CHRISTIAN
NONDUALITY
From Nicholas of Cusa:
"I have found the place where one
can find Thee undisguised. It is surrounded by the coincidence of opposites.
This is the wall of Paradise in which Thou dwellest.
Its gate is guarded by the “highest spirit of reason”. Unless one overcomes it,
the entrance will not open. On the other side of the wall of the coincidence of
opposites one can see Thee, on this side never."
The
coincidence of opposites is a certain kind of unity perceived as coincidence, a
unity of contrarieties overcoming opposition by convergence without destroying
or merely blending the constituent elements. Although in once sense not
obliterated, in another the constituent elements shed their multiple,
differentiated status. Examples would include the coincidence of rest and
motion, past and future, diversity and identity, inequality and equality, and
divisibility and simplicity.
... coincidence does not really describe God. Rather it sets
forth the way God works, the order of things in relation to God and to each
other, and the manner by which humans may approach and abide in God. God is
beyond the realm of contradictories. God ... preceded
opposites, is undifferentiated, not other, incomparable, and without opposite,
precedes distinctions, opposition, contrariety, and
contradiction.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
What
Nicholas of Cusa describes regarding the coincidentia oppositorum
is very reminiscent of the type of nuance we find in semiotic theory vis a vis
the principles of excluded middle and noncontradiction
and when they hold and when they fold. It is also found in all approaches
to the univocity and equivocity and analogy of being, whether of Scotus or Aquinas. It is found in early Dionysian logic, in
Meister Eckhart and in the modern American Pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce.
I first learned of it from the teachings of Richard Rohr. It resonates with my
own Franciscan sensibilities, incarnational
imagination and appreciation for Scotus. I elaborate
on all of this here at Johnboy’s Homepage.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
I
like what Fr. Rohr says here:
quote:
"The
Secret" which is now gaining popularity in the USA, is probably a classic
example of something that is partially true, and even good, being made into the
only lens through which you read reality, and then it becomes untrue. Heresy
could be defined as when we absolutize a
partial truth, and I believe that is what is happening here. But I
would also love for Christians to learn the partial truth, and that is why we
teach the contemplative mind here.
And
he says this in the context of speaking against Gnosticism and for Incarnationalism, which is our portal to the Divine via the
particular, the concrete, the physical ... even the sad and painful. That's what
we'd expect from a good Franciscan, n'est
pas?
Fr.
Rohr also wrote:
quote:
We
are also preaching to a largely secular world, and must find a language
that
they can understand and draw from, as Paul did, and not insist that they
learn
our vocabulary before we can even talk to them or hear them. How else
can we ever
be “all things to all people” (1 Corinthians 9:22) or dare to
think that we can “preach
the Gospel to all creation” (Mark
16:16)?
Center
I
think he is right on in what he is saying here. At the same time, we must take
great care, semiotically and semantically, to make
sure that the terms, categories and logic employed by any vocabulary of choice
in our dialogue are referencing and describing the same realities, hence my
ongoing emphasis on the need for deliberate disambiguation, careful parsing,
high nuance, rigorous definition and suitable logic or
grammar.
From
THE PARADOX OF
NON-DUALITY by Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO
quote:
The
state of non-duality is addressed in most of the advanced spiritual
traditions
of the world religions. It is sometimes referred to as No Self or
Emptiness, as in Buddhism. It refers to the death of the false self or ego and
the diminishment or extinction of the separate self sense, along with the
abiding sense of unity with Ultimate Reality.
My first reading of
Keating was that he was facilely mapping one set of experiences over another
without much rigor, disambiguation or parsing. Looking more closely, I feel safe
in attributing an epistemic stance to
him rather than an ontological
perspective because I can glean that from within the context of other things
he wrote in that same article and other things he's written over the
years.
It is not just a
distinction between an epistemic stance and an ontological perspective, which is
crucial, it is also a matter of distinguishing between states, structures and
stages that, on one hand, ordinarily correlate (which I think it is fair to say) or,
on the other hand, necessarily indicate (which would be patently absurd) one
transformative or unitive level or another.
I
conceive of the False Self as the persona, which is a good and necessary
thing, just not a sufficient thing for completing the transformative
journey. We go beyond it but not without it. The No Self is not, then,
the True Self that follows the development of the persona on our journey of
individuation and transformation. The No Self is, rather, an experience of
nondual awareness, of absolute unitary being. It may be, though, that this No
Self experience is correlated with
the journey to True Self. We find them together, often.
quote:
Non-duality
is clearly a state beyond what is called in the Christian contemplative
tradition “Transforming Union.” The Cistercians, Franciscans, Carmelites, and
other religious groups have described this state as “bridal mysticism.”
Nondual
awareness is a metaphysical intuition, not a state of virtue or level of
transformation. It is, rather, value-neutral, in fact. Now, again, it may be
that it is well-correlated with this state of virtue.
quote:
The
unifying force of divine love draws and unites the soul into ineffable
experiences of union with the Beloved and forgetfulness of self. They remain two
however.
This
seems quite alright vis a vis a
spousal or bridal mysticism, in and of itself, which should not otherwise be
equated with nondual states of awareness but might well be highly correlated
with experiences of same. It is preferable to other formulations of No Self,
which annihilate the ego, self or even personhood.
quote:
St.
John of the Cross in the “Living Flame of Love” hints at higher states of union,
but is not explicit. Some of the Beguines of the 12th and 13th centuries wrote
explicitly of the Transforming Union as initiating a further journey into states
of unity consciousness that parallel the descriptions of no self or
enlightenment found in Buddhism, Advaitic Vedanta, or
Sufi literature. Here there is no self at all.
We
must be clear as to whether or not we are talking about a fleeting epistemic
experience or an ontological reality. Keating properly speaks in epistemic terms is my
take.
quote:
Perhaps
it might be useful to orient practitioners to the paradox of living a life that
is neither dual nor non-dual, just as some spiritual traditions affirm that the
Absolute is not this, not that—or similar to the statement, not one, not two.
These paradoxes point to
the fact that God is beyond all that exists and
beyond all categories of being and non-being, as well as in all that
exists.
I
rather like that.
It seems clear that Fr. Keating talks in terms of
awareness or a sense of this or that, which is to say in epistemic terms, but
does not commit the metaphysical category errors of others who make sweeping
ontological & metaphysical claims. He affirms the dialectic between
apophatic and kataphatic, nondual and dual (and transdual).
When I say tertradalectical, I mean to
nurture the interplay, for example, of sensation, intuition, thinking and
feeling; or between the empirical, rational, practical and relational; or
between the subjective, objective, intersubjective and interobjective; or
between the descriptive, prescriptive, interpretive and evaluative; or between
the positivist, philosophic, theistic and theotic; or between truth, beauty,
goodness and unity; or between creed, cult, code and community and so on. These
different approaches, faculties, sensibilities and methodologies are not each
holonic (the Wilber mistake that leads to arational gnosticism) but are tetradically holistic. That one correction to Wilber cures a
host of ills, I believe. At any rate, I sense that Keating and Rohr definitely
get this aspect right.
Fr.
Keating wrote:
quote:
Non-duality
is clearly a state beyond what is called in the Christian contemplative
tradition “Transforming Union.” The Cistercians, Franciscans, Carmelites, and
other religious groups have described this state as “bridal mysticism.” It
involves the union of love with God in which the will and intellect are united
to God, whether in interior trials such as the feeling of God’s absence or the
delights of mature, apophatic contemplation. The unifying force of divine love
draws and unites the soul into ineffable experiences of union with the Beloved
and forgetfulness of self.
Metaphorically,
the way I have received this all is that, this nondual self-forgetfulness is an
ecstatic journey on which we venture and from which we return, again and again
and again. This bridal mysticism is nothing less than Divine intercourse of
those otherwise already joined in Mystical Union. To be metaphorically explicit,
it is the difference between Marriage and the Marriage
Bed.
Bernard of Clairvaux
On the Song of Songs
But notice that in spiritual
marriage there are two kinds of birth, and thus two kinds of offspring, though
not opposite. For spiritual persons, like holy mothers, may bring souls to birth
by preaching, or may give birth to spiritual insights by meditation. In this
latter kind of birth the soul leaves even its bodily senses and is separated
from them, so that in her awareness of the Word she is not aware of herself.
This happens when the mind is enraptured by the unutterable sweetness of the
Word, so that it withdraws, or rather is transported, and escapes from itself to
enjoy the Word. The soul is affected in one way when it is made fruitful by the
Word, in another when it enjoys the Word: in the one it is considering the needs
of its neighbor; in the other it is allured by the sweetness of the Word. A
mother is happy in her child; a bride is even happier in her bridegroom's
embrace. The children are dear, they are the pledge of his love, but his kisses
give her greater pleasure. It is good to save many souls, but there is far more
pleasure in going aside to be with the Word. But when does
this happen and for how long? It is sweet intercourse, but lasts a short time
and is experienced rarely! This is what I spoke of before, when I said that the
final reason for the soul to seek the Word was to enjoy him in
bliss.
See this story of one journeyer.
As
Fr. Keating once explained in response to a questionnaire:
quote:
There
is no way to accurately judge when a person has moved from Centering Prayer with
its minimal effort towards consent and surrender to God's presence, to a state
of infused contemplation where the Holy Spirit is fully directing the prayer or
"praying us." There are some signs, but no distinct states discernable to
ordinary human discrimination. Those who are faithful to the practice of CP
gradually give up the need to know "where they are" and learn to surrender more
and more to what God wants to have happen.
So,
for all the talk of stages and levels and ways regarding the transformative
journey, it is good counsel to give up the need to know where we are or where
others are on this journey for there is no way to accurately judge such
things. It is important, in my view, to draw a distinction between
phenomenal states and psychic structures, on one hand, and
transformative stages and levels of
virtue, on the other hand. It is
enough to know that they can often be highly correlated but important to know
that they are not necessarily otherwise truly indicative one of the other. Some
are given glimpses. Some experiences are fleeting and transitory. Others are
more perduring. All is unmerited and freely given by
God for reasons known to Him alone.
This
is how I would conceive any state beyond transforming union. This is
clearly, in St. Bernard's view, a matter of experience, a type of awareness, an
affective moment, an epistemic
value-realization and not, rather, a perduring ontological reality.
The
following is an excerpt from an introduction to St. Bernard's Sermons on the
Song of Songs by Prof. Katherine Gill for her courses at Yale Divinity School
and Boston College:
quote:
Sermon
52 illustrates Bernard's conviction that contemplation is a foretaste of heaven
and a mystical (bridal) sleep that vivifies the mystical senses. But he also
viewed it as a type of ecstatic dying to the world and as an apophatic,
imageless-therefore, "angelic"contemplation of God.
For St. John of the Cross, bridal sleep is the most apostolic work a person can
do for the Church, because therein a person does what he or she was created for:
to love and to be loved.
The selected text from Sermon 74 is one of
the most stunning attempts in the entire Christian mystical tradition to
describe the mystical experience. When the Word invades the soul, he cannot
be perceived by the senses. However, the heart, or the person's deepest center,
suddenly becomes alive and its most secret faults are disclosed. When the
Word leaves, it is like a boiling pot removed from the stove. The Life of the
soul's life seems to have disappeared.
Sermons 83 and 85 describe
spiritual marriage and spiritual fecundity. The Word actually takes the soul as
his bride, and two become one in spirit, yet remain two. Spousal mysticism
emphasizes a differentiated unity. In other words, love actually makes two one,
but also enhances personal identity. Love makes the soul equal to
God, God by participation, but not simply God. Also, Bernard emphasizes that
bridal love loves God for his own sake. Although as bride, the soul desires the
Bridegroom's embrace, as mother she loves her children, that is, her neighbor.
We must honor the
distinction between a mystical experience, on one hand, and a level or degree or
stage or state of sanctity or virtue or perfect charity, otoh. Sure, there are manifold and multiform phenomenal
states, psychic phenomena or experiences that can be correlated with whether or
not one is on the purgative or illuminative way, whether one is in this or that
interior mansion, whether one is at base camp or the summit of Mt.
Carmel.
When speaking epistemically, especially
of nonduality, a state would be temporary, an epistemological structure, or if
you prefer stage, would be more permanent, which is to recognize a type of
nondual consciousness that is not so much an experience per se as it is,
instead, a way of perceiving reality.
Of course, there is another notion
of nondual realization, not of an experience or perception or type of
awareness, in which case the state of one's consciousness doesn't matter:
nonduality is just there to see. And it does seem to me that a good panentheist might figure this out through philosophical
contemplation, someone else through an intuition of being, still another through
a kundalini experience, yet another through
enlightenment. If Keating indeed follows Wilber's take, this is all a nondual
state entails.
At any rate, there is more to this stage paradigm than
just the experiential aspect; when speaking of the transforming union we are
talking not just about phenomenal experiences but habitual virtue, increased
charity & sanctifying grace, preservation from mortal sin and general
avoidance of venial sin and so on.
Mystical ecstasy is
a type of nonduality, but does not exhaust that reality. Keating speaks of the
transient nature of such ecstasy as is associated with bridal mysticism. I do
not interpret him to be suggesting that this is what becomes permanent. Rather,
at this point, I'd suspect he thinks in terms of nondual realization, an
epistemological structure, whether one thinks of that in terms of a perduring unitive consciousness (or way of perceiving
reality), or, as Wilber would (and Keating leans on Wilber), nondual
realization, which doesn't require any form of consciousness per
se.
quote:
johnboy:
...
nonduality is just there to see. And it does seem to me that a good panentheist might figure this out through philosophical
contemplation ...
Now,
this may seem to leave a question begging ... of why, when it comes to
nonduality, so many go the pantheistic route, or, worse, the materialist monist
route, or maybe not as bad, the idealist monist route, rather than the panentheist route. And I'm just going to leave this here as
a footnote. The reason is, in my view, that they have not seen the wisdom of
Dionysian logic, as has a modern counterpart in the semiotic approach of Charles
Sanders Peirce; or they have not been exposed to a dialogue between the univocity and analogy of being, of Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas. Or, they just don't know how to
get around the seeming inviolability of the principle of noncontradiction.
The answer lies in the coincidentia oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa.
The
closest thing in Christianity to the way I usually hear "nondual" being used is
"union," which presupposes an intimacy between two-in-love. There's nothing in
Christianity about the soul and God being one and the same thing. Of course, it
would take extensive dialogue to know if that's what the Easterners intend to be
saying, as, in some traditions like Buddhism, the terms soul and God aren't used
(and it's a strain to find conceptual equivalents). Hinduism's Atman and Brahman
are closer, but, in the end, these turn out to be one and the same. So, no --
Christianity's doctrine of creation is rather unique.
We should note,
here, that BR doesn't use the term "nondual" and it's not what she means to be
saying by no-self. For her, no-self signifies the extinguishing of human
consciousness, which is a prelude to the discovery of what lies beyond.
Posted
by johnboy (Member # 31) on
03 July, 2008 10:00 PM:
quote:
Originally
posted by Phil:
The
closest thing in Christianity to the way I usually hear "nondual" being used is
"union," which presupposes an intimacy between two-in-love. There's nothing in
Christianity about the soul and God being one and the same thing. Of course, it
would take extensive dialogue ...
Defining
everything that one might mean by nondual is like trying to nail jello to the wall.
When it comes to a theism properly conceived, which excludes atheism,
pantheism and other nontheistic traditions, I think
the big divide, theologically, precisely has to do with defining our
relationship to ultimate reality.
It has always seemed to me that, when
talking about God, some people equate our unitive striving in terms of a
journey toward intimacy, or even more plainly put, as a transformation
from what might start out as a merely functional relationship into a
purely personal relationship. It has to do, then, with getting
closer.
Others conceive of this unitive striving as a dance
between relationship and identity, as a journey from intersubjectivity into absolute subjectivity. Some affirm
this intersubjectivity and then strive to transform it
into absolute subjectivity; others see this intersubjectivity as an illusion.
There is nothing in
the Christian tradition that corresponds to this second type of unitive
striving. Anyone who suggests this isn't so much being a heretic as they are
just plain being silly.
Now, it is possible to conceive of God,
philosophically, as mostly in a functional relationship with creation, so there
are other ways to be theistic without relating to the Creator as Abba or
as in bridal mysticism. This isn't an option for the Christian. If Jesus
revealed anything, then He revealed an actively involved and deeply caring God,
building on the Hebrew experience. (Of course, let's not forget the Song of
Songs, either). Thus, He taught us to pray, Our Father ...
Aside from
these distinctly theological concerns, nondual has different meanings that
pertain to 1) psychological states: altered states of consciousness,
ecstasy 2) epistemological states and structures: nondiscursive, preconceptual and
transconceptual awareness; avoidance of subject-object
cleavage; epistemic vagueness; nominalism &
essentialism 3) linguistic and semiotic approaches: Dionysian logic,
semantical vagueness, triadic semiotic grammar;
deconstruction strategies 4) metaphysical & ontological theories:
idealist and materialist monisms; aristotelian hylomorphism;
ontological vagueness; modal ontology 5) philosophical: false
dichotomies; binary logic; dualistic conceptions 6) ascetical practices &
spiritual disciplines of all sorts, what we might call spiritual
technology
It is not important to understand what each item in the
above inventory means. It should demonstrate the difficulty in disambiguating
the term. Beside, I wanted to make a little inventory like this for my own
reference and your question evoked same.
Finally, there is nothing
distinctly nondual, from the standpoint of natural or revealed theology, in
Christianity. From the standpoint of ascetical and mystical theology, and
formative spirituality, "the nondual" can pop up in any number of places and be
successfully integrated. It also presents itself in various scientific,
metaphysical, psychological and anthropological considerations and can be
appropriated that way, although as Phil pointed out earlier, our theological
commitments do make certain claims on these other foci of human concern, mostly
at the axiomatic or presuppositional
level.
Wise men among us can say all of this so much more
succinctly:
quote:
We
cultivate the intuition of being by pursuing our deepest inner aspirations that
transcend metaphysics itself. The more we situate Zen in this ascent, the
better able we will be to let it inspire both metaphysics and
Christian mysticism, and be inspired by them in turn. Each is enamored
by existence in its own way. The metaphysics of St. Thomas wants to
understand it, and to do so, it uses concepts and pushes them to their ultimate
limits where they display their innermost nature as reflections of existence.
Zen wants to actively embrace existence so it resolutely puts aside all
concepts, and in this emptiness finds the way to existence. Christian mysticism
wants to be embraced by existence and see revealed in its depths its most
intimate face, which is love. There is no reason except our own weakness that
prevents all three from sharing with each other the riches they have found in
the service of this one Existence, or Nothingness.
Chapter 8: Zen Catholicism? in _God, Zen and the Intuition of Being_ by Jim Arraj
One
might look at the nonduality inventory above and ask just how BR's
accounts square with it? What categories do her teachings attempt to address or
otherwise ignore?
In closing, it seems that, when people are speaking
about the nondual in strictly natural theological terms, they are describing
ultimate reality in terms of Oneness. When people are speaking about the nondual
in these other areas of human concern, nondual need not imply oneness or
absoluteness or simplicity; rather, in overcoming two-ness or duality, other strategies present themselves. Think
about what these might be before reading on. Use this as a Zen koan. Then, scroll
down.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
These
other strategies include threeness, fourness, fiveness and so on. Mostly, though, we see people
employing triadic and tetradic strategies. Charles
Sanders Peirce built a whole philosophical method or grammar on the triadic,
bordering on what some have called triadomania.
Pseudo-Dionysius and other neo-platonic philosophers and mystics used a triadic
grammar, too. Psychology and spirituality is full of tetradic approaches, largely due to our brain quadrants,
although our brain functions are much more distributed than many ever thought
possible.
To
be nondual in tiddly winks, all you have to do is to skip
twosies!
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
When
evaluating phenomenal states, psychic structures, psychological stages, Lonergan's conversions and ontological and theological
degrees of perfection, we must carefully define their essential nature,
inventory the graces that might accompany them and identify their fruits. In
other words, we need to draw distinctions, but as Maritain said, in order to
unite.
Since grace can build on nature, any epistemic
value-realization offers promise, including such as Zen and nondual realization,
including such as natural science and natural mysticism. It also offers perils
and pitfalls, for, as Richard Rohr says, "something that is partially true, and
even good, [can be] made into the only lens through which you read reality, and
then it becomes untrue. Heresy could be defined as when we absolutize a partial truth."
Natural science
is a partial truth. When it becomes "the only lens through which you read
reality ... then it becomes untrue," or what we call
scientism.
Natural mysticism is a partial truth, but, when it
becomes "the only lens through which you read reality, then it becomes untrue,"
or what Arraj has called "nondualist imperialism."
Jim writes:
quote:
what
does this kind of nondualist imperialism do to Christianity? It eliminates its
distinctive nature. Let me be clear about this. Used in this way, Zen awakening,
which could be a wonderful gift for Christians, becomes destructive to
Christianity.
Addenda
on Keating:
JB,
note the influence of BR on Keating in the quote
below:
quote:
On
the Christian path, God is known first as the personal God, then as the
transpersonal God, and finally as the Ultimate Reality beyond all personal and
impersonal categories. Since God's existence, knowledge and activity are one,
Ultimate Reality is discovered to be That-which-is.
-
http://www.centeringprayer.com/Mystery/2easter07.htm
You
buy?
This is a prime
example of our need to employ Dionysian logic, to embrace the coincidentia oppositorum.
We must distinguish between univocal
and equivocal predications of God. We generally cannot employ univocity when speaking of God and creatures, which is to recognize that the words we use to
describe humans, like person, for example, cannot be literally predicated of
God. There is an equivocity in play in any
words we use to describe both God and humans. The way we bridge these distinct
realities is to employ, then, analogical predications, which is to affirm
that the Trinity is in a relationship LIKE that enjoyed by us a
persons.
When we speak of the Mystical Body of Christ or the Cosmic
Christ, we speak of an eternal reality and employ such words as body and cosmic,
not literally, but analogically. Even when we speak of Jesus in His life on
earth, the precise nature of His humanity remains shrouded in mystery and these
rules of predication would apply metaphysically. Revelation, though, has
literal and historical dimensions (what can I know?),
anagogical dimensions (what can I hope for? Last Things?), mystagogical dimensions (how does this all relate?
and initiate into mystery), allegorical sense (how is this metaphor
sustained?) and the tropological sense (morally
and theotically, what must I do?). So, while we cannot
say literally and metaphysically how Jesus' essential nature was realized, we
can say that spiritually and morally He revealed the fullness of God's
Trinitarian Life to us, as well as how we are to respond and what is in store
for us.
I think it is fair enough to say that our relationship with God
is, in some sense, undeniably personal. As we conceive of the Mystical Body of
Christ, there is obviously something transpersonal,
that goes beyond our understanding of the personal, which is not employed
univocally of God and creatures in the first place. And there is absolutely
nothing wrong with also recognizing that the Reality of God cannot be robustly
described using any of our human categories for, apophatically, the only literal descriptions we can
predicate of God are those statements of what God is not.
What we have,
then, in Dionysian logic, is a trialectical (tetradalectical?)interplay between the both/and of apophatic/univocal
predications and the kataphatic/equivocal predications, as well as the
neither/nor of the unitive subversion of binary logic, hence,
dichotomous thinking. Temporally speaking, we also have a tension between what
we can experience now vs eschatologically versus proleptically (as though the future were
present).
Therefore, when we read this: On the Christian path, God is
known first as the personal God, then as the transpersonal God, and finally as
the Ultimate Reality beyond all personal and impersonal categories. Since God's
existence, knowledge and activity are one, Ultimate Reality is discovered to be
That-which-is ...
There is no reason to interpret this in terms of
strict binary logic, as either/or dichotomies. It is an initiation into
the Dionysian logic of the both/and/neither/nor. All of these references to God
are true. We go beyond each but without none. At least, this is the case I made as lead counsel for
Meister Eckhart in my prior reincarnation as a canon lawyer.
Theologians
distinguish between primary and secondary objects of our beatific vision, and
also between essential (subjective and objective) and accidental beatitudes.
Keating is describing the essential beatitude, which is God alone, as our
primary object, the Divine Essence seen by direct intuition. There are also
secondary objects, comprised of all other things of interest to us, including
all of the sacred mysteries we ponder now, including the communion of saints,
all realities we will encounter as blessings accidental to beatitude: the
fulfillment of natural aspirations and the company of Jesus (yes, with memory,
understanding and will plus) and one another (yes, with memory, understanding
and will plus) all with glorified resurrected bodies, as well as the company of
angels and other persons.
For
me, self must be identifiable as a person, and that's why I referred to the old
classical description of the rational soul by Augustine: memory, understanding
& will.
This human memory, understanding and will is analogous to the Trinity. Some metaphysical approaches
conceive of a disembodied soul (maybe two-dimensional) and some reject that idea
as philosophically suspect. From what I think we know and don't know, it is
best, in my view, to remain agnostic on this matter.
What seems obvious
is that death terminates human life as we know it, to be clear, both our memory, understanding and will, as rational soul, as
well as the rest of our body. Personal immortality is not a metaphysical
necessity but our resurrection by God, whatever that entails, is a central
element of our belief.
What is true, above, about us as humans, is also
true about Jesus as a human. At death, His personal, human self was terminated,
in a word, lost. After all, Jesus is true man. The notion of deified self, where
Jesus is concerned, doesn't make sense. He was like us in all things but sin,
ergo, not in need of deification or theosis; not to
mention, He is also true God. Maybe, such a deified self is somehow related to
how, as a human, He grew in age and grace, and the more human He became, the
more He realized Himself? I dunno.
As true God,
a person of the Trinity, we will experience, through direct intuition, as our
primary object of beatific vision and essential beatitude, Jesus' essence as
God, something to which I can confidently refer but not truly describe.
As true man, we will enjoy as a secondary object of beatific vision and
an accidental beatitude, the company of Jesus, in His human nature, with that
rational soul's faculties of memory, understanding and will, as a human person,
as His self, resurrected by God.
God resurrected that man, Jesus, and I
have reason to hope, therefore, he'll resurrect this man johnboy, who is human and a member of the Mystical Body of
Christ, also joined to Jesus and others through eucharist, and who is still busy about theosis or deification.
Jesus has a human body, a
resurrected body including a self (rational soul w/memory, understanding and
will), a glorified body, a presence in the eucharist, a mystical body, a cosmic incarnational presence and is the 2nd Person of the Trinity.
The human Jesus' self was sacrificed on the cross. His human existence was
terminated, lost. This sacrifice, this death, this termination, this loss, was
not final. On the third day ... you know the rest of the story, the Greatest Story Ever Told.
quote:
"Was
it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his
glory?"
And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to
them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. Luke 24: 26-27
quote:
But
if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him. Romans
6
Obviously,
we can lose our self through death. God can resurrect it. He did Jesus. Without
knowing the specific substances or modalities, or processes or events, of
resurrection, even without human subjective immortality, which some would
consider a dubious metaphysical proposition, we have every reason to believe
that God can mediate to human persons our memory, understanding and will from
His own ongoing life.
As for this:
quote:
Now
it just so happens that what Keating saying about Jesus here is exactly what BR
is saying about her journey -- that no-self is the loss of personal self, then
on we go on to resurrection, ascenscion, etc. without
a self.
I
see Keating saying that we and Jesus lose this self. I don't hear him denying
that we and Jesus get it back. I do hear him affirming that we and Jesus must
also go beyond this self, Jesus, for His part, returning to His essence in the
Godhead, the primary object of our beatific vision and our essential beatitude;
we, for our part, becoming members of the Mystical Body; creation, for its part,
the Cosmic Christ. Neither do I hear Keating denying that, as an accidental
beatitude, we encounter Jesus' full resurrected humanity as one of the secondary
objects of our beatific vision. I do hear Keating emphasizing the primary and
essential and not addressing the secondary and accidental but don't find
anything inherently wrong in that. That others are perhaps more concerned with
that which is secondary and accidental is understandable, but that says more
about others and nothing about Keating.
I think everyone is throwing
around the term No-self too loosely. Now it has to do with physical death; next
it has to do with advaita vedanta; then it has to do with mystical ecstasy; or else
with self-forgetfulness; or it has to do with nondual realization or nondual
perspective or nondual awareness or nondual enlightenment or temporary nondual
phenomenal states or permanent nondual epistemic structures; and let's not
forget, whatever it is that BR suggests it might also be.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
In some cases,
though, it is not a choice between church teaching and alternate interpretations
that's being presented, but, rather, various aspects of a theological reality
that are not really in competition, are only in apparent contradiction,
which is to recognize that there are different types of paradox (veridical,
falsidical, conditional, antinomial -- beyond our scope here).
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
To
the extent we have been considering nondual realization, alongside other
epistemic faculties, properly considered, I have emphasized their holistic
relationship and have suggested that all of our epistemic faculties must enjoy
an integral interplay, each with the others in every human value-realization
(whether dialectical, trialectical, tetradalectical or what have you). Wilber,
on the surface, appears to affirm this integrality with his all quadrant, all
level approach, but, with no logic or coherence or empirical observations, a
priori concludes that the nondual state is "the highest estate
imaginable," and, there you have it, the fatal epistemological
ailment Arraj calls "nondualist imperialism."
I have no problem with correlating nondual realization with this or that
stage in this or that paradigm, based on some type of empirical observation and
rational demonstration of when and why it should emerge now versus later on our
journeys of individuation, conversion or perfection, for example. When it does
emerge, however it emerges and for whatever reasons, ascetical or philosophical,
it must, then, simply take its place as one furnishing among others in our
epistemic suite, enjoying an integral interplay in all of our human
value-realization pursuits.
If in appropriating Wilber, one finds the
nondual realization concept useful as an epistemological structure, more or less
permanent, and one buys into an integrally conceived all quadrant-all level
epistemic outlook, and one sees some value, even, in his rather emergentist take on the great chain/nest of being, I see no
problems, really, in using this gift in our Christian imaginations and modeling
attempts.
If what Wilber means by the "highest estate imaginable" is the
nondual stance toward reality not conceived as in my account above (and
throughout this thread), then we are precisely looking at a "nondualist
imperialism." And Christianity cannot appropriate that, and not because it is
bad theology. Before that, it is plain and simple bad science coming from an
epistemologically bankrupt philosophy.
Daniel Helminiak explicates this problem:
http://www.visionsofdaniel.net/R&HSch4.htm
quote:
More
specifically, the flaw in Wilber's presentation is that, in his proposed levels
of interior development, he mixes together stages of cognitive development
and levels of meditative experience. In the process, he calls "knowledge" what
is merely experience, that is, data that could be questioned in a process
that could lead to understanding and knowledge but that in themselves are not
knowledge. This confounding allows him to place on a single continuum matters
that are really very different. In a line he lays out apples after oranges and
claims that they belong together since they are all fruits. And, indeed, his
levels all do have something or other to do with consciousness. But apples are
not a further expression of oranges, and levels of meditative experience are not
further stages of cognitive development. As Kelly (1996, p. 20) expresses the
matter, "Clearly, the transpersonal 'levels' as a whole are of a completely
different order than the ones that 'precede' them [in Wilber's hierarchy]."
Precisely because he adds meditative levels to the list of cognitive
stages, Wilber--along with centuries of fuzzy thinking about mysticism--is able
to maintain that meditative experiences constitute knowledge. Moreover,
since the wildly variably conceived post-formal operational thought marks the
passage between the two sets, the claim to knowledge in the later levels easily
slips in. Then, in the supposed highest attainment, the Nondual, all the known
characteristics of knowledge disappear; all concepts, distinctions, and
propositions become irrelevant; but this phenomenon is nonetheless presented as
a kind of knowledge. The implication--and explicit claim--is that all
distinctions are ultimately irrelevant. I criticized this matter above. My point
here is that it continues to control Wilber's theorizing, and it discredits his
theorizing for anyone who believes that knowledge and science entail articulate
explanation.
Later
we might flesh out how Zen, properly appropriated, can be a boon rather than a
bust for the Christian contemplative. I have described the perils and pitfalls,
but do not want to deny the promises, which every Merton student would
affirm.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Instead
of self and no self, think, for a moment, in terms of noisy self and quiet
self
and think of noisy and quiet in terms of emotional
energy.
Think of the different ways we grow in authenticity:
intellectual, affective, moral, social and religious (Lonergan's conversions) and how growth in one way does
not necessarily accompany growth in other ways.
Think of how we can
gain clarity of insight about reality, intellectually, sometimes through
inexplicable aha moments of brilliant raw awareness, which bubbles up from
our unconscious, sometimes through arduous intellectual and philosophical
exertion.
Think of how we grow in emotional maturity and individuation
processes, sometimes through gradual and healthy formative upbringing, sometimes
from growth brought on by crisis and our successful transcendence of
circumstances, suffering and pain .
Think of how
we grow in faith and hope and love, sometimes through gradual conversion and
formation, sometimes through profoundly moving metanoia experiences, sometimes through liminal experiences that take us away from the ordinary and
open us to new encounters .
It seems to me that,
while all of these growth processes can be placed in the service of each
other process, our individual paths reveal them to be otherwise quite
distinct.
It also seems to me that, once our egos are relieved of the
disquiet of emotional energy, our psychic resources are then available to better
grow our authenticity such that, for example,
1) intellectually,
insights come with greater spontaneous facility and they can be deep and
profound and almost otherworldly (novel as they can be in their unconscious
origin), gifting us even with enlightenment and nondual intuitions of the unity
of being;
2) affectively, our responsivity is
more free and spontaneous, less reactionary, more existentially-oriented toward
what is life-giving and relationship-enhancing, less neurotically-driven toward
what is life-destroying and relationship-detracting, as our unconscious energy
is properly ordered away from anger, fear and inordinate desires and toward
purified desires and healthy appetites;
3) virtuously, neither hand knows
what the other is doing in more authentic love, which flows from the wellsprings
of an unconscious that is centered in the things of God, with God, with the love
of self for sake of God and the love of God for sake of God, though not without
the love of God for sake of self and not without the love of self for sake of
self ---
for the self is not metaphysically annihilated, just
energetically quieted, affectively speaking
As you know, growth in
intellect has never implied, necessarily, emotional growth or other aspects of
psychological individuation or human authenticity. And this is true whether our
metaphysical insights come through arduous philosophical labor or from
spontaneous experiences of unitary being. Neither does emotional maturity
necessarily imply growth in theological virtues. And we know from our studies of
the saints that the greatest faith, hope and love have been gifted humankind by
the simplest of children and the most eccentric of adults.
What will
happen to this or that individual who undergoes a loss of the affective ego, a
quieting of the noisy self?
We do not know.
It depends on their
formation. It depends on their mental health, both due to internal chemical
milieu and external circumstantial milieu. It depends on their ascetic
disciplines and prayer routines. It depends on their meditation forms and
durations. It depends on the One Who infuses mystical
contemplation. It depends on where they happen to be on the path of this or that
development. This is all way overdetermined.
We
do know that psychic structures and phenomenal states are sometimes closely
linked to developmental stages, both psychological and spiritual. Sometimes they
are not. We do know that such stages, structures and states are often in the
service of theological virtue but that sometimes they are not. We do know that
what Merton called the false self (or persona) does not disappear but that we
learn to go beyond it through transformation.
We do know that our
personhood is integral and valued by God and destined for ongoing conversion and
authenticity and resurrection along with the quiet self, which remains restless
until it rests in Him, alone.
NO SELF, then, is not a
level.
NO SELF is not an absorption or
annihilation.
The only I that has been removed is the one
between the NO and the SElf in the word
NOiSE.
Events, as you say, that you
encounter and that other people encounter might legitimately be interpreted
differently from the standpoint of each person's internal growth in human
authenticity (the conversions: intellectual, affective, moral, social and
religious). Such events cannot be legitimately interpreted from the standpoint
of describing external physical and metaphysical realities, drawing ontological
conclusions about creation and the Creator. Such speculation is the domain of
the sciences: positivist, normative and practical (including theological
science), which are advanced by a community of inquiry according to specific
norms.
In a prior post, I mentioned that, due to our being fashioned in
the likeness of God, we, even as creatures, enjoy an unfathomable depth
dimension, which is to affirm that we can swim in one another's depths forever,
too! And, for this reason, the essence of love that we share with one another is
also off-limits to our discursive faculties, too. I cannot begin to offer a
robust explanatory apologetic for the who, what, when,
where, how and why of my love for my children and spouse and extended family and
friends. This dimension of relationality transcends anything that I could tender
in empirical, rational or practical terms. This does not mean, however, that I
have been absorbed into my spouse or children (although sometimes, let me tell
you ...)
In closing, you ask: this stated
accomplishment of NO SELF is just another trick of the ego?
Why would
anyone consider this an accomplishment? In and of itself, as an
experience, its origins are manifold and varied. I realize that there is talk in
the literature on nonduality of levels and stages and such, but the loss of the
affective ego is a value-neutral phenomenon, sometimes indicating health,
sometimes disease, sometimes in the service of transformation, sometimes leading
to utter confusion as we grapple with various interpretations. As with any
alternating consolations and desolations, I think the time-honored spiritual
direction is to let go of these things, to discern the movement of the Spirit,
to desire and occupy ourselves in prayer, not so much to gain consolations but
so as to gain the strength to serve (Teresa).
_________________________________________________________________________
In
spiritual direction, it can be a thorny task discerning together existential
versus psychological issues, or spiritual emergence/emergencies. In psychology,
it can be difficult to diagnose depression as organic or reactive. The point is
that none of this lends itself to a facile analysis.
But, also, in
spiritual direction, suppose, for example, that one goal is to see ourselves as
God see us, to employ an Ignatian approach. Or, perhaps our director has us
working through our different conceptions of God, our different images of God.
In either case, a proper understanding of our self, our false self, our true
self, or even our no-self, and a proper understanding of God, and a proper
understanding of who we are called to be in relationship to the world, other
people, the self, the devil and the Trinity --- will profoundly impact our life
of prayer, our worship, our ministry, our fellowship. If we misconceive God as a
stern, unforgiving Father-figure, as an eternal policeman, then it will affect
all of the above understandings and experiences of self, other, world and
God.
If
we misconceive the creature-Creator relationship when we come out of a nondual
experience, or a no-self experience, then it, too, can profoundly influence all
of these other understanding and experiences. This is not just a danger for
people immersed in apophatic experiences. We have always recognized that
wrongful over- and under-emphases on this or that epistemic capacity can lead to
error. For example, an overemphasis on the apophatic and affective can lead to
quietism; on the affective and speculative can lead to encratism; on the
kataphatic and affective to fideism and pietism; on the kataphatic and
speculative to rationalism; and so on and so forth. These encounters are
integrally-related. Wrenched out of their context in the whole, they get swollen
to madness in their isolation (to borrow a metaphor from CS Lewis). Quietism,
arationalism, gnosticism and other insidious -isms are
the "fruits" of a tree not planted near living water. But so are rationalism,
fideism, pietism, scientism and so on.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
It
has been said that we know more than we can tell. And this is true in many ways.
Think of kinesthetic intelligence and athletic prowess. Some excellent musicians
never learned music theory but can just play, often at very early ages. We can
navigate our way around this town or that, but couldn't give directions. There
are multiple "intelligences." The same is true for our somatic experience;
doctors and nurses use a simple number scale to try to crudely gauge our pain
levels. Cardinal Newman described what he called our illative sense. Jung and
Maritain addressed our intuitive knowledge. There are parts of our brain that
process our phenomenal experience that have few or no linkages with other parts
that govern our linguistic faculties. And so on and so forth.
The
converse is also manifestly true: We can tell more than we know.. And we see
people do this in a thousand mundane ways. Sometimes
tentatively. Sometimes dogmatically. And when
they traffic in falsifiable claims, sometimes they get caught. But when they
traffic in nonfalsifiable claims, often they get away with it.
The only
way we can attempt to adjudicate conflicting nonfalsifiable claims is to
evaluate them from a pragmatic perspective, cashing out their value in terms of
practical significance: If I believe this and act on this, what are the
implications? If there are none, then such claims are likely harmless and
useless.
Clearly, though, as we discussed previously, our images of God,
our beliefs about the Father almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth, Jesus
Christ, His Son, our Lord, the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, and the
communion of saints and forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body and
life everlasting, the efficacy of sacraments, the exegetical approach to
scripture, the contemplative tradition and on and on --- all have tremendous
existential import and profound practical implications. How do we pray? To Whom can we go? What can I know? What can I hope for? What
must I do?
Because we are dealing with deep mysteries, which we can
penetrate but not grasp, which we can partially apprehend but never fully
comprehend, much of church dogma is articulated with clear references
to but not robust descriptions of these sacred mysteries, which with
Mary, we must ponder in our hearts, the essence of contemplation. Our
descriptions necessarily remain vague. Earlier on our journeys, our faith is
clear but tentative. Later on our transformative paths, universally, the
church doctors and mystics report that our faith becomes obscure but
certain.
So, we have two criteria for evaluating claims: 1) practical
implications for the life of faith and 2) proper articulation of sacred
mysteries. And those, in a nutshell, describe what this thread has been about.
We have discussed theological claims against time-honored doctrine and related
traditions. We have discussed implications for the life of prayer and our walk
with the Lord. And, yes, we have approached it with high-fallooting categories and terms, which is helpful in one
way, but acknowledge, too, that good old common sense can be even more helpful
in many other ways.
This much I know to be true. There is SO much in
physics that we have not settled. There is WAY too much in philosophy of mind
that remains unanswered. How MUCH MORE, then, metaphysically, regarding
consciousness and reality's other givens in terms of primitives, forces and
boundaries we simply do not yet know! Ergo, HOW woefully ignorant we are
regarding things theological, where our language of the realm is vaguely
descriptive even if otherwise robustly referential and relational!!!!! Anyone
who supposes they really have consciousness figured out, along with the Great
Chain of Being, let me know, and I will forward your theory to those who are
busy trying to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics!
If you hear
anyone telling this untellable story, then I suggest you pay no heed.
Jesus already issued this injunctive regarding Last Days and such. Who needs
mine?
If anyone comes back from an ineffable encounter and effables in clearly descriptive terms, then, by definition,
they are telling more than they can tell. Now, I am not saying that the cure for
gnosticism is agnosticism. Neither is it the cure for
dogmatism. The human epistemic approach is, rather, fallibilist. We move forward
in fits and starts as a community of inquiry, a community of
believers.
There is no sense in doubting people's experiences or in
denying their descriptions of same. There is MUCH to be learned from this wheat
of our lives. This is the storytelling that we do at table, eucharistically,
when we take and eat such wheat. There is so much that has been added to our
fund of spiritual and psychological knowledge from modern day contemplatives and
practitioners of various ascetic disciplines.
We simply must not confuse
the wheat of these experiences from what can be the chaff of different
interpretations of same. Those interpretations are subject to critique. And
people are entitled to their own opinions but they are not entitled to their own
facts -- not empirically, not scientifically, not normatively and
philosophically, not metaphysically and not theologically, this last category
which must appropriate its analogues and metaphors from the preceding ones. And
there is another criterion: if you hear anyone speaking literally about that
which can only be referred to analogically, pay no heed. Literal descriptions
are logically invalid in orthodox God-talk, except when predicated negatively,
which is the whole point of apophatic theology.
Finally, the fruits of
the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness and self-control. Watch for these criteria.
B.
Roberts wrote:
quote:
If
anyone wonders why John of the Cross and other mystics never talked about
No-Self they need only read what Mr. Arraj thinks
about No-Self. John of the Cross would have been thrown to the Buddhists,
labeled a “natural mystic”, denied God’s supernatural grace, in short, be
regarded as un-Christian.
No,
no, no, not at all!
Merton drew distinctions between East and West in
terms of the natural and supernatural, apophatic and kataphatic, existential and
theological, impersonal and personal, and immanent and transcendent. As Maritain
always said about distinctions, we distinguish in order to unite!
From an
incarnational perspective, these distinctions are not
to be cashed out in terms of levels of virtue, especially once considering that
we are talking about unmerited gifts, all which proceed from the same Giver of
all good gifts!
Whether from East or West, as Arraj would put it, every person is in the same
existential context called to the same supernatural destiny, but responds to
this call in and through the concrete circumstances they find themselves
in.
Furthermore, whether from East or West, every contemplative
attains to God, whether through emptiness or through an experience of God’s
presence!
Finally, whether from East or West, every soul is already
elevated by grace, is supernatural and produces supernatural acts attaining to
God, whether through apophasis or kataphasis. Arraj does not deny this!
All Jim is doing is
articulating an old Thomistic distinction between
substance and mode, which is to say that, when it comes to
substance, my attainment of God through praying the Psalms and a Hindu
experiencing God as led through Kundalini are both
supernatural according to substance!
Neither would necessarily be
supernatural according to mode, which is only to say they aren’t what we would
call infused contemplation. No one is suggesting that infused contemplation is
denied anyone by God for reasons of virtue, necessarily; rather, it may not be
suitable for reasons of temperament or vocation. That’s all!
B.
Roberts continued:
quote:
It
seems any Christian who talks about man’s final estate entailing the loss of
individuality is going to get thrown out, condemned, or mercifully ignored. Had
John of the Cross and others talked about this we’d never have heard of them.
Obviously, they knew when to quit. But this is exactly why you will not find
No-Self (or what I mean by this) in the works of Christian mystics. Indeed, had
I written this book in the Monastery it would never have seen the light of day. For some people in the Church, like Mr. Arraj, No-Self upsets their theological apple-carts.
Although No-Self neither contradicts nor changes a single Christian dogma,
there’s no denying it is not meant for public consumption. Although No-Self is
more orthodox than the orthodox, all people really need know is that they will
be transformed into Christ. This knowledge is both sufficient and the Truth.
(When they get there they’ll see how wondrously it all works).
If
such a loss of individuality is to be understood in terms of an ecstatic
journeying to and from self-forgetfulness, analogous to ecstasy as it is
ordinarily conceived and experienced, differing however in both quality and
orders of magnitude, then I could accommodate what might be entailed by this
spousal mysticism, which goes beyond, but not without, the unitive state.
This would be an epistemic
interpretation. And it begins to even put certain numinous experiences of my own
in context, even if not perduring past a period of a
few years, long ago now.
If this is to be otherwise interpreted ontologically, then someone is
telling an untellable story. In the first place, we do not have the
science of consciousness, the philosophy of mind or the metaphysics of emergent
reality worked out yet, and, even if we did, such a transcendent state could not
be spoken of literally, only metaphorically and with weak metaphors at
that.
Another
thing that I find interesting, or maybe moreso
perplexing, is how loose folks can be in their use of the word
consciousness. Last I heard, in the Philosophy of Mind, this was still
being called the hard problem, notwithstanding Dennett's Consciousness
Explained.
I mentioned in a prior post how we can successfully
refer to realities that we cannot otherwise successfully describe.
And this was in a theological context re: God-talk. This is also true regarding
certain physical and metaphysical realities. Before we go too far in
describing this or that consciousness theologically, it seems to me that
it is necessary that we obtain better descriptions of consciousness
philosophically. And those are not to be had just yet.
Consciousness
thus remains one of those realities, from both a physical and metaphysical
perspective, to which we can successfully refer but which we cannot otherwise
robustly describe with any satisfying degree of explanatory adequacy.
Concretely, then, for example, does it have some quantum dimension? is it physicalist but nonreductively so? is it
epiphenomenal? is it another primitive along side
space, time, mass and energy?
Our
positivist God-talk, which inhabits the last drawer in the last desk of all
metaphysical inquiry, is necessarily vague and analogical, such as in the panentheist take which I set forth in my
nonduality thread. This panentheist perspective is
not invested in, and in fact is pretty much agnostic and indifferent to, any
given philosophy of mind approach. It can live with whatever the scientists and
philosophers come up with, eventually, and will simply have a more robust
God-analogue when such dust settles, if it ever does.
This is all to suggest that we can get
along quite well, theologically, from a merely phenomenological perspective,
metaphysically, even as we wait for more knowledge, scientifically. No future
discoveries in philosophy of mind will jeopardize our human dignity or the rich
tapestry and depthful experiences of our encounters with reality, with others,
our world and our God. They will make our God-analogs richer and our
tautological arguments more taut vis a vis our grasps of
reality.
So, all this talk of consciousness here and consciousness
there seems to me to be empirically falsifiable. And, to the extent that it ever
is not, it is otherwise nothing but the inhabitation of elaborate tautologies
whose conclusions are already buried in the very terms and premises of their
arguments, which offer no way to cash out any value in terms of practical
significance. It's just people moving abstractions and constructs around in
logical formulae that have little or no correspondence to external reality (at
least as I have or can, presently, experience same).
I think we can
successfully refer to such as global consciousness, for example, from a
vague semiotic perspective vis a vis a community of inquiry, but to pretend to have
successfully described same in terms of some type of organic evolution or kosmic address specifications is farfetched, like this Wilberian thought, for example: The integral model I am
suggesting therefore explicitly includes a corresponding subtle energy at every
level of consciousness across the entire spectrum (gross to subtle to causal, or
matter to body to mind to soul to spirit).
As I have understood BR
vis a vis consciousness, she precisely defines NO SELF as NO
CONSCIOUSNESS. Paradoxically, investing, in the end, nothing in
consciousness, this opens the backdoor to the arational gnosticism dwelling,
which Wilber entered through the frontdoor by
investing, in the end, everything in consciousness? There is no
critiquing of gnostic knowledge, by definition,
especially when it is arational and unmediated? except that, in the end, only orthopraxis will authenticate
orthodoxy; we can look for "true glory" and fruits from "true practice," which
is love. We certainly wouldn't expect additions to Revelation, or departures
from established dogma, both which can be inventoried, such "inventories"
requiring a great deal of parsing, disambiguation and nuancing.
I
think once we clarify what we think may be going on propositionally,
then, we can set all that aside and focus more on what she reports
experientially. She has given us a great gift with the generosity of her
sharing of these profoundly personal experiences.
Apparently, her own
interpretations of same have grown and changed through the years, as would be
expected. Our interpretations of her experiences can change, too, through
dialogue with other traditions and depthful consideration of our own, through
feedback from her.
We needn't make more of this nor less of this than it
really is: one pilgrim's story.
I think it would be a mistake to
interpret it normatively, as if it could in any way be
a map for anyone else. That is not how spiritual autobiographies work. They
merely provide hints and clues and touchstones for the journey, letting us know,
usually retrospectively, that, sometimes, we have been where others have
trod, hence, have no fear. They really do not function to tell us,
prospectively, where we are being led or which way to go in order to get
there. We already have Scripture & Tradition and a Teaching Office to
mediate that type of revelation to us.
For those called by temperament or
vocation to a particular life of prayer, such depthful sharing as BR's,
regarding some of the promises and pitfalls of experiences such as her own, can
provide valuable insight, spiritually and psychologically. It doesn't provide
metaphysical and theological revelations, at least not of universal import
(vis a vis the norms for interpreting private
revelation).
___________________________________________________________________________________________
In
a nutshell, what I think happens is that folks extrapolate nondual realizations ontologically, which is not
a wholly unwarranted move. One of the very first things a westerner might intuit
from such a realization is perhaps how a radically reductionistic materialist monism is just untenable. It is,
in fact, the atheist credo.
Never mind that some of us realize
this through either common sense or philosophical contemplation, because it has
real problems with leaving questions of infinite regress begging, which is why
science was largely stillborn in such "cyclical" traditions. So, one can see
where this reincarnational intuition came from
also.
So, over against any modernist Enlightenment fundamentalism, with
its hallmark ontology of materialist monism, some postmodernist fundamentalists
assert what they conceive to be a more robust ontology of idealist monism, which
is, in fact, the pantheist credo. And some do this through philosophical
musing and some through existential realizations. The problem is, however, that
the infinite regress question still begs.
Furthermore, this tautology is
not taut enough vis a vis our empirical encounters of reality, which is to charge
that it is a partial but incomplete truth and equally reductionistic. It does not square, empirically, with
self-realization. Nondual realization is not untrue, but is a partial truth.
Same for self-realization. How can we marry
them? is our charge.
Look at this Wilberian rendition of nondual mind:
quote:
According
to the nondual traditions, as this nondual Spirit or Mind "steps down" into the
relative, manifest plane, each individual mind or subject remains nonlocally and immediately in touch with other minds or
subjects (all the way down), which is why, among other things, knowledge of
other minds is possible. Once on the manifest or relative dimension, then the
relative forms of intersubjectivity arise (three of
which were outlined by de Quincey, and four or five of
which I outlined). But all of them can exist primarily because of the nondual
ultimate nature of consciousness itself, which is "a singular the plural of
which is unknown." This is the final and radical meaning of intersubjectivity (namely, grounded in nondual Spirit), and
this is likewise the fourth and ultimate meaning of the mind-body problem and
its "solution" (namely, awaking to the one Mind or nondual Spirit, which is
"not-two, not-one"). My simple suggestion is that all four or five of these
meanings and their solutions ought charitably to be included in any integral
approach to these important issues.
Now,
juxtapose this with what I wrote earlier:
quote:
And
very much at the fore of this all has been a theme of kenosis, the idea of God
shrinking back and making ontological room for Creation, in general, and
shrinking back even more for us as Created Co-creators, in particular, our
memory, understanding and will corresponding Imago Dei-like to the
Trinity.
For me, Reality starts off radically nondual and only gets
quasi-nondual with the moments of Creation. As individuals we are not only not
separated from God vis a vis
some creatio continua, as He holds us in existence
after creatio ex nihilo (even when we're in mortal sin
as St. John of the Cross noted), but we are radically and inextricably
intertwined within this Divine matrix of interrelated causes and effects, which
is what makes us quasi-autonomous.
One might reconceive the final act of self-emptying, death, as a
holistically-conceived act of creaturely creation, as a kenotic moment of
radical deliverance of our memory, understanding and will -- consciousness or
self -- back into the Divine Now of the Matrix, where it is objectively
"experienced" by God, Who then re-creates us in yet another kenotic-creative act
of His own, mediating this now-divinized objective reality of our memory,
understanding and will back into a human but newly ordered body, whether thru a
singular resurrective event or thru some dynamic
process, eternally of course, not temporally, or some combination uniquely
suited to our particular needs.
We
are saying the same things, analogously, except that Wilber has robustly
described the ultimate nature as subjectivity and I only vaguely
refer to it as a nexus of interrelated causes and effects. I refer to God's
shrinking back and Wilber speaks of Nondual mind stepping down.
What he describes as the manifest or relative dimension, where the
relative forms of intersubjectivity
arise, I speak of how we Rise less quasi, more autonomous,
freedom being the hallmark of love.
Whatever else may be going on,
putatively, the idealist monism of the Nondual Mind account is incomplete
because it does not sufficiently account for, you
guessed it, self, or the attribute I have emphasized as
autonomy.
The Wilberian account
addresses the quasi vis a vis radical intersubjectivity and
I have problems with this move because it is saying more than we can possibly
know, telling an untellable story, even though I can see why it wants to
reasonably assert same. This ultimate reality is incomprehensible and can only
be apprehended in part, which is to say, once again, vaguely referred to but not
robustly described.
I also have problems with this move because it is
leaving out an account of the self, which, contrastingly, we can describe
pretty well from our empirical experiences and rational demonstrations, although
some aspects remain immersed in mystery and can only be referred to (such as
thru heuristic devices like holistic dualist conceptions of the soul, or nonreductive physicalist accounts
of the self). Thus it is that the philosophical remedy for such a pantheist
account is a properly nuanced panentheist
perspective.
The reason, therefore, that a nondual mind approach is
heterodox is grounded in natural theology, more specifically, natural
philosophy, and not because of special revelation. It is a simple matter of
definitions. If it quacks, it's not a gander.
This all has practical
implications, such as what Nancey Murphy set forth. As
we speak in terms of autonomy, from a moral theology perspective, where would we
draw the lines, for example, between limited dominion and no
dominion for this quasiautonomous human created
co-creator? in matters of life and death? in matters of health and reproduction? in our social lives? How does this all speak to our
theological anthropologies and formative spiritualities? And the methodologies
we need to employ beyond simple natural law conceptions to personalist and relationality-responsibility
approaches?
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Our
interpretive stances are in a recursive feedback loop with the interplay of our
positivist, philosophic, normative, evaluative and
other foci of human concern. There is nothing, in principle, that should a
priori rule out the possibility of our attaining, one day, a very high level
of confidence in our data and inferences regarding, for example, NDEs or other
paranormal or psychic phenomenological data. At such a time, what are now mere
heuristic metaphysical placeholders or otherwise controverted dogmatic beliefs could enjoy theoretic status
as we would be able to move beyond the nonnegotiated
and still-in-negotiation status to fully-negotiated status. It is too early on
humankind's journey to say whether we are only practically constrained,
methodologically and epistemically, or that we are
otherwise constrained, in principle, by the permanent occulting of this aspect
of reality. Of course, one could predicate the terms involved in such a way that
they would not be falsifiable, but that would create a tautology with little
traction pragmatically.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
As
I have observed, mostly from a distance, the discussions of nonduality over the
years, my lingering impression, to put it most succinctly, is that confusion
tends to reign whenever epistemological observations get extrapolated into
ontological conclusions.
By epistemological, I mean all the different
categories that people use for describing how it is that we think we know what
it is we might know. Some of these are:
1) sensation 2) thinking 3)
intuition and 4) feeling;
1) descriptive 2) prescriptive 3) evaluative
and 4) interpretive;
1) memory 2) understanding 3) will;
1)
cognitive 2) affective 3) instinctual;
1) subjective 2) objective 3)
intersubjective 4) interobjective;
1) positivist - science 2) philosophic
3) theistic 4) theotic;
1) empirical 2) rational 3) practical 4)
relational;
1) apophatic 2)kataphatic 3) affective 4)
speculative;
and so on and so forth, some more psychological, some more
philosophical, some categories a blend of such categories.
It is also my
belief that, in large measure, our epistemological faculties are geared toward
distinctly human value-realizations and therefore correspond, at least roughly,
to the values of 1)truth 2) beauty 3) goodness and 4)unity, which, for example,
religions express in 1) creed 2) cult 3) code and 4) community.
As we
move from one value-realization approach to the next, different of our epistemic
faculties will seem to enjoy a primacy, which is to say that they will come to
the fore in our experience. For example, during liturgy, in our cultivation of
beauty, we may be at certain points, mostly affectively engaged. Or, when doing
science, we may be moreso cognitively engaged,
empirically focused. The important point, here, is that epistemic primacy
doesn't imply epistemic autonomy.
These different categories do
represent different faculties which, for the most part, do correspond to
different methodologies which are autonomous. For example, faith and reason are
autonomous. Positivist sciences and normative sciences are autonomous. Apophatic
encounters of reality and kataphatic encounters are distinct, are autonomous.
Our social-relational experiences that might inspire assent are autonomous from
our empirical-rational engagements that might inspire speculation. Our practical
approaches are autonomous from our theoretical speculations.
To recognize
that these approaches to reality are autonomous is to recognize that they
involve radically different commitments in the form of value-realizations,
pursuing truth, beauty, goodness or unity, for example, and that they employ
radically different terms and categories, which is to recognize that they are
not logically-related. The important point here is that just because our
different epistemic faculties are not logically-related does not mean that they
are not intellectually-related.
And we know this, for example, from
Helminiak's hierarchy of the positivist, philosophic,
theistic and theotic foci of human concern, each which appropriates the other.
And we know this from the way that faith relates to reason in fides et ratio. And we know this from Jungian psychology and Enneagram paradigms that relate the faculties of sensation,
thinking, feeling and intuition to our cognitive, affective and instinctual
levels. And we know this as we travel from the IS to the OUGHT, the given to the
normative, the descritive to the prescriptive, in our
natural law interpretations and moral reasoning. And we know this from our
affirmation of such as Occam's Razor, where symmetry
and beauty and facility guide us to truth. And we know this whenever it seems
that truth comes flying in on the wings of beauty and
goodness, uplifted by unity. The important point here is that just because
these different epistemic faculties often enjoy a primacy in this or that
value-realization, just because they are methodologically autonomous, just
because they are intellectually-related even if not logically-related, just
because they are integrally-related, just because EACH IS NECESSARY in every
human value-realization DOES NOT MEAN THAT ANY IS SUFFICIENT for an given
value-realization.
I suppose the practical upshot of what I am saying
is that we cannot take these different epistemic faculties, which are indeed
integrally-related and claim that they are otherwise somehow holonic.
From evolutionary epistemology, we know that ours is an ecological
rationality, which is to recognize that our different epistemic faculties,
methodologies and sensibilities interact within various dialectical,
trialectical and tetradilectical tensions to help
navigate us toward every human value-realization.
Some seem to
suggest that any given epistemic approach enjoys primacy, autonomy and
sufficiency for all human value-realizations, by suggesting that the other
approaches are, on this occasion or that, not necessary due to some holonic
dynamism that allows them to somehow inhere each in the other. This is a
fantastical claim and not borne out in human experience. It is a falsifiable
claim. It leads to radical apophaticisms and gnostic arationalisms.
The different epistemic
faculties, methodologies and sensibilities that are integrally-related and
holistically (NOT holonically)-engaged in every human
value-realization, however otherwise autonomous, are all necessary, are none ---
alone ---sufficient, and navigate us toward our realization of human values
through a creative tetradalectical tension. One of those value-realizations
is metaphysical knowledge, which yields ontological insights about creation and
Creator, which further informs our theological speculations, which, in turn,
have a weighty practical significance for our approach to theosis, which has profound influence on our life of prayer,
our life in community, our unitive strivings, our formative spiritualities and
our transformative journeys. And this is why I see such a real danger in the
radical apophaticisms and gnostic arationalisms that come
from the category errors of those who wrongly extrapolate nondual
epistemological experiences to such broad, sweeping ontological conclusions
regarding, even, such metaphysical realities as the essential description of the
Creator-creature relationship. To engage in a seemingly robust description of a
Reality to Whom we can otherwise only vaguely refer
(according to all time-honored dogma of every Abrahamic tradition) is heterodox, indeed. One of the
reasons that it is difficult to robustly describe the interplay of our different
human faculties, that it is difficult to attain explanatory adequacy for exactly
how this tertradalectical tension navigates us toward our value-realizations, in
my view, is precisely because we are made in the image and likeness of
God, which is to recognize and affirm an unfathomable depth dimension to our
human experience of God, creation and one another. We are fearfully and
wondrously made! It is nothing to trivialize through reductionistic accounts, nothing to romanticize through
overly simplistic and pietistic accounts. It is something, instead, to inspire
mysterium tremendum et fascinans!
There are
time-honored traditions for discerning spirits, for evaluating alternating
consolations and desolations, for recognizing the fruits of the Spirit, for the
treatment of private revelation, for the recognition of true prophetic voices,
for gauging the journey to human authenticity via intellectual conversion,
affective conversion, moral conversion, sociopolitical conversion and religious
conversion. By their fruits, then, ye shall know them. If there is one fruit
that leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, then it is impolitic speech and
incivil, ad hominem discourse. Let us explore, then,
the creative tension between competing ideas and downplay any interpersonal
tension, which is, rather, destructive of all that leads to truth, beauty,
goodness and unity.
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Throughout
our consideration of this NoSelf notion and how it
contrasts and compares with nonduality, variously conceived, I have had these musings on nonduality in mind, especially regarding the
Divine Matrix concept of a panentheist approach.
quote:
...
viewing creation and creatures as quasi-autonomous
realities that exist in God with both the Creator and the created order
operating in and through a Divine matrix of interrelated causes and effects
...
And
very much at the fore of this all has been a theme of kenosis, the idea
of God shrinking back and making ontological room for Creation, in general, and
shrinking back even more for us as Created Co-creators, in particular, our
memory, understanding and will corresponding Imago Dei-like to the
Trinity.
For me, Reality starts off radically nondual and only gets
quasi-nondual with the moments of Creation. As individuals we are not only not
separated from God vis a vis
some creatio continua, as He holds us in existence
after creatio ex nihilo (even when we're in mortal sin
as St. John of the Cross noted), but we are radically and inextricably
intertwined within this Divine matrix of interrelated causes and effects, which
is what makes us quasi-autonomous.
Through theosis, as we empty ourselves of all that
does not conform to the Imago Dei, we might conceive of this in terms of our own
kenotic shrinking of self, gifting it back as a Reverse Creatio moment. Paradoxically, however, this movement
increases our facultative autonomy for, becoming more Like God, we are less quasi, more autonomous.
There is much
debate in modern theology about the loci of Divine Activity in our otherwise
physical world, but examples are replete in a nonreductive physicalist paradigm
of top-down causation. And with the Divine Matrix, we needn't bother with
directionality issues (top-down, bottom-up) but need only realize that God's
interactivity with us can be both utterly efficacious and ineluctably
unobtrusive at the same time. (A lot of folks have abandoned the concept physicalist for naturalist, honoring the fact that we may
not have identified all of the universe's primitives. For example, will
consciousness somehow take its place alongside space, time, mass and energy?
Too early to tell. Ayn Rand
thought so.) At any rate, the distinction between natural and supernatural can
get very blurry, however one conceives things.
When it comes to
conceiving the soul, the more rigorously one deals with the issue
philosophically, the more the dualist and nondualist conceptions resemble one
another, really to the point where distinctions are quite academic. We have seen
this with substance and process metaphysics, as the aristotelian thomists reconceive formal causation as deep and dynamic formal
fields of activity, as the process thinkers recognize bounded realities.
A holistic dualist conception more and more resembles the nonreductive nondualist conceptions. Only the radically
dualistic and radically reductionistic approaches are
theologically untenable, but this is not foremost due to anything properly
theological but, primarily, because they are philosophically
incoherent.
Back to theosis. One might reconceive the final act of self-emptying, death, as a
holistically-conceived act of creaturely creation, as a kenotic moment of
radical deliverance of our memory, understanding and will -- consciousness or
self -- back into the Divine Now of the Matrix, where it is objectively
"experienced" by God, Who then re-creates us in yet another kenotic-creative act
of His own, mediating this now-divinized objective reality of our memory,
understanding and will back into a human but newly ordered body, whether thru a
singular resurrective event or thru some dynamic
process, eternally of course, not temporally, or some combination uniquely
suited to our particular needs.
And we Rise less
quasi, more autonomous, freedom being the hallmark of love. The more freedom we
experience in life, now, the more authentic our love, the more fully human we
have become and the more God-like. And the more deeply intimate our relationship
with the Divine Matrix, in more solidarity with God and others and even self in
a manner that no eye has seen nor ear heard nor the
heart of wo/man ever imagined. There is no reason that
this process cannot go on forever, as we progress through kenotic exchanges,
Lover and Beloved, gifting and re-gifting, creating and
recreating.
Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has
spoken
I must go birding in God's recreation of the new
day
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Below
are some practical implications for Nancy Murphy's view. It does demonstrate how
a more nondual approach can be quite naturally holistic, quite naturally incarnational, forsaking some of the dualistic baggage that
has plagued our tradition for too long. Again, it is not offered here as an over
against, as overly normative, but in a dialogic reaffirmation of the many
realities we have affirmed together for years.
quote:
Both
Judaism and Christianity apparently began with a concept of human nature that
comes closer to contemporary nonreductive physicalism than to Platonic dualism. But, both made
accommodations to a prevailing dualistic philosophy, and combined a doctrine of
the immortality of the soul with a doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The
pressing question now, concerns whether to return to those earlier nonreductive physicalist accounts
of human nature, as many Christian theologians have urged throughout this
century.
If a nonreductive physicalist view of the person is acceptable theologically
and biblically, as well as scientifically and philosophically, a variety of
consequences follow in the fields of ethics, spiritual development, medicine,
and psychotherapy.
For example, many arguments against abortion depend on
when the human soul is presumed to appear. If the soul is present from the
moment of conception, then abortion at any stage of pregnancy is full-scale
murder. This argument no longer makes sense with a nonreductive physicalist account
of the person, in which there is no soul upon which one's humanity depends.
Similar sorts of issues arise with regard to euthanasia. It is certainly true
that the concept of the soul has been valuable for ethical purposes; it needs to
be shown that equally powerful arguments can be constructed using the nonreductive physicalist account
of personhood. For example, Jesus' injunction to care for the "least of the
brethren" (Matthew 25:40) can be applied supremely to children before they are
born, as well as to the elderly at the end of their life. Notice that in Jesus'
parable the emphasis is not on saving the souls of those who are in distress,
but rather, on meeting their bodily needs for food, water, clothing, and
companionship.
Spiritual formation throughout most of Christian history
has presupposed a Platonic conception of the person. It has often been
understood, for instance, that "mortification of the flesh" is necessary for the
flourishing of the soul. It is likely that a nonreductive physicalist account
of the person will lead to healthier and more effective approaches to spiritual
life.
Psychotherapists have already come to realize the dependence of
psychological health on physical health, such as when a serious illness leads to
depression. Equally important is the less-frequently recognized dependence of
physical health on psychological and spiritual factors. This includes, for
example, the role of stress (a psychological factor) in causing ulcers, high
blood pressure, and other psychosomatic ailments. Spiritual
factors, such as resentment resulting from an inability to forgive others, also
play a significant role in affecting one's physical health. Increasingly,
studies are finding that prayer and church attendance are associated with better
health. A nonreductive physicalist conception of the person can be expected to
promote a more integrative practice in a variety of health-care professions.
That is, it will not be possible to compartmentalize the person and to conclude
that physicians treat only physical illnesses, psychologists only mental illnesses, and pastoral counselors
only spiritual ills.
From
your own subjective experiences, you might better empathize with Bernadette and
how her experiences similarly confirmed for her what also appear to be extrapolations in the order of metaphysical
knowledge. Practical examinations of the circumstances might, at best, provide
others with the ability to assign different levels of probability to varying
interpretations, metaphysically speaking.
But that's just metaphysics.
And either view is presently consonant with known facts of science and history
and with revelation. If there is a metaphysics of heaven, and if death and
subsequent glorification is experienced moreso
dynamically and process-like, then perhaps we can accomodate all manner of otherwise seemingly disparate
metaphysical interpretations?
Perhaps BR was frozen in one frame, such as
one might experience in the liminal space between
heavenly "mansions." It does not seem to me that any given account is
necessarily mutually incompatible with other accounts, or that one's experience
must be taken as normative for all other experiences. While it may very well
have normative impetus for any given freeze-frame that we might all go through,
one "day," it need not of necessity otherwise elevate that experience or state
or stage or frozen-frame to some gold standard of the Golden Gates.
Experiences on "this side" are richly textured and elusive enough. How
much more so those of the next realm(s)? Dogmatic pronouncements about
experiences on the "other side" that exceed the necessarily vague and minimalist
accounts of faith are of dubious origin, and what is good for BR is good for
Peter Kreeft.
If all BR is really about is
metaphysical speculation, then there will be no easy adjudication of her claims.
If she has broken open new categories and terms, and it appears that she has,
then it is not a logically valid move to place them in logical contradiction to
terms and categories and arguments of other systems that do not even employ such
concepts. That's like placing quantum mechanics and gravity in competition and
suggesting they are contradictory and not rather complementary accounts of the
same reality. Those have to be reconciled through an arduous process of
renormalization.
If, otoh, or more
appropriately, in addition to such metaphysical groundbreaking, BR is
speculating theologically, then that is more readily adjudicable vis a vis the existing
deposit of the faith. It is one thing to do inculturated theology, rearticulating truths of the faith
within specific cultural and metaphysical hermeneutics, and quite another to do
de novo revelation. But before we suggest that anyone is doing something
that heterodox, we must step back and ask them to prescind from a strictly metaphysical articulation to a more
phenomenological account and to tell us: "Do you believe in God, the Father
almighty ... in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of
saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and in life
everlasting?" And these creedal articulations must then be consistent with the
forms of worship we cultivate and the sacramental economy we trade in and Christ
present in the Eucharist in the presider, the people
gathered, the word proclaimed, in the sacred species, as we celebrate meal,
memorial, covenant, thanksgiving and presence. And it seems that, on a
phenomenological level and praxis level, BR is good with all of this? It is far
less important what one thinks about the relationship between the immanent and
economic Trinity.
It is not so much important HOW these mysteries are
accomplished in positivist and metaphysical terms but THAT they are realized. In
our religious language, we employ beliefs that are dogmatic, which is to say
that they are nonnegotiated and nonnegotiable. In our
metaphysical langauge, our beliefs are still in
negotiation, which is to say that they are heuristic devices, conceptual
placeholders, but not robustly explanatory. In our scientific and positivist
language, we deal with beliefs that have been negotiated by a wider community of
inquiry, which is to say that they are not quite as dogmatic (always open to
falsification), and moreso theoretic (robustly
explanatory) and less so heuristic.
When we see people employing dogmatic
approaches and using nonnegotiated universals to
describe metaphysical realities, or, when we witness them using robustly
theoretic approaches in their treatment of theological realities, which are
otherwise best dealt with in metaphor and poetry and vague terms proper to the
mysteries to which they refer but cannot otherwise fully decribe, chances are some major category errors are in
play.
That's part of what I sense might be going on in BR's work. But
these rubrics are good for both geese and ganders.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
There’s
a certain dramatic irony in that, on one hand, one could truly, with no small
amount of philosophical rigor and empirical scrutiny, embrace a certain
metaphysical agnosticism, needing to banish certain of life's mysteries neither
speculatively nor affectively but letting them live on while still holding to
the essential elements of one's faith, while, on the other hand, one could
indeed resist uncertainty and seek faculty-based comforts in one's clinging to
otherwise dispensable metaphysical formulations, as if certain religious beliefs
were necessarily connected to certain concepts, otherwise dulling one's
aesthetic sensibilities for this immense mystery of life.
___________________________________________________________________________________________
To
the extent one employs philosophical rigor and empirical scrutiny toward the end
of recognizing that it is indeed too early on humankind's journey to rush to
closure in favor of any particular metaphysical approach or positivist
perspective regarding certain of life's ineluctable paradoxes, adjudicating many
such competing arguments with the Scottish verdict, recognizing manifold
interpretations as indeed live options consonant with faith, all this over
against so many other dogmatic takes, whether derived from a scientistic or fideistic or
pietistic stance --- then one may very well have already bowed to mystery, well
tolerating life's ambiguities, well accommodated to life's paradoxes, well
holding life's contradictions, well nurturing life's creative tensions and truly
pondering in one's heart, with Mary, this Jesus and Who He is for me, for you,
for humankind, for the cosmos and, through the Spirit, for His Abba and
ours.
It has been a most fruitful engagement. I leave you all with: http://shalomplace.com/res/kgambit.html
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Temporal
distances are not relevant for
eternal moments in the Divine Now, such as the "distance" between one's
particular judgment and the general resurrection at the moment of death (as per
Kung)? To be clear, I am referring to my prior post and Kung's belief that
resurrection takes place immediately.
Indeed, what seems even more
consonant with both the enhanced "epistemic" experience of the dying and the
putative ontological manifestation of any deceased loved ones is --- not the
metaphysical reality of what would, by definition, be badly impaired disembodied
souls, but --- instead, the reality of what would otherwise be already ensouled, glorified bodies?
In other words, the
deceased loved ones, presenting so robustly metaphysically are not suggestive of
disembodied souls. And the person dying and transitioning as well as you
describe, even recovering memory, understanding and will (as mediated as
objectively known to the Divine Now) seems more consistent with one who's
stepped into a vestibule of bodily glorification as opposed to some shadowy
disembodied vestige of one's self?
Now, insofar as we believe that not
all share the same destiny, these hospice accounts do not have to be taken as
normative for every afterlife transitioning. No reason to believe that the dying
process, for all its transcultural similarities, does
not have, for each person, such idiosyncrasies that depend on the exigencies of
their passing and as might be fitting to the manner in which they lived their
life. IOW, who's to say every journey is the same?
This putative
annihilation of self may not be temporally distanced from its own resurrection
(via the mediation of its memory, understanding and will as objectively known to
the Divine Now). Where Alzheimer's patients are concerned, especially those who
"show strong signs of their personalities enduring, and can even experience the
re-vivification of their lucid self-other sense," this mediation by the Divine
Now might even suggest itself more strongly. The dynamic process account rather
than the discreet event account may better capture what goes on, however
temporal, however eternal, whatever the metaphysical
reality.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
You
wrote:
I think we have a situation, here, where
Revelation and theology illuminate philosophy.
That was very well
said. In the positivist, philosophic, theistic and theotic view of things (Helminiak's hierarchy), while these are otherwise autonomous
domains of human concern and these different foci represent radically different
commitments and logics, they are still intellectually-related. And our theistic
commitments, for example, do make some demands on our philosophical
perspectives, clearly excluding some even. Truth often comes flying in on the wings of beauty and goodness, uplifted
by unity.
Consider this
quote by Marc Cortez in EMBODIED SOULS, ENSOULED BODIES --- AN EXERCISE IN
CHRISTOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE MIND/BODY DEBATE:
quote:
The
thesis thus comprises two major sections. The first develops an understanding of
Karl Barth’s theological anthropology focusing on three major facets: (1) the
centrality of Jesus Christ for any real understanding of human persons; (2) the
resources that such a christologically determined view of human nature has for
engaging in interdisciplinary discourse; and (3) the ontological implications of
this approach for understanding the mind/body relationship. The second part of
the study then draws on this theological foundation to consider the implications
that understanding human nature christologically has
for analyzing and assessing several prominent ways of explaining the mind/body
relationship.
This study, then, is an exercise in understanding the
nature of a christocentric
anthropology and its implications for understanding human ontology.
This
doesn't deny that science and metaphysics and philosophy are autonomous and even
narrower foci of human concern that get appropriated by theology as a broader
focus of human concern, but it does illustrate how theology can inform some of
our axiomatic commitments or presuppositions for these other foci, such as, for
example, requiring moral and metaphysical realism, epistemological realism,
fundamental human dignity and so on.
Cortez closes with:
quote:
In
this study, we have not attempted to resolve this theoretical conundrum. In
fact, the approach developed in the course of this study suggests that
theologians should resist the temptation to wed Christian theology to any
particular theory of human ontology.
This
is echoed by Alfredo Dinis, who is the Dean, Associate
Professor, and Lecturer of Logic, Philosophy of Science and Cognitive Science,
Faculty of Philosophy of Braga, Catholic University of Portugal, in this paper , which is entitled Body, Soul and God:
Philosophy, Theology and the Cognitive Sciences. Dinis writes:
quote:
The
concept of a soul is not theological but rather philosophical. As a consequence,
one may leave it out of the theological discourse. Concepts like ‘mind,’ ‘soul,’
‘self,’ and ‘consciousness’ are not specifically
theological concepts. They are rather philosophical concepts.
Theology
has over the centuries used such concepts to express some religious beliefs, but
such beliefs do not have a necessary connection with those concepts and
certainly not with the metaphysical meaning they have in some philosophical
traditions. Today, however, it is the sciences, especially the cognitive
sciences, that wish to clarify such concepts.
In this task, they are most
of the time against religious beliefs because such beliefs seem to be
necessarily connected with those concepts. I want to argue that this is a
mistake, and that most authors in the cognitive sciences are basing their
analysis on misleading presuppositions.
But it is also true that a new
theology needs a new anthropology, one that is less dependent on the traditional
metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and more in line with a relational paradigm.
And
in the spirit of those two papers cited above, I commend the following work of
Nancey Murphy to all:
THEOLOGY IN A POSTMODERN AGE: which included three lectures:
1) BEYOND MODERN LIBERALISM AND FUNDAMENTALISM; 2) BEYOND MODERN DUALISM AND
REDUCTIONISM; and 3) BEYOND MODERN INWARDNESS.
A more concise summary can
be found here and also here at Counterbalance, entitled Neuroscience &
the Person and Neuroscience, Religious Experience and the Self,
respectively.
Finally, here are some interview transcripts of Nancey Murphy's The Conscious Mind.
Alfredo
Dinis amplifies this:
quote:
The
metaphysical mind-body dualism is now being systematically challenged by a
growing number of Christian philosophers and theologians (Murphy 1998, Brown
1998, Clayton 1999, Gregersen 2000). Nancy Murphy, for
example, argues philosophically in favour of a
non-reductive physicalism, which she describes as “the
view that the human nervous system, operating in concert with the rest of the
body in its environment, is the seat of consciousness (and also of human
spiritual and religious capacities).” (1998, 131) These Christian philosophers
and theologians believe that we do not need either the concept of a metaphysical
self or that of a metaphysical soul. A relational self seems more adequate to
understand the nature of human beings than a metaphysical self. Indeed, every
traditional metaphysical category appears increasingly to be inadequate and in
need to be abandoned in our search for knowledge. A relational view of the
person, and indeed of God, needs no immortal soul to assure immortality.
Instead, immortality is a relational situation. Human relationships constitute
the individuals as persons. For those who believe in God, it is God’s
foundational relation with the whole creation that makes human immortality
possible.
Now,
let me say that the metaphysics of the human person remain an open question,
especially vis a vis philosophy of mind issues and the hard problem
of consciousness. And let me reassert that, on matters metaphysical, I am
agnostic. I incline, however, to the more nondual approaches to the human
person. And to the human person's relationship to God as being
only quasiautonomous. My panentheism is indifferent to metaphsyics, for the most part, and very much indifferent to
whether or not any subjective aspect of human personhood is
immortal.
Now,
as to any teachings, dogmas or creedal elements, those are
distinctly theological, necessarily vague, and certainly open to interpretation
and rearticulation, metaphysically and
philosophically. They certainly do not presuppose aristotelian or thomistic
metaphysics, in general, or the soul, in particular. The "descent into hell" was
possibly understood by the early church as an emphasis on Jesus' death and the
resurrection of the body is foundational for the doctrine of the Communion of
Saints, the church militant, penitent and triumphant. For those in the church
penitent (a state) and the church triumphant (heaven), we needn't conceive of
them as disembodied. With Kung, we can argue against the idea of a separated
soul between particular judgment and the general resurrection as understood in
either a platonic or aristotelian-thomist way,
recognizing that, in Kung's words, "man dies a whole, with body and soul, as a
psychosomatic unity … into that eternity of the divine Now which, for those who
have died, makes irrelevant the temporal distance of this world between personal
death and the last judgement."
While theology
certainly does have implications for our metaphysical and philosophical
presuppositions, as you noted and our authors above affirm, you will note that
all of the above-listed authors consider other anthropological approaches, other
than the distinctly dualistic conception, to be live options for the inquiring
theological anthropologists.
You wrote:
quote:
Some
of these teachings are dogmas, one is even in the Creed -- all long before the
rediscovery of Aristotle and the teachings of Thomas Aquinas, Scholasticism,
etc.
and,
in fact, many of the earliest Christian writers of both the 1st and 2nd
centuries, and even later Athanasius, did not believe in human immortality. It
came later with hellenization and those guys you
listed.
Nancey Murphy summarizes:
quote:
Both
Judaism and Christianity apparently began with a concept of human nature that
comes closer to contemporary nonreductive physicalism than to Platonic dualism. But, both made
accommodations to a prevailing dualistic philosophy, and combined a doctrine of
the immortality of the soul with a doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The
pressing question now, concerns whether to return to those earlier nonreductive physicalist accounts
of human nature, as many Christian theologians have urged throughout this
century.
As
for any persistence of the soul after death, while Kung, in Eternal Life, finds
a two-fold view of human nature unscientific and any life based thereon
untenable, he allows for resurrection, as does John Hick, right after death.
Kung has tried to rehabilitate the concept of purgatory, which is less
problematical conceived as a state not a place (thanks JPII for clearing that
up).
Alfredo Dinis also wrote:
quote:
From
this externalist point of view, it is possible to think about immortality
within a non-dualistic framework - within a relational and dialogical
framework. In his book Introduction to Christianity Joseph Ratzinger, the actual Pope, has put forward a relational
view of the soul:
“ ‘having a spiritual soul’ means
precisely being willed, known, and loved by God in a special way; it means being
a creature called by God to an eternal dialogue and therefore for its own part
capable of knowing God and of replying to him. What we call in substancialist language ‘having a soul’ we will describe in
a more historical, actual language as ‘being God’s partner in a dialogue’.“ (2004, 355)
A dialogical concept of the human soul has
for Ratzinger an immediate consequence: an equally
dialogical concept of immortality: “man’s immortality is based on his dialogic
relationship with and reliance upon God, whose love alone bestows eternity”
(2004, 355). A dialogical concept of immortality needs no body-soul scheme, no
natural-supernatural dualism. Thus, according to Ratzinger, “it is also perfectly possible to develop the
idea [of immortality] out of the body-soul schema” (2004, 355), and so “it
becomes evident once again at this point that in the last analysis one cannot
make a neat distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’,” (2004, 355-6),
since it is the dialogue of love between God and the human beings, and among the
human beings themselves, that is truly the essence of every religious
experience.
It
is precisely Occam, who applied his razor to any philosophical demonstration of
the immortality of the soul. Scotus, too, saw such
arguments as inconclusive. Proper scriptural exegesis doesn't allow
proof-texting either on this metaphysical issue. While it remains, in my view,
an open question, parsimony doesn't needlessly multiply ontological layers for
explanations that have ever increasing probabilities based on empirically
falsifiable and verifiable observations regarding those faculties of the human
brain once explained by those of the soul. With Peirce, I'm all for the
mattering of mind and the minding of matter. Against Kung, however, I'm not
ready to toss out psychic phenomena and other paranormal evidence. It is too
early to draw such conclusions. Neither, however, do I want to foreclose on
physicalist and/or naturalist accounts of the
soul.
I think we have a situation where revelation and theology can
certainly help us with an account that elevates human nature and dignity via
a Christocentric
anthropology. But I also believe that theology has overstepped its bounds if it
leaves anyone with the impression that the metaphysics of philosophy of mind are
loaded with inescapable philosophical presuppositions.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
On
my own journey, there are many distinctions that I have found very useful for
processing my various experiences. For example, I feel like I can legitimately
distinguish between:
1) phenomenal states
2) developmental
stages
3) psychic structures
4) epistemological faculties
5)
ontological categories
6) metaphysical realities
7) positivist
sciences
8) philosophic (normative) sciences
9) practical sciences
(including theological)
10) theotic sciences (e.g. formative
spirituality)
When it comes to the experience of no self , in
particular, I have found Merton's distinctions especially useful:
1)
existential vs theological
2) apophatic vs kataphatic
3) natural vs
supernatural
4) immanent vs transcendent
5)
impersonal vs personal
Further, from Merton, I
came to better understand that the false self is a necessary part of our
development and is not lost but transcended on the journey of transformation,
which is to say that we go beyond it but not without it as we grow in
likeness to God. This is not incompatible with the view that I recently
shared regarding my own philosophical conception of nonduality here:
quote:
I
do not see anything wrong with viewing creation and creatures as
quasi-autonomous realities that exist in God with both the Creator and the
created order operating in and through a Divine matrix of interrelated causes
and effects.
So,
I certainly do not equate any conception of the transcendence of this False Self
with an experience of the No Self. Rather, I equate the latter with what Arraj has described as the loss of the affective ego.
And we should be aware that this is a very complex psychospiritual dynamic that doesn't lend itself to facile
analyses and diagnoses, whether from this depression or that, dark nights,
enlightenment, the threshold of contemplation, infused contemplation and so
on.
I am grateful to people like Ken Wilber, Tony deMello and Bernadette Roberts for the depth of their
personal sharing and the breadth of their imagination and intellection. It
provides much food for thought and experiential grist for the formative
spirituality mill. My chief criticism is that they have all, in one way or
another, committed major category errors vis a vis, for example, the
many distinctions I have outlined above. Above all, whatever it is that is going
on vis a vis their own phenomenal states, psychic structures and
developmental stages, they have drawn sweeping and unwarranted conclusions
regarding metaphysical realities, in my view.
Below are some musings
from yesteryear that discuss my understanding of the Loss of the Affective Ego
vis a vis my processing of my own experiences through Merton's
insights. They can be found in context here.
quote:
I
cannot report a loss of affect as much as I can discern, rather, a tendency for
feelings to follow me into action rather than leading me into action.
St.
Thomas described how our love of God increases in proportion to our knowledge of
God. And this is true.
St. Bernard described how our knowledge of God
increases in proportion to our love of God. This, too, is true.
The
knowledge of God that St. Bernard describes, however, surpasses that which St.
Thomas was speaking and writing about. St. Thomas was talking about that
knowledge of God that comes from both natural and supernatural revelation, a
discursive knowing that increases through our study of philosophy, metaphysics,
theology and such, such a knowing as could never attain to God's essential
nature even as it might infinitely advance toward same.
The love of
which both Thomas and Bernard spoke of, however, can indeed communicate with
God's essential nature, leading one to a mysterious type of knowledge that
certainly informs our normative sciences (of logic, aesthetics and ethics) and
descriptive sciences (for instance, natural science) but which also far
surpasses them, a knowledge difficult to describe or articulate. Such a love, I
believe, is experienced on the threshold of contemplation.
Such is the
love which casts out all fear. And here is the link to the loss of the affective
ego that I'd like to explore. The perfect love that casts out all fear is a love
that has grown in dependency on God, has learned to trust God, that knows that,
however bad the situation or dire the circumstances, in the final analysis, all
will be well. It is the mystical love of Julian that sings all may, can, will
and shall be well and is the realization of the promise that you will know that
all manner of things will be well. Here, then, is the distinction we draw
between existential fear and neurotic fear, existential guilt and neurotic
guilt, existential anger and neurotic anger, the existential always in service
of life and love and relationship, the neurotic invariably life-detracting,
love-detracting, relationship-destroying. We are not dealing only with neuroses
that are overcome in the process of individuation but also those sinful
resistances to conversion that are overcome on our journey of transformation,
distinct but intertwined realities.
So, I would describe the loss of the
affective ego as an energy inversion whereby the emotions and feelings and
affective life don't so much energize our behaviors by initiating them but
rather energize our behaviors by reinforcing them. It seems that this state
could be effected all of a sudden through some precipitating event or could
arise through time and a habit of virtue.
I will stop here as my thoughts
are fogging up, but there is a dynamic of love and surrender that seems to be
involved and either a sudden metanoia or a force of
habit where this dynamic is concerned?
Love, eminently reasonable, needs
no reason, inasmuch as it is sufficient unto itself. Happiness, finally, cannot
be pursued but must ensue. So, too, with good feelings.
They aren't needed but will often ensue, which is to say, follow, love.
Merton noted that often, when we are in pain and
conflict and contradiction, we incorrectly associate same with old wounds, with
old injuries that truly have been resolved and healed already. During such
times, Merton encourages us to consider the very real possibility that we are,
rather, being invited to open ourselves to a new level of being through such
pain and conflict and contradiction. In other words, if we are not properly
attentive, then we run the risk of stagnation, desolation and aridity, sometimes
for months or years, dwelling on the wrong integrative and transformative
issues, missing the invitation to move to another level, a level that could be
attained in a day even.
One of the chief obstacles to advancing in the
spiritual life, then, is to gain a certain clarity of vision regarding the route
to sanctity or to psychological integration (routes that are much intertwined)
and then acting as if the vision itself is the attainment when, in fact, it is
not the mapping of the journey that marks our growth but the walking of the
road, which is to say that, if you are on the illuminative or unitive way, then
get on with it, and so on. Further, the mapping never involves the entire
journey but entails, rather, our next good step, a step which is the spiritual
equivalent of taking the entire journey Thus it is that the entire road is
traversed, one step at a time in faith with the trust that that step is truly
what is required for now, for today. We can get caught up with seeing the road
and then fail to walk it, is our constant peril.
Two lessons here:
Sometimes one has to quit beating one's head against the wall just because it
feels good when you stop. Sometimes one has to quit circling the same
developmental block on the journey just because some of the signs look the same,
which is to say that emotional memories can get in the way by misleading us into
thinking that our pain is rooted in old unresolved issues when it is moreso about leading us in a new direction entirely (with a
genesis in new issues), inviting us to another level entirely. Then, once we see
this new direction, it is of the essence to WALK it and not merely content
ourselves in the consolation of SEEING it!
Well, this is a very loose
rendering of the meaning I gathered from Merton and any misconstructions are my
own. I will leave it to the forum to sort through how the
integration/transformation of the affective ego fits in, for that may be a
better way of describing what I think is going on in what is being called the
loss of the affective ego. Point is that old emotional memories can get
improperly associated with new spiritual emergence issues and that we can
misdiagnose the reason for our present pain, conflict and
contradiction.
I believe it was in that very same lecture that Merton
noted that the spiritual path and the path of scientific breakthroughs is analogous. Specifically, the steps are: 1) We find an issue, sort through it and set about to solve it.
2) We grapple and grapple with it until we realize that it is virtually
irresolute, unsolvable, beyond us, too difficult. 3) We let go and move on. 4)
Sometimes, years later, the solution comes to us in an instant, in a
flash.
Nothing very profound here. We've all
used this apporach in balancing our checkbooks, eh?
But the point is that that is how our human natures are constructed and that
that is how our unconscious and conscious minds and spirits seem to
interface.
Seeing after not before is axiomatic for the spiritual mapping
of the journey. Others' journeys, even those of the great mystical doctors,
let's say the Carmelites like John of the Cross and Teresa of Jesus, can give us
touchpoints for the journey, indications that we are
on the road, but they have no predictive value. The same is true with Ignatian
and sanjuanian discernment such as re: consolation and
desolation, maybe even such as regarding loss of affect, depression, acedia, beginnings of contemplation -- where we are moreso discerning retrospectively and not so much being
guided prospectively.
Finally, BINGO re: this wisdom as not being a
property of the mind even though it works very much in concert with the mind.
The contemplative gaze in love transcends our cognitive and discursive faculties
and penetrates through to the Divine Essence, actually communicating and
relating to God's essential nature, a nature that is, in principle,
incomprehensible.
We must be careful, however, in confusing
incomprehensible with unintelligible. If these experiences were unintelligible
and God was unintelligible, this forum wouldn't be possible, huh?
Another
Mertonesque thought: We are moving toward an
existential realization of how critical to our spiritual survival prayer really
is. This realization is attained when we feel our need for prayer as acutely as
we would feel the need for a breath when underwater.
That is my crude
rendering from memory. I think this has something to say to us all whether we
are called to discursive mediation, lectio, meditatio, oratio, contemplatio, operatio or what
have ya. Whatever our prayer gift as led by the
Spirit, it is to be engaged with the sense of critical and acute and urgent need
that affirms our radical dependence and perennial state of existential
crisis.
Now, don't get Merton wrong. This is all dialectical. One moves
into crisis to lose crisis. One loses self to gain self. First, there is a
mountain. Then, there is no mountain. Then, there is. One recognzies one's radical dependency to move to place of
radical trust. One experiences one's emptiness and abject poverty to realize
one's utter fullness. One moves into paradox and pain and contradiction to
realize that, whatdaya know, all is well.
This
is something re: the loss of self that is affirmed by the Sufi (Islamic)and the Hasidic (Jewish) mystics and that Merton, building
on Buber as well as the Sufis, so well understood.
So, too, with human
affects and desires. John of the Cross speaks of disordered appetites and
Ignatius speaks of inordinate desires. It is not the appetite or desire we seek
to eradicate, ultimately, but through proper ascticism
and renunciation, we lose our emotional energy that intitiates so many of our behaviors (both virtue and vice)
only to regain it to reinforce our virtues. Think of Ignatian discernment re:
consolation and desolation, for example, and of how the different spirits
console or afflict us, variously, as we either cooperate with Grace or
backslide.
This dialectic is working, I believe, with the affective ego.
Now, there may be something very deeply analogous going on with spiritual
consolations and desolations and psychological affects that is not completely
identical. This could account for how psychologically developmentally deformative influences might intefere/interact with spiritually transformative processes.
This is no easy nut to crack and might profoundly influence with what facility
one moves through an existential crisis to the experience of
no-crisis-after-all. IOW, a spiritual emergence issue that gets foisted upon
someone may not achieve its dialectical goal of teaching one to breathe
underwater but could, for all practical purposes, drown a person.
When He
knew for certain only drowning men could see Him, He said all men shall be
sailors, then, until the sea shall free them.
continuing with Merton
Merton speaks of a Sufi
scholar, who draws many parallels to psychoanalysis, which is to say who sees
the therapy process as analogous to the spiritual journey.
If in therapy
our primary concern is the resolution of unresolved subconscious conflicts, then
Sufism might be thought of in the same way, only on a deeper level.
In
therapy and normal individuation, we are resolving certain conflicts, the
resolutions of which 1) take us from an infantile level, take us from the merely
instinctual animal to a human type of being where our cognitive and affective
development is concerned 2) then further take us and adapt us to successful
social and cultural beings.
Many struggle at the first level, such as
with an Oedipus complex, by way of example, staying Momma's boys their entire
life, but most get through it to the second level of struggle, some falling prey
to escapes from the difficult realities of social-cultural life. AA is an
example of a good way to deal with such evasions, helping primarily by providing
motives to change, wise to the fact that one has to want to change in order to
change and no one can do it for us. This is pretty much where conventional
therapy stops, helping one deal with one's neurotic evasions of social
responsibility.
This, however, is insufficient for bringing about the
general honesty required to go deeper and to become an authentic human who has
faced life's fundamental challenges, life's BIGGER problems, gaining life's
existential awareness.
What are these BIG PROBLEMS? 1) continuity vs discontinuity - death
2) creativity - having a life that is meaningful, a presence that makes a
difference.
What are the mistakes that even analysts/therapists make
here? What mistakes are made by us as individuals at this level? We treat these
issues as if they were problems of social adaptation (that second level we
talked about). IOW, if you are esteemed by your society or in a particular cultural milieu, then you've conquered these problems, your
presence not only has made a difference but lives on, in a manner of speaking.
WRONG! This "solution" leads people into a further evasion from a truly
meaningful life. This blueprint is wrong and must be torn up and thrown away.
[Think here of our affective reward system and not only what vices are
reinforced by certain emotions but also by what so-called virtues are being
reinforced by our range of emotions. There needs to be a rewiring.]
What
is called for, rather, is a BREAKTHROUGH into existential awareness. IOW, we
recognize that this social esteem and instinctual control we have gained is
MEANINGLESS, not meaningless, to be sure, for our functioning in ordinary life,
but certainly in terms of life's ultimate meaning. [Here Merton recommends
Viktor Frankl.]
So, from this deeper level, our
social success is meaningless. On one hand, though, it is great and necessary,
but, otoh, it is TOTALLY NUTS!
How do we get in
touch with what is needed on the deeper level? Through the Psalmist is one way,
for the deeper level whether praying the mad, glad or sad psalms is always
GOD.
The CROSS is the demonstration of this struggle, the realization of
this conflict in Jesus, a conflict between the establishment of the religion,
such as in society, on one hand, and the realization of authentic religion, such
as in one's heart, otoh. It REJECTS the silly notion
of "Keep the rules and there you've got all the answers," which Merton calls a
wooden nickel. It similarly rejects: "Don't keep the rules," which is a stupid
form of the same silly game.
The ultimate solution to our biggest
subconscious unresolved conflicts, our existential questions, is experiencing
our rootedness in God, God in our very hearts. Death loses its significance as
an end because we are already finalities, already ends unto ourselves because of
our being-in-God, being-in-love, which is sufficient unto itself with no further
reason or justification. Our creativity is found in our issuing forth from the
Creator and not in anything we do to gain social approval or cultural amenities.
The obligational has become aspirational. One then studies and prays, fastening and
binding one's spirit to God, clinging to God, after the manner I wrote about
previously, needing prayer as badly as one who is under water needs a breath.
Then, in all we see and experience, God is present, and we don't at all take
seriously the self we have to be to operate in society, the role playing, the
best things in life not being demanded by us but received a pure gift from God
FOR ME, who lets God be Himself in me, when my false self has
vanished.
The old emotional programming, that was even formative and not
deformative, must be re-wired, in order to move on to
the deeper level of a human being-in-love-with-God. Hence the
dark Nights. Hence, the transformation of the affective
ego as we move from a false to a true self.
re: The old emotional
programming, that was even formative and not deformative, must be re-wired, in order to move on to the
deeper level of a human being-in-love-with-God. Hence the dark
Nights. Hence, the transformation of the affective ego
as we move from a false to a true self.
continuing -
Hence, what Merton is describing is our
social persona, which must die. True enough, our formation from the
animal-instinctual to the social-cultural self is required, is necessary for the
journey. In fact, we cannot surrender this self to the Cross, which is to say,
to the existential crisis, until we have fully come into possession of
same.
The existential crisis, then, involves a confrontation of the I
with the not I , of the true self with the false self, and, when it is upon us,
everything we see and observe and relate to in our existence is then seen
through the lens of this crisis, of this Cross.
For society-at-large,
then, the Gospel is this lens. The problem is that we have talked about the
Cross so much, about the Gospel so much, that we have, in some sense,
trivialized it and robbed it of its profound and radical significance for our
individual lives and our lives in community. While in this crisis, however, we
come to realize that the reason the world has so many huge problems -- socially,
culturally, politically, economically -- is because of people, people like me
who are living on a phony, superficial level of existence, out of contact with
our true source, Who is God, alone.
The ultimate idolatry, then, is our
self. So, we take this socially-formed self and crucify it and it is not like
going to a movie or coming into an Internet discussion forum but is, rather,
much more like walking into a fire.
The reward system, the reinforcement
mechanisms, the old emotional programs, which worked so well for those of us who
made it through our formative years with more formation, reformation and
information than deformation, must be transformed. This mirrors, in fact, how
our loving knowledge of God no longer comes through our senses, no longer is
accompanied by sensible consolations, but is a direct communication with the
Divine Essence that is beyond our discursive faculties. All of this is a massive
upheaval of the way things have been for us --- cognitively, affectively,
morally even, for it is no longer a mere following of the rules that brings one
closer to God, although that part of our formation was absolutely necessary.
This is a huge project and undertaking, multilayered and multitextured and quite unique for each individual, although
we have discussed the touchpoints and the mapping of
this journey.
The soul now approaches the God, Who needn't approach,
Who dwells within, and the heart remains restless that
has not made God its all. Rooted in God in radical trust and surrender, a new
reward and reinforcement system gets set in place, where Love of self for sake
of self has been transcended by love of God for sake of self, which has been
transcended by love of God for sake of God, 'til, finally, our true self emerges
and we love that self for the sake of God. The dialectic takes us back into
self-possession, paradoxically, by self-surrender. This has cognitive, affective
and moral aspects.
This is why we are here.
What comes to mind with
respect to adulterers and murderers like both King Herod and King David, is
what, ultimately, makes the difference between our going Herod's route or that
of David?
To a certain extent, all that society asks by way of
reformation is that we be rehabilitated into a good social persona, that we
function well in our interpersonal dealings -- politically, economically,
socially and culturally. IOW, society asks that we follow the rules, that we
obey the law. Adherence to the Law is what was required of these Old Testament
persons, in accordance with the Old Covenant. David became a good man and a
great king by meeting these standards. He became his true self, the psalmist,
when he went deeper in his relationship to God.
So, in its very essence,
the Old Covenant very much corresponds to that second level of development, that
which pertains to our socialization, and, although there were certain prophecies
and foreshadowings, the crosses borne by these peoples
were not the same as THE CROSS. Certainly, there must have always been some
opportunity for humans on earth to partake of the transformative process effected by Jesus for once and for all through his birth,
life, passion, death and resurrection. Indeed, many did undergo such radical
transformation, especially, one might suspect, someone like David, the Psalmist,
who points the way to Jesus, to the Father, in the Spirit.
At the same
time, the explicit announcement of the New Testament, the proclamation of the
Good News, the living out of the Gospel, of the Kerygma, through the Cross, marked an existential crisis at
a global level for ALL PEOPLES, and played itself out as, not a total
renunciation but, as a total surpassing of the old way. This is directly
analogous to the death to self that is called for on the journey of each
individual but involved a type of death for the People of God as a whole, who
were being called to a new level of intimacy.
Again, we invoke, as
individuals, because we have been convoked, as an entire People of God. We are
called as a People and respond, radically alone (in many respects), as
individuals.
Another lesson that is taught about David by Louis Evely in That Man Is
You , which
is to say: what is wrong with the world is ME.
What happens as we make
the turn and drop the persona, which, again, was formatively necessary, is that
we seek enlightenment out of compassion for the world, which constantly suffers
our unenlightened selves. No longer are we in search of
consolation or sensible positive affect because Perfect Love is its own reward,
is totally unconditional, entirely kenotic.
We lay down our false
selves, not for our own benefit, not because we are tired of the pain it causes
us, but because of the pain we are transmitting to our loved ones, to the world.
Any pain that is not thusly transformed, however neurotic or
psychotic or emotional or idiopathic, we transmit to others. We seek to
be rid of this pain that we may desist from transmitting it to others. Perfect
Love and Perfect Contrition are inextricably bound up. It is suffcient to enter the Kingdom, through the law, through the
old gate, of following the rules and being sorry for the consequences to
ourselves when we don't. That was the old way and it still works.
BUT,
if we take up our cross, go through the existential crisis, and come to that
breakthrough where we are moreso sorry for our sin
because of the consequences to others and to God, then we crucify the Old Man
and rise as a New Creation, seeking the contemplative gaze, as Teresa says, not
so much for the consolations but, rather, in order to gain the strength to
serve. We become Christs. We allow God to be
God-in-us, our truest selves. This isn't a requirement, but it is an invitation.
The most important one that any of us will RSVP or
not.
Let me insert this here. Losing something like fear does not
mean that we have come to any Pollyannaish conclusion that all of the bad things
that could happen to us are not going to happen --- rather, it means that, we
know full well they are even likely to happen but are nothing, ultimately, to
fear. So, too, with guilt, anger ... We give up the neurotic version in exchange
for the existential version, which is quite THE CROSS to arrive at the
resurrected version, which is ALL IS WELL.
This, too, is dialectical,
like the Kingdom. It is on its way. It has already arrived. Paradise is ours to
inherit. It is already in our hearts. All is decidedly NOT well, temporally, in
this earthly tent wherein we dwell, BUT, in reality, ours is a robe of
resplendent glory and, eternally (not at the end of time or for a long time, but
outside of time where we have both origin and destiny), ALL is, indeed,
well.
Another distinction from
Merton.
Merton discusses two of the types of confessio, of confession, but I don't recall the latin terms for both. One was laude
or praise. The other was re: the more familiar "It was me. I done it." that we know from the Rite of Reconciliation and from
police shakedowns, or parental busts re: hands in cookie jars.
This
distinction makes for rich reflection and meditation but I'll try to control my
imagination and focus on the transformative process.
The confession of
praise is the converse: "It was God. He done
it."
The psalms are about 50:50 penitential supplication taking the form
of "I done it" and of praise taking the form of adoration of "He done
it."
Now, there comes a point where we pass through existential crisis or
a series of crises and recognize that there is little meritorious effort on our
behalf other than cooperation with grace and that all else is pure unmerited
Grace. This is part of recognizing our radical dependence on God, Whom we can
trust because, well, look around at What He
Done!
My point pertaining to this thread, however, is that, prior to
getting to that place of praise and He Done It, we must
get both to the place of I Done It re: our abject sinfulness as well as It
Isn't/Wasn't Me! re: our manifold blessings and very
existence.
Part of the nondual experience, then, is the existential
realization of It Isn't Me --- not this creation, not these feelings, not these
thoughts, not any rule-following or goodness, iow, It
Isn't Me cognitively, affectively or morally, that's responsible for starting
all of this, holding it all together and taking it anywhere.
This can be
quite liberating.
The famous singer-songwriter, James Taylor, once made
a wisecrack about AA, saying that half of the people that are in it are trying
to come to the realization that they are not God, while the other half had the
job once and are desperately busy trying to tender their
resignation.
Well, it isn't enough to stop with It Isn't Me, and that, I
believe, is where an existential experience of the no-self can leave us. But
this apophatic realization must be dialectically related to HE DID IT! IT'S HER!
and this is the positive, kataphatic content that is truly fitting and proper,
coming from a tongue that cannot confess same without the initiative of the
Spirit's prompting.
So, the loss of the affective ego can occur, in any
of the many ways we have conceived it and experienced it, I think, and
particularly in a manner that Merton wisely discerned was apophatic, natural,
impersonal, existential, but needing completion in the kataphatic, supernatural,
personal and theological, these processes nurturing and mutually enriching and
entailing one another.
Point is, the confession
of It's Not Me is necessary but not
sufficient.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
We
maintain that all successful descriptions of God, if literal, are
necessarily apophatic, which is to say that we thus gain descriptive accuracy
through negation, while we gain positive descriptive accuracy of God, kataphatically speaking, necessarily, only through
analogy.
Many people look at this grammar of description and see a
paradox. They suggest that if God is literally no-thing in sensible
reality as could be successfully described other than through negation or
analogy, then why does this seeming radical discontinuity not, therefore, entail
a complete causal disjunction between Creator and creature? This is to
say that they feel like there is a causal joint question still begging, somehow.
How can this Creator, if wholly distinct ontologically from creation, thereby
exert any effects, whatsoever, on the created order?
There is another
grammar, however, which is the grammar of reference. And this grammar suggests
that we can, in principle, successfully reference realities we are
otherwise unable to successfully describe. And we have always routinely
employed these distinctions (between description and reference) as we've
advanced in our knowledge of science and metaphysics, retreating into rather
vague heuristic references while awaiting more robust theoretic
descriptions for unknown causes proper to known effects.
Meta-metaphysically, then, God is the answer to our limit
questions, primally asking: Who, What, When,
Where, How and Why?
And while we may indeed claim that we successfully
refer to this ineluctably unobtrusive Reality as the Answer to these
ultimate questions, at the same time, we are by no means suggesting that this
Reality is not also utterly efficacious causally. Analogically, we may
think of Haught's discussion of Polanyi's tacit
dimension, of Arraj's discussion of nonlocality and superluminality, or of formal and final
causation ---even as minimalistically conceived--- in
Peirce's triadic semiotic science.
In her paper, A God Adequate for
Primate Culture, Nancy R. Howell of the Saint Paul School of Theology writes
about John Haught's evolution-informed approach, http://moses.creighton.edu/jrs/2001/2001-4.html :
quote:
God,
in a theology of evolution, must permit "genuine independence" in creation.
Haught's rationale for such a God rests in divine
kenotic love. Love by its very nature cannot compel, and so any God whose very
essence is love should not be expected to overwhelm the world either with a
coercively directive "power" or an annihilating "presence." Indeed, an infinite
love must in some sense "absent" or "restrain itself," precisely in order to
give the world the "space" in which to become something distinct from the
creative love that constitutes it as "other." We should anticipate, therefore,
that any universe rooted in an unbounded love would have some features that
appear to us as random or undirected.
There
is a tension, then, between our conceptions of some type of causal continuity or
interactivity and an ontological discontinuity between Creator and created. This
should not surprise us, however, for analogously, we encounter
discontinuities even within the created order between otherwise distinct levels
of emergent reality even without the violation of known causal closure
dynamics.
As science advances and our metaphysical tautologies gain ever
more taut grasps of reality, our kataphatic God-analogues will become more
robustly descriptive and so will our apophatic negations (as we add to our
positivist inventory of not-God-realities). Our references to God can become
ever more successful, too, especially once considering that our God-encounters
engage all of our intentional fields (Haught, Lonergan), our entire person integrally and unfathomably, in
a relationship of love, precisely through such divine kenosis as we have
explicated above. The efficacy of this relationship derives from our being
God-like and necessarily precludes, in principle, our being,
essentially, God.
Thomas Merton speaks of the confessional aspects
of the Psalms, one which was: "It wasn't me! It was Him, Who did
this!"
This kenosis, this divine self-emptying, condescends through
the Incarnation (and all the attendant Mysteries
that we celebrate) to gift us with a correspondence --- not an
identity --- with God. This correspondence fosters communication
(think Logos, think semeiotic even) most unitively!
Raw awareness of this correspondence is ineffable, nondiscursive, immanent, impersonal, existential and
apophatic. Reflective experience is liturgical, discursive, transcendent,
personal, theological and kataphatic. They can nurture each other in a virtuous
cycle. Neither the awareness nor the experience yields ontological
descriptions, but the reflective experience refers to the Wholly Other and is, in that sense, vaguely ontological, in
maintaining the discontinuity.
When
we say that we can describe nothing of God literally, except in denying
what God is not, and that all of our positive descriptions are merely
analogical ...
But that we can still successfully refer to God
...
What are the implications for the relationship between Creator and created? What bridges the ontological
discontinuity in this relationship? What gets us past mere
analogy?
I seem to recall a discussion by Arraj
of deep and dynamic formal fields. And this is from a Thomistic perspective. There is also the panentheistic, neo-Whiteheadian
perspective of Fr. Joe Bracken, who speaks of the Divine Matrix. It is beyond my
competence to reconcile these approaches with one another, much less with my own
semiotic approach. And since my own grasp is rather inchoate it makes it
difficult to translate my intuitions into an accessible form. But I'm going to
try anyway.
I do not see anything wrong with viewing creation and
creatures as quasi-autonomous realities that exist in God with both the
Creator and the created order operating in and through a Divine matrix of
interrelated causes and effects. This could only be accommodated by a Thomistic view that reconceives
its ontological categories more dynamically and not in static, essentialistic identities, for example, seeing the Whiteheadian concept of creativity in the Thomistic act of being.
quote:
Creativity
is thus to be understood as immanent within creatures, rather than transcending
them and ‘may aptly be described as “the divine matrix” within which the three
divine persons and all their creatures exist in dynamic interrelation. See this link .
This
all seems to resonate with Phil Hefner's description of human beings as
created co-creators.
Reconceiving this
relationship between God and creatures has implications for how we view original
sin and for theodicy and such. I won't go there for now.
The bottomline is that we experience enough autonomy to be in an
authentic (in radical freedom) love relationship with God and others and enough
causal interconnectedness to know that we will subsist, forever, through, with
and in this Divine Matrix.
It may be that a natural mysticism corresponds
to a raw awareness of this ineluctably unobtrusive tacit dimension or matrix. It
is with the benefit of special revelation that our contemplation experiences it
as Divine. Our contemplation reflects on our autonomy. Enlightenment qualifies
it as quasi.
re:
Our contemplation reflects on our autonomy. Enlightenment qualifies it as
quasi.
Just to be clear, those aspects of contemplation and
enlightenment, of course, do not exhaust those rich human
realities.
re: I do not see anything wrong with
viewing creation and creatures as quasi-autonomous realities that exist in God
with both the Creator and the created order operating in and through a Divine
matrix of interrelated causes and effects.
To amplify a bit, I have
recently been contemplating this panentheist approach
with an aim toward reconciling it with that of Gregory Palamas and the hesychasts. It
does not seem to me to be a major stumbling block for Christian unity, no more
than the filioque?
About
Hesychasm
quote:
In
the Byzantine East, the hesychast tradition had
a tremendous influence, and found a powerful interpreter in Gregory Palamas in the 14th century. Palamas, the most influential Greek Orthodox theologian of
the Middle Ages, taught that the most effective way to increase our awareness,
integrate body and soul, and open ourselves to God is to attend to our
breathing.
In The Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, Gregory described the process of pure prayer
beyond words or thoughts or concepts and advised his students what to expect.
The first step is to enter into our own body, not to flee from it. While
this is very difficult at the beginning, with repeated effort in time attention
to breathing gathers together the mind that has been dissipated and produces
inner detachment and freedom.
For Palamas, this
activity is not itself grace, but he tells us that God works in and through the
body and soul together to communicate supernatural gifts. As long as we have not
experienced this transformation, we believe that the body is always driven by
corporeal and material passions.
In language that is at times similar to
the Buddhist tradition, Palamas tells us that
theoretical knowledge cannot grasp this transformation. Only experience can
convince a person that another form of life, free from the incessant domination
of desire, is possible. Apatheia,
the fruit of prayer, is not the deadening of feeling, but that stillness and
openness that frees us from self-concern and allows us to redirect our natural
energies toward serving others.
Through prayer and the grace
of God, every aspect of ourselves is transformed and crowned with virtue.
http://monasticdialog.com/a.php?id=771
quote:
In
solitude and retirement the Hesychast repeats the
Jesus Prayer, "Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have
mercy on me, a sinner." The Hesychast prays the Jesus
Prayer 'with the heart'—with meaning, with intent, 'for real' (see ontic). He never treats the Jesus Prayer as a string of
syllables whose 'surface' or overt verbal meaning is secondary or unimportant.
He considers bare repetition of the Jesus Prayer as a mere string of syllables,
perhaps with a 'mystical' inner meaning beyond the overt verbal meaning, to be
worthless or even dangerous. This emphasis on the actual, real invocation of
Jesus Christ marks a divergence from Eastern forms of meditation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychast
quote:
Orthodox
Tradition warns against seeking ecstasy as an end in itself. Hesychasm is a traditional complex of ascetical practices
embedded in the doctrine and practice of the Orthodox Church and intended to
purify the member of the Orthodox Church and to make him ready for an encounter
with God that comes to him when and if God wants, through God's Grace. The
goal is to acquire, through purification and Grace, the Holy Spirit and
salvation. Any ecstatic states or other unusual phenomena which may occur in
the course of Hesychast practice are considered
secondary and unimportant, even quite dangerous. Moreover, seeking after unusual
'spiritual' experiences can itself cause great harm, ruining the soul and the
mind of the seeker. Such a seeking after 'spiritual' experiences can lead to
spiritual delusion (Ru. prelest, Gr. plani)—the antonym of
sobriety
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hesychast
So,
the emphasis here is on experience of God, a knowledge that goes beyond
the propositional. There is an emphasis on freedom here, on increasing freedom,
and thereby love. This is very Buddhist in some ways but differs in being very
relational and personal and not, rather, empty.
Now, read here about the distinction between God's essence and energies,
and our experience of God's uncreated energies.
quote:
Abiding
In The Indwelling Trinity
by George A. Maloney
Excerpt - on Page 3: " ... Their loving presence as
personalized relations of uncreated energies of love surrounds us, permeates us,
bathes us constantly in their great loving communication ... "
Mystical Theology: The Science of Love by William Johnston
Excerpt - on Page 61: " ... distinction between the divine essence and
the divine energies. This is closely related to his theology of light; for the
uncreated energies are energies of light and of love. ... "
In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God's Presence in a Scientific
World by Philip Clayton
Excerpt - " ... to the uncreated energies of
God, as well as trinitarian interpretations and the
whole project of process theology. ... "
The
Foundations of Christian Bioethics by H. Tristram
Engelhardt Jr.
Excerpt - " ... is solved and
the door found in the horizon of immanence: Christianity's disclosure of an
immediate experi- ence of
the uncreated energies of a radically transcendent, personal God. Here philo- sophical solutions and
theological truth coincide: the truth is a Who. Such
... "
Just
some food for thought.
This reminds me a tad of a thread from years ago: Kundalini and the Holy Spirit