to begin this work, I’d like to address the mind-body piece today, outlining what a full tradition of orthomorphosis would look like.

A full tradition of orthomorphosis would involve 4 “negotiations.” That is, our relationships to four things would shift. In turn, we need to talk about self, desire, body and mind. After that it’ll be important to assess the transformative tools the Catholic Church already has, and those bits of wisdom that, if she’s to be true to her mission, she must assimilate from other religions.

Self: This negotiation is foundational. Without the giving up of self, we perpetually open one hand to renounce the world, while (with the other) we grasp at our system of commodified spiritual experiences. In other words, renouncing the self is the key to ultimate renunciation of desire.

If self exists, I’m certain of two things: we’ll be conscious of it until right before we’re divinized. Also, whether one knows the final door between us and God by Christianity’s “the eye of the needle” or Zen’s “Gateless Gate” we’ll lose at least the separate self-consciousness when we walk through it. Beyond that, we all have a false self, and Christianity was spot on in mapping it out. As I’ve said before, we unconsciously use the eight evil thoughts form an entire identity out of the misuse of things, emotions, others and ourselves. As for the true self, I have some abiding questions: for one thing, can we know anything about it without selfishly enthroning the “knower” and undoing some of the purgative work we’re trying to do? Most strains of buddhism, and some strains of hinduism, would ultimately answer with a big, karmic nope. I’m inclined to agree. St. Paul was careful to put questions of divinized self at a distance: to claim that his true self was concealed twice over. It was hidden, he said, with Christ, in God. To me, the final rule on self is: let go of what you know of it, and whoever you are will just be, and thereby be alright. It’s important to mention two things: first, having noticed that we’re selfish, the thing to do is not “try to give it up.” In the end, until a person is well acquainted with their purgatorial predicament, with the slice of the gospel their lives are designed to convey and with a way to give unforced attention—until they’ve gotten to know and cleaned up their Karmic game, say our friends in the East—only at that point will efforts be sufficiently detached as to bear fruit. Second, thoughts about self will happen even as we renounce them. As we become more detached, they’ll become less frequent, but they’ll still happen.

Desire: Attachment is a problem. On its account, Everything we desire is a possession, even if we don’t have it, and desire, in the end, possesses us. The “dark night of the senses,” the “dark night of the spirit” and the negative role “unknowing” plays in the Christian tradition are all eloquent and accurate descriptions of negotiating desires. It’s important to note that, whether or not they’re conscious of them, most people experience these adjustments. Sr. Ruth Fox, OSB was conscious enough to request that the primary mark of these negotiations be present in her life. “May God bless you” she later prayed, “with the gift of discontent.” People being purged of their attachment to the senses will find that things of the senses are either unsatisfying or an outright source of active affliction. Ram Dass, (apologies, babaji!) at the height of his hippie days, might say something like “When you’re finally getting your game straight, and the game is questioning the self and attachments underneath desire, you might go ahead and have a pizza, but it’ll cost you. It’s not free.” The rational mind tends to look at that element and apply modern psychobabble: if you’re sad because nothing does it for you anymore, it’s depression. If you’re numb because you’re forced to interact with things you don’t want, it’s that dead feeling they call “dysthymia.” In the life of the Spirit, that’s all part of the purgatorial predicament. It’s no big deal, if you can deal well with it. You’ll suffer a little only if you decide to grasp at what your being asked to let go of.

Of course, having “renounced sense objects,” the ego will attempt to re-entrench, treat spiritual things like they’re “commodities” the possession of which renders those who have it better or worse, higher or lower, more or less spiritual adept. This is a bold faced trap of spiritualized dualism. Imagining we’re separate enough from God to enduringly long for him will get us only so far: spiritual wisdom would exhort us not to get caught up in self on God’s account. God, our tradition ultimately says, is what’s left when we’re done with things like wanting and self. When Meister Ekhart said "I’ve often prayed to God to save me from God,” he was ultimately articulating something as native to Catholicism as bread and wine. St. Paul would agree, in slightly different terms, and with that mortar, he built a missionary church.

So, for instance, I can imagine that the 14th Century author of The Cloud of Unknowing got totally uptight about being the knower. in his classic meditation on the negative way of prayer, he spent a whole, thin tome asking us to offer all of our attachments into the cloud of unknowing. In Catholicism, knowing isn’t complete until the knower has disappeared, until there’s no subject object relationship between the knower and the known. Ram Dass would do ask us to meditate similarly around other aspects of our egotism. In other words, not just “The Knower” has to go. Other flies in the cosmic punch are “the experiencer” and “the collector.” “Whoa,” says the experiencer, “I just felt what the hindus call ‘kundalini energy.’” Or again, the collector might fill the space between insights typing his way through the blogosphere: “Holy Cow,” he says "I just learned that I can’t give up desire without giving up self.” The knower, the Experiencer, and the collector are just a few of the “spiritual roles” we’ve got to get rid of. That stuff isn’t free. Desire will take its pound of psychospiritual flesh.

Body Language: I was at a wedding recently, watching a photographer take pictures. If corralling the adults was a difficult task, reining in the children of the respective families was well nigh impossible. Those who could stay in one place wiggled. Those who couldn’t ran about. It had rained earlier that day, and one of the parents ended up taking their child to the emergency room after a slip on wet concrete dealt him a broken wrist. The best man and I stood in our tuxes, hoping it wouldn’t cast a pall over the bride and the groom and musing at how little awareness, to say nothing of control, the young have of their different bodily energies.

Adolescence is weird. Deepening awareness of body, mind, emotions and their respective energies manifests as anxiety, and it only turns into more creative energy when we’ve about-faced and accepted it. Too many kids are prescribed antidepressants, when what they need is a crash course on psychology, meditation, chakras and nutrition. In any case, adolescents either come out of denial or don’t. Those of us watching either call it maturity or repression when someone carries themselves calmly. In any case, the general movement begins, from involuntary fidgeting to a peaceful demeanor.

Those who negotiate adolescence by repression, whether out of sheer denial or hyper-vigilant self-preservation, become compulsive adults. The pain of youth is at the bottom of adulthood’s every bottle. I find it true, for what it’s worth and without pigeonholing people into methods, that adults either meditate or medicate. A friend of mine once said “wherever I go, I take me with me.” That is as true of chronology as it is of location. If there’s an eighty year old who never dealt with being eight, somewhere inside him he’ll still be that small child.

Mind: We’ve been taught to identify ourselves, not just with our mind, but with our most selfish, dualistic mind. It begins inside us and is constantly, societally reinforced. After a life of harboring an either/or perspective ("Either Faith or Works!" say unnuanced Lutherans. “Either light or dark!” says the earliest Christian catechism) we begin, perhaps, to allow a “both/and” perspective. Further still, we ask "who is the person doing the thinking?"


There are a number of tools with which Christianity goes about diagnosing things like mind and self, naming their deficiencies, and claiming whatever good they yield. For one thing, the body isn’t just something the mind is trapped in, it’s like a television that broadcasts the signals being sent between mind and heart. The tongue makes whatever’s in the heart rationally intelligible, the limbic system stores pain throughout the body, to be dealt with whenever we can get our developmental game sufficiently straight. The practice of a simple mantra can attune us to our heart. One hell of a long strange interior trip begins, for instance, when the Jesus Prayer’s two words (Jesus, Mercy) become synonymous with the in and out of a breath cycle. Vocal prayer says “come to God with words, until they begin to feel meaningless.” I have, and I've made too much of it, and will do it all again. Meditation says “come to God with thoughts and feelings and sensations, until they begin to feel meaningless.” I have, and I’ve made too much of it, and will do it again. Contemplation says “Come to God and be, until the one being begins to feel meaningless.” I have, and I’ve made too much of myself, and will do it again.

For me, at this point, Koans have pride-of-place as mental diagnostics. I’ve said it before: Koans make all times present, all people me, all places here, all sounds bodily vibrations. With the illogical, being and thought are divorced until they no longer depend on one another. Koans actualize potential, unite opposites, silence discursive thought and awaken intuition. For me, at this point, this is all needed overhaul.

Eastern religions don’t out-pace Western ones in much, but they definitely do so in at least two places. For one thing, Christianity works with beings and morals, thereby giving egos material for self-absorption. God is the highest being, bestest of the best. I am a worm, not a man. Furthermore Christianity aids in the delusion of spiritual materialism by the labels it places on spiritual work. Heaven is good. Hell is bad. Buddhism, specifically tantric buddhism, works with energy and its effects. No religion’s cornered the ego-market, but Buddhism’s lack of a deity doesn’t lend itself as easily to “Heavenly beings giving earthly beings celestial cookies for good behavior.” At some point, language like “purgatorial predicament” and “non-self” become important depersonalizers by which we slip the spiritual materialism trap.

Additionally, though there are bits of the Gospel that function like Koans, Koans themselves have no corollary Western tradition. Aiding this development is a primary part of the mission Under the Influence has taken on. This post is proves the need. When I woke up this morning, before I sat down to write, I thought to myself "I need coffee." I made it, and I started writing. As I’ve gone along, I’ve realized this post calls much of that into question. I don’t need coffee, I want it—that’s desire. Tripping over myself to get to the coffeemaker—that’s just the body language of dependence. And spending all this time with words, in which someone named “I” talks through it all—well, on some level, that’s all ego.

This post is the Koan unsolved, the cross yet to be carried.  Savior and Self are the same.  When we follow "Not Two" back through "Not One" we'll find both.  Koan, Christ and Cross are the same. They’re all different aspects of a single work, the becoming of the single being I'll only be on the other side of non-being. They’re the message behind the mishigas, the messiah my flesh will play manger for: it’s just they’re within me, and yet to be born.