Letter to John

Part II
Additions
(June – Aug 4th, 2023)

1

What must be gradually eradicated is the entire movement of auto-suggestion in consciousness.

On close examination, the link between mental phenomena and consciousness cannot be established. No thought will raise consciousness and no thought can dampen consciousness. Only the spontaneous, effortless, “natural” stilling of thoughts will render consciousness permeable to its own clarity— without the interferences of projections, ideations, and judgments; without the investment of the display upon consciousness as real.

As for the thoughts etc. which appear upon the display, they are thoroughly empty, non-binding, and spontaneously released. They are flits of “substance” which at worst will remind us of the impermanence of substance and of its utter inability to define or alter consciousness: they pass before they arise and, finally, have nothing to do with us.

This fact can be contrasted with auto-suggestion: the process whereby mental phenomena are allowed to determine and push around consciousness, or more to the point, the conscious being, who believes that the mental phenomena are its own.

Indeed that is the first result of auto-suggestion: the sense of (independent) I-being, ahamkara, as “owner” (or appropriator) of objective thought, objective reality, objecthood in general. From this node of error flows the entire complex of related errors; but all of them express the same ignorant move, namely: when our consciousness mistakes itself for and globs on to an objective or mental phenomena of the nature “I am, you are, they are, we are, it is, it is all… X.”

One must thoroughly grok not only the unreliability and contingency of any such saying, but also the folly of the entire operation (despite its minor successes to ‘say the real’) as simply a defense against the impartial space of consciousness— against the mystery of the Unattributable which suffuses all attribution and renders it empty. For, in the end, we do not know what is happening— because “nothing” is happening. It is in the coincidence of nothing-happens and it-happens that the miracle of existence is named.

The semblance of definition and alteration in consciousness, however, is perhaps the most difficult thing to disabuse ourselves of, because it boils down to the judgment of existence. Not the categorical judgment (i.e. assigning qualities) but the existential judgment itself: “it is.”

(It may indeed be the case “X is”, but we are limited to knowing the case and not its nature. What we say of X will always carry the flaw of a limited perspective, and it is only in withdrawing from this game that we reapproach the total perspective which treats each thing as it is and thus repairs the rift between being and knowledge. That is why everything is “in the mystical” in the final perception: we cannot know what “it” was, or if it was an “it”; if “it” and “is” do not reveal more a failure to know than anything.)

A thought arises in consciousness, it repeats, it nags us, it provokes us, we want it, we don’t want it, it has importance, it is meaningless— its deployment is unending because we keep vacillating on whether or not the thought “exists,” has meaning, relevance, pertinence. We see its emptiness, its non-binding nature, even its illusory and reality-misnaming nature; but then we forget this, we resubstantialize it, we glob it back on to another thought we also deem substantial, and so the investment in relevance-delusion continues.

This does not imply a judgment of irrelevance on things, but locates relevance outside the mental judgment of relevance. It implies a surrender to the real relevance of presence, rather than a slavery to the false, superimposed, egocentric relevance. This means that relevance certainly is— what could be more obvious?— but it is unlocalizable and indeterminable: not in the direction of the vague, but in the direction of the ever-more-abundantly unknown! On the other side of our attributions of reality is the revelation of the Unattributable.

Ultimately, we do not see the empty, non-binding, spontaneously-liberated character of thoughts because we are invested in some image or sense of I-being, which those particular thoughts are supporting, antagonizing, terrorizing, flattering, and in any case: sustaining “in existence” such that the judgment on the existence of that I-being is, if not positive outright, at least dubiously-suspiciously positive— which indeed always the case. We name this “egoism.”

2

No more performance in prayer.

3

In Buddhism there is no debt to repay. In most theistic systems, there is a debt.

The debt we have incurred through our sin and wrong-action can only be forgiven by God. As a karmic debt, we must pay it off according to the Lord’s justice. But the Lord may always intervene and lessen or cancel the sentence. God is sovereign in this regard. Indeed in this control over moral cause and effect he proves himself Lord of the universe, since life and death are at stake.

The debt however proves too exorbitant (when compared to what it would have been to obey God) for us to pay it off. The incarnation of God must pay it off. Ironically, the human being that shows how far we fall from the ideal, is the only human being who can show us the way back to the heights.

Buddhism however has no need for this, hence in the enlightened state there is no judgment on existence. Good and bad appear relative, indeed, as attributions which simply set the neurotic cycle of sin and punishment, debt and retribution, in motion.

At the same time, in its aspiration to free us from karmic cycles, much is essentially the same. One could even say that the stroke of grace is here even more radical for not requiring a deity: it is “built in” to the universe (the impermanent expanse) that an increase of awareness, of mind-clarity, will lead to an increase in good-making behavior and loving-kindness. The Buddha Samantabhadra is All-Good spontaneously, without any choice—is this not another extreme expression of the sovereignty of Unchangeable, Unlocateable Presence over everything that changes in time and space?

If there is a drama, it is a drama of owing something to God, of making up for having missed the true life. If there is no drama, the true life cannot be missed, and everything rests freely. But both perspectives require or lead to a sort of long-standing trust in being—a surrender of the “I” who would control, in favor of an entrustment to the Indestructible, however the latter is further narrated and figured (Dharmakaya, Godhead, etc).

Does this debt derive from a comparison of our actual selves with the self we intuit was possible? In the theist’s case, the God-man holds the position of the self that was possible. In the case of Buddhism, there is no comparison possible, due to codependent arising, and so no debt before another is possible: every debt would be shared, there could only be a total paying back of everything to everyone—but in the clarity of mind that very “paying back” would be “spontaneous arising”: the drama of debt ceases to make sense.

But, there is joy in the owing, in the striving for the impossible, for the unactualized perfection of God. We also know this because of the incarnation. The God-Man more than anyone loves God. He lives unto the debt Man owes God. He loves God more than enough to pay it, and will pay it infinitely out of love. Our having missed what we could have been sorrows God and the God-Man. The latter shows us that Devotion and Atonement are the same movement in the soul of Man: love is always love-suffering for the beloved, whether the beloved of God for Man or Man for God.

4

The pain of being born is unending
Train the mind in wisdom of the breach
And death will never reach you

5
After Sankara

The beginningless Brahman is prior to the creator God.
We can realize beginningless brahman as our very self; but this does not mean we become the creator God.
The creator God has attributes we can reflect but never possess in the degree He-and-She does.

Brahman is not the Creator, though the Creator is not other than Brahman, since all that is Brahman.

6

The effort must end. The act of reaching out to God—what could be more natural? So it should be natural, like a child at play, trusting its supervisor sees it with love, and has no wish to manipulate it into stances or micromanage what it does.

If it is a ritual play, so be it: let the child look upon its uniqueness each time in awe, let him never “go through the motions” thoughtlessly, let him always trust it is enough to be in God’s presence: that God seeks not formulas, not fancy displays of intention, not pro forma gesticulating, not copy-cat holiness, but the creature he made to be one with him, in being itself—in being His-self in its being.

One only needs to realize the beginningless in oneself, as oneself, as the Spaciousness in which all arises.

One needs only to learn to appreciate that all mental phenomena are dissolved in non-phenomenal mind. Nothing can stick. Nothing should be made to stick. The goal is not accrual of holiness, as if it were a matter of practice. The goal is naturalness of an uncontrived awareness and respect. It is a boldness that, while receiving everything, does not dramatize the reception. That, while giving self, has no self to give, and that too without drama.

No show, no life plan, no mounting relationship, no vocations, no appointments, no egos, no bodies of work, no books, no messages, none of this—it all may happen, but it all dissolves right now in the present, for there is no need of a trace of God, no need of any trace we could make.

The evidence of realization is greater than all action. It is the fruit of the greatest love of God, because it is not other than the love of God, and so has no effort to make. It is “no trouble” whatsoever.

Once we are free of susceptibility to trial, we do not need to pray to not be led into it. It is “no trouble” to resist temptation once we see that all temptation is a ruse of egoity, a passing clinging for non-reality. Because temptation would always mean, seeking pleasure outside oneself in non-reality. Who is realized, has “no trouble” watching the tempting tug dissolve on by, “no trouble” turning from the mental phenomena to a remembrance of the clarity of mind itself.

And in the teaching of holiness—never to address the other as one needing teaching—never to be practical—never to concede to mundane, transactional, egoic conceptions and outlooks—never to puff up a sense of mission of not balanced by the humility of the nothingness of self—never to cultivate virtue like a workout program—never to guide anywhere but to awakening to the automatic spontaneity of Love as the essence of the movement of being-there.

7.1

I’m falling startlingly beyond the scope of action making sense. This must be a kind of death.

I can see the spiritual babies who must keep sucking at the teat of endeavor. When will we be weaned of proactivity and form, so that God alone suffices in the clarity of the inner driver.

So many sought substitutes sought without knowing they are substitutes. But right now every move feels like a substitute. Prahabda karma.

Oh, the emptiness of ritual! Shankara, have you cursed me with understanding you?

7.2

Whatever one can produce as feeling through a religious practice of any sort, can never be a proof of truth. These are aides and consolations allowed by the ultimate so that we will not take our eyes off of God. But they are only accidentally God himself—and never essentially God.

I don’t think this view would be unacceptable in Eucharistic theology, though one can imagine many difficulties of conception. If the Eucharistic celebration reminds one of the non-duality between God and creation, it succeeds. It should also remind of God’s sacrifice in uniting himself with that creation, because he would not have had to. Ironically, two-tier Thomism might find help in Advaita.

It is finally the intention to act that is simply unnecessary. The remedy of intentional action is necessary to the extent that one’s mind-heart is not yet clear enough to not need the intention for the action to flow/follow. Because finally, if one’s intention is God or Brahman, the question of action simply does not arise. No more than any ‘choice’ for nonaction. Isn’t ‘discernment’ at an end when only God is real?

When “all impressions are of nothing”—what could be left to do? Only one thing: restore and hold everything to the One.

At that limit, ego-centric desire has had to die. While there may be flashes and ideas of it yet to die, seeds left to scorch, ultimately and practically impressions of sensory or mental phenomena can no longer drive one into action. The principle of action has become self-giving love but this a self-giving to the One that is all and in all, the One perceived to be the motionless substrate of all motion, indeed a kind of “beyond of accidents” that is subexpressed by the accidental happenstance of temporal reality. Every occasion is ripe for action but there can be no agenda for action; the only agenda can be “go sin no more” in the sense that one continues to scorch the seeds of egocentric desire and exhaust whatever karma one has left. And the straightest road to that goal is, again, to restore and hold oneself to God—if not the constant experience of non-dual consciousnesses then the recollection of the Ultimate and the aspiration to abide in the reality of God, which is the only reality there is.

8

Better to be lonely and disillusioned than spellbound by falsehood.

Better to be isolated and speechless than to mouth words you inherited only wishing to believe them (for them to be believable).

9

A community that bases its cohesion and consistency on internally-recognizable markers of identification, belonging, and adherence, is as flimsy as a castle made of cards.

Entrance into that community is achieved by adopting, into a body and into a personality, the markers which designate inclusion, common intent, shared identity, etc. Exit from that community begins when such markers lose their hold or are intentionally dropped. At that juncture, departure will continue – unless one restarts the effort of entrance, in this case, the effort of reinclusion, reinvigoration of one’s belief in the community’s belief, renewed participation in its practices, rehearsal of its views.

This makes apparent that such communal belongings are matters of identity-maintenance, and they have a goal. This makes them not natural, not very spontaneous, indeed, put on.

But time proves that any identity which is put on, perishes. One may protect the continuation of that identity into the far future or afterlife; this does not make it any less perishable, and probably only betrays a kind of anxiety over its flimsiness – inflating it because it so easily loses air.

Because that is what, for example, the highly regimented and psychologically demanding environment of a boot camp or cult-world accomplishes: it maintains the adherent in its suspension by means of a constant string of duties, obligations, and rules – all the more powerful if they seem like word-of-mouth phenomena, cult tradition, things which everyone else pretends to do so gladly, with such investment.

The cult is structured, at every point, to maintain one’s physical and psychological investment in it. It succeeds when its subject cannot tell itself apart from the group identity; when it cannot distinguish itself from a group marker, so fully has it assimilated into itself the performance of these markers and worked up a giant arsenal of justifications for doing so. These will be all the more powerful the more that individual is able to carve out a niche, an outside in the inside that gives it the illusion of some distance or freedom, the illusion of ‘doing the cult my own way’. However this may be true, it ups the investment either way. The more I feel I’ve made the markers my own, the more thoroughly have they achieved the goal of assimilation.

No doubt this is one sociological reason for the hierarchy between clergy and lay. The community holds up for greatest adoration those who have most submitted their lives to the rituals, rhythms, and reasons of the cult. To make exchangeable administrators is the unspoken goal of marker-maintenance. A belief in the beauty of concelebration achieves what no direct strategy of coercion ever could, because there one believes that one’s action is the fulfillment of freedom and the highest duty a man could have: to administer God to other men.

10

What I finally must reject, again, is the auto-suggestion called prayer.

The emptiness of a speaker invoking Christ’s name, pretending to speak to God when in fact he is just performing his good intentions for the crowd. Or less than that: he is “praying” because the social moment calls for this.

But prayer as convention is abominable. Prayer that is performed is abominable.

I cringe every time. When a prayer merely voices the group’s shared intentions, why pretend it is anything more than this, a statement of our hopes? It would seem more authentic to list our hopes in this way that to pretend we are actually in a state to speak to God.

But what I discern in others is obviously only a reflection of my own desire to purify myself. I can no longer accept that I “pray.” That there is a distinction between “regular time” and “prayer time.” I can no longer give sense to directing my internal monologue to God when I am fully aware how easily it is to simulate a response to this address. How often prayer is a matter of convincing oneself of something, a form of psychological self-talk that is merely facilitated by the fiction of having an audience with the Supreme. But what a disrespectful scenario this produces: asking God to help out our ego.

We could instead ask God to destroy our ego, but if we really cared about that goal, wouldn’t the more effective road be up stop pretending to talk to God?

Oh the pious displays have to stop, if we are ever to really live without self-deception. We have to stop telling ourselves a story of what we’re doing. We turn prayer into something all-significant and crave after it to give ourselves a good self-feeling and relieve ourselves of some imagined debt toward God. We think this time is effective whether we are transformed or not. But how often are we just filling out an identity, the image of one who prays?

Oh I would rather a heart dry to the bone, burdened with timidity to speak to God and unwilling to muster the gall to even try, then this constant flow of wish-filled garbage ejaculating from a self-server’s mouth!

This rambling babble Christ spoke against. And I suspect the saying attributed to him, that whatever you ask in my name will be given you, was added in as a commercial, for the claim is obviously redundant: only the Father’s will can be granted, so it is true only for a prayer for such. But even if he did say it, it can have nothing to do with our egoic wants, and I include in these the desire for God to show us his will for us. For didn’t Christ also say, the Father knows what you want before you ask it? If that is the case, isn’t it wiser to want to know the Father—since he knows better than we do who we are and what we want?

But who will have a chance to know the Father when the airwaves are constantly being stuffed with “prayers” for this and that? Does one really believe that a thousand Hail Mary’s brings one closer to God-knowledge? It couldn’t be more plain that such an idea is little more than superstition. Such repetitions may play the functional role of calming us down or improving our focus, but this is not because the Queen of Heaven is suddenly sending more smiles our way, glad that we’ve put a few more pennies in her slot. This juvenile way of conceiving the human-divine relationship should be trampled by every pamphlet and preface every prayer session.

11

Likewise one should be careful even of supplicatory prayer which is genuinely aimed at a future spiritual good. The risk is always the deferral of present contact with God in the heart. Better is one instant of earnestly renouncing all conditioned reality, so as to sink for a flash into the Unconditioned, than are days of repetitious pleas for improvement in one’s spiritual life. The aspirant, more than any human soul, must always be careful that his endeavor is not corrupted by the tendency to articulate dreams while ignoring realities.

No doubt one will have fantasies about what one wants to do for the Lord. Best then is to entrust it all to his hand, that he will see such happen if he wishes. But if any of our desire is mixed in, for example, we wish to make an impression on our Church, then we can be sure there is a poison in the stream that may disease it entirely. And this despite of our success in the conditioned world about it, for nothing guarantees that ego-diseased efforts will fail right away! Rather know that only what has the Sanction of the Lord is viable in the conditioned world, and that the only way to “guarantee” that is to ensure that one’s heart is entirely, sincerely, constantly rested in the Lord or underway with purifying aspiration to that point.

Because in the eternal perspective, none of the fantasies are real. Their only goal can be precisely: to help ourselves and others see through the fantasy that anything other than the heart-link with God is off worth. That primary goal ought never be let drift from sight—but how difficult this is for distracted, egoisitic, planning man! How he wants things to “pan out” according to his faulty panoptics. How he wishes he could act omniscient and know his role in God’s plan. But this discernment is finally irrelevant unless it leads to union with God.

The mind will never figure out how man’s will and God’s will coincide. It is only by letting the mind rest in Him, so that He will take it over, that any chance of coincidence is possible. But by then, this will not be a thing that man himself needs or wants to know, for that state is beyond the evaluation of conditional results. The guesswork is over once the heart-link is stabilized and solid. So anyone who is sincere about doing’s God will, ought to prioritize that work over all other work.

All the Churches will eventually cede to the eschatological reality of Christ handing the Kingdom back to the Father. Like us, it must remember this ‘end-time’ modality, which is perfectly realized the moment one sees that the Unconditioned is the only real, that the world, history, etc., is nothing but a manifestation of Him/Her/It. It will continue to evolve towards that Omega point, and we are its conscious evolvers. But it is not by praying for that day, expecting it, or putting it off, that we best help. We help when we consent for the entire organism and organization, at every level, to be taken up in the “Omega-progress”—an intentionally contradictory idea meant to jolt is into realizing that “progress” comes best when we realize and inhabit the fact that the Eternal alone is, alone expresses itself from matter to mind to spirit, is the soul’s only goal and answer, the pinnacle that when reached reveals the truth of everything.

To cross the ocean of these fantasies, attach your mind to Brahman and do not let go! The real work will show itself in freedom; and you, nothing-no-one, will know Who Is All.

12

The celebration of the Eucharist accomplishes not transubstantiation but the focusing of attention upon the reality of a transubstantiation universe.

If one wishes to understand the origins of life, one focuses on a tiny strand of DNA. To understand the earliest epochs of the universe, telescopes aim into the smallest fraction of deep space, yet from this slice can comprehend the whole. And no one can read every poem and play by Shakespeare at once, no, we read line by line, word by word. Just so is the Eucharist the supreme pedagogy of the Incarnation of God.

By focusing us on this morsel of reality, the bread and wine, and guiding us to believe it “is”, beneath appearances, the very substance of the eternal God, his blood and body; and by repeating this focus so our minds, aided by faith, bend to grasp it, we are gradually conduced to that openness of spiritual faculty able to perceive and understand the whole universe as pervaded by God’s essence. This takes place from within, the silent reception, the humble gnawing on the host, the sweetness of the sip from the chalice, the warmth that spreads through the chest and lungs, the silence that comes over the mentality and the peace that fans out from the eyes and ears such that pervasion of God’s presence everywhere is no longer a far-fetched theologumen but an obvious mystical fact. One rests in that within of the Eucharist dissolving into oneself, and simultaneously one is dissolved oneself into that eucharistic Being which is the felt world.

In such a way we see that the transubstantiation of the finite into the infinite is not restricted to the morsel of reality consecrated by the priest. Rather, the latter only imitates the high priest Jesus Christ’s consecration of Creation as such—an omnipresent consecration that, while emerging historically, is in fact an act from eternity as it fulfills the very purpose of Creation. As this consecration stretches and unfolds in time, we witness what is really going on: the becoming-universal of the hypostatic union which Christ first revealed in his singular self, when he broke his body and poured his blood and said “Do this in remembrance of Me.” Similarly, the singular Eucharistic meal gives a foretaste of that transformed way of “tasting” reality which might be called eucharistized apperception: whereby the hypostatic union of Creator-Creature is immediately experienced as the truth of being-there (Dasein).

This is the witnessing of ‘resurrectionhood’, the reality of Life beyond life-and-death, as the truth of the phenomenon, even as the True Phenomenon: as the concrete work of the Spirit renewing even our body-consciousness in the image of the Trinitarian love-heaven. Here is the coincidence of opposites, the horizontal meeting the vertical, as above so below, and so on: the Eucharist we averagely celebrate each day is the harbinger and holographic foreshadowing of this supranaturalization heading toward God’s “all in all”—which is always much, much further progressed than we think; which thinking we can make great steps in overcoming by dying to self in acceptance of Christ’s incarnational work of intervention and perfection of the cosmos.

13

It is the conceptual difference (or similarly) between participation and identity which constitutes the single obstacle for the reconciliation between all spiritual systems. Only secondarily is it a debate about that which we (either) participate in and (or) are identical with.

Participation stipulates that whatever we participate in —with our body, heart, and consciousness— is bigger and beyond our participation.

Identity stipulates that in some fundamental sense we are (non-different from) that thing.

If there is a remnant of us apart from That, it is fulfilled by participation in That: by living in and towards a mode of total dependency on That. This is the Western relation between man and God.

If however there is no sense in imagining a remnant apart from That, then effortless, spontaneous, self-originating, self-evident, pristine, ‘non-non-manifesting’, perfect, blissful and eternal identity with That is the supreme statement on what we are.

Because we know that we are not That (e.g. not God), we pray for maximum participation in That by Its grace. Conversely, because we know that we are not this (e.g. this body with its limited desires, this mind with its thoughts, this life with its finite trajectory, etc.), we feel that all that can be left is our identity with That, since That alone is.

We are nothing on our way to Him. He is us, without our being anyone but who He made us to be as parts of Himself. We are not, but that in being His He is Himself through us, without our adding anything of our own that He did not give us.

There is no way to decide theoretically, one must leave it to the quest of experience, context, supracontext, destiny, language, and love.

He loves us with the love He has for Himself (Father for Son), and we are the fruit of that love (Holy Spirit is our true self), and He is identical to this love just as, after He has fully transfigured us, He is identical to Himself in us.

14

I hyperspeed cycle from enthusiasm to emptiness and have yet to understand this vis-a-vis commitment. The psychotechnics required to maintain a “mission” are elaborate and all-constraining, especially if one imagines a divine decree to it, or even a sign of fate. Indeed, how many spiritual exercises are designed to foster writing oneself into the “commission of meaning”! So many inducements to live according to images, my Lord, it is so rife and this knowledge is painful to have. It makes one distrustful of all appearance, especially the satisfying ones. Hard as it may be to live without illusions and narratives, honesty requires that we aim for that abstinence. I understand painfully from the inside the need for that narrative, for commission. It strikes us as deeply as possible, as perhaps the most exploitable resource in this world—that psychic energy that is free to be parasited upon by “destined meaning”. Difficult as it seems to inhabit a place free of such parasites, it is the only place where I feel like myself.

15

The options are either conscious representational responsibility or unconscious faith. With faith always comes doubt and the craze to repress that doubt. And the more naive the faith, the more devastating the doubt that comes with it.

We lack an undubious faith and understand the danger of treating anything in the metaphysical domain as a mere object of belief. This is a page that cannot be turned back. The gnostics chose knowledge of the self over ecclesial gymnastics. The Bhagavad-Gita places jnana above bhakti even when it retains devotional imperatives. Vedanta educates beyond fulfillment of rites and duties. Buddhism places naked awareness above any kind of ideation or representation, etc.

I myself came to that realization regarding faith. I had to notice the sacrificium intellectus that various views were increasingly requiring of me as a Catholic. One bolsters this sacrifice through faith, and to that extent, the underbelly of doubt increases. One narrates it as a course of conversion, of being part of the crowd ‘in the know’ or saved, etc., with all the rationalizations of exclusion that come with that. I am lucky that before long I came to the realization: “I know too much for this to hold!” The dammed up doubt broke in a matter of days. Scales falling from the eyes indeed. My letter to you then was its prime expression (and let me reiterate the wonder of psychic friendship in such a case). While there was suffering involved in that, I cannot tell you how much more I suddenly felt like ‘myself’.

In this light, does epistemic progress makes metaphysical claims impossible? Certainly not, of course they remain possible; only our maturity lets us know their non-absoluity. Doubt lingers (can linger) in any metaphysical statement, no matter how bare. I see that painfully now. This is not the first time I realized it, but at previous moments I guess it was “too good to be true.” In the ironical sense that, obviously unconsciously, I continued to pursue metaphysical claims to believe in, to shelter myself from that form of goodness–a goodness which demanded one remove the rosy-glasses and look Evil straight in the face. (Bataille represents the object of repression par excellence for whenever I turned my back on what I knew and chose priestcraft, which I don’t mean pejoratively but as a witness to facts.)

The ‘statements’ formerly believed to render the unity between psyche and world comprehensible, or rather, to facilitate its accomplishment unconsciously, have proven doubtful. That does not bar new symbols (symbolic representations) from forming, on the contrary, union of conscious and unconscious is the whole effort (which Jung following an alchemical vocabulary calls the unus mundus). That will be necessary, natural, creative. But in doing so, we will never go back to the point where we can pretend that the statement, in itself, is absolute, or anything more than our reflection on a process that, we must acknowledge, involves elements we cannot know. It is paradoxically awareness of the unconscious element in all this that makes the “union” less of a delusion–less subject to catastrophic psychic disintegration (which can very feasibly parade in the guise of a prayerful holy person).

16

“Jesus tricked everyone, for he did not appear as he was, but he appeared so that he could be seen. He appeared to everyone… For this reason his word was hidden from everyone.” Gospel of Philip

Perhaps the claim of Christ’s uniqueness as an avatar of God, which the hyperbole of miscomprehension has him being the “only begotten Son of God”, can actually be substantiated by the fact that he was the most woefully not-heard, not-loved, not-received.

The Gospel writers may have thought they were nearer to receiving him than the outright rejectors, which is probably true. But my mind cannot help but entertain the idea that he is the “Man of Sorrows” precisely because the thing which goes by his name is so rampantly not of him. God’s ultimate sacrifice of God cashes out as a religion that keeps sacrificing God in order to sustain itself.

Yet clearly there’s some mysterious logic to all of this. God sneaks his way fully into us even where we absolutely misunderstand. It is compassion on our weakness to the max.

Like Christ’s light was too strong for any direct transmission, but this “rejected injection” of his love-juice was God’s way to infect everyone, through a slow and very messy indirect transfusion. Christ, the sacrificial donor of our blood. And that was his sacrifice of himself and his honor: his eminence as an incredible is won at the price of his being maximally miscomprehended.

To such a degree that we might even make a maxim out of it: for the Son of God dogma to be true of Christ, we must accept that this means we know nothing about him. The Gospels are but a shadow and give no access. Their words of love, forgiveness, even of Jesus’ kingship, are like flashlights pointing at the sun. To really encounter Christ in the Spirit, is a darkness.

The history of error in the Church certainly shows our limitless capacity to get a good thing wrong. But Christ enters the obstacle precisely in that way. This is how Satan is defeated. He makes it impossible for Satan to hide; yet simultaneously Christ disappears in his very conquering. It the humblest of triumphs to the point of being the opposite of a triumph! Such that Satan becomes more and more obvious as the obstacle to overcome (that is as our responsibility), while Christ is more and more hidden (which positively is us becoming him, negatively the spectacle of a godless world). But godless because there is no option left but to be God ourselves in the combat.

For Christ, there is no liberation without a confrontation with Satan.

17

The only choice may well be between surrender and playacting—but how do you know you’ve not just surrendered to a satisfying image your mind has created under the pretense of it being the real divine? What is the criteria for knowing that you have not surrendered to a phantom?

An appeal to direct experience is little good. If the criteria is not accessible to reflection or reason, it is a “choice” whose meaning is incommunicable. It is a parable: those who have will increase, those who do not will become even worse off—indeed because they will continue surrendering to a playact, having no way except an interior feeling (but what?) to make out their way.

18
Monism as Absolute Continuity

Monism is probably the most misunderstood, misinterpreted and easily maligned spiritual vantage point. It necessarily destroys every logic, from simple dialectics up to cosmic mereology. It cannot be taught except by pointing out the shadow it casts over all other systems, rendering them not so much false as windowless.

Monism is not a belief or a position but, undoubtedly, an experience: a mode of apprehension and vision that, by definition, ruins the categories we would like to use most reasonably to describe it—indeed it ruins these especially. Categories like: things, substance, essence, reality, object, subject, nature, spirit, God, world, boundary, limit, the One, and so forth.

But chief among the ideas that a true “monist” apprehension ruins is that of undifferentiatedness, an idea so applied because of the boundlessness of the feeling. But in fact there is no more a lack of differentiation inside the “oness”-experience than there is absence of distinctness. The intimate order may be described as the destruction of the world of objects, but this destruction is simply a metaphor for the restoration of the mind to its natural non-knowing state of empty receptivity to the total or infinite game.

Sameness, difference, union, disunion, separation, fusion, identity, stasis, progression, liberation—what can we do with such rubbish in the unitary field of the incomparable Vast? Only fill our philosophy books with fantastic-sounding things— perhaps aiming to make our reader’s incredulity clearer to us — but again, we only cast shadows on the wall. Even the rishis’ “not this, not that” is but a propaedeutic. Negation is a remedy against falsehood, or a weapon for transformation; it is not the realized state.

What then shall I say? I find only one word left for description. It is a word I suspect will allow new uses of all the categories discarded above, though without recuperating them per se. That is the word Continuity.

Before me, inside me, as me, distinct to mind but continuous in psychic feeling, there is That. A moment ago it looked different. A moment ago I thought about it differently. The states of beings which appear to move through it have all changed. It is gänzlich at rest and gänzlich in movement. It is beyond any decision I could make about it. It is That, and everything is continuous with it.

No matter what I might call it, it is not that but That. It is the Continuity of everything beyond waking, dreaming, and sleep, beyond perception and non-perception. It is obviously a real substance and it is obviously really insubstantial. It is extensive as wholely matter and wholely spirit. It is fundamentally poor and fundamentally superabundant, the two superposed past any known economy. It is obviously not God and it is obviously nothing but God. It cannot be contradicted because it is not in position. It cannot be filled because it is not a container. Nothing escapes it because there is nothing to escape. It is an omni-directional vector radiating out from any potential center whatsoever, so that the entire vacuum is suffused with It as with a perfectly consistent block of its perfectmost tendency. It goes without saying and it is the univocal of speech. It has nowhere to go and goes there without going anywhere. It is seamless, pristine, virginal, yet also contaminated by everything, foreign to nothing, a communion without rules. It is Continuity.

Were it possible to tear it or tear it apart, its continuity would just become more obvious. And no doubt, that is the common experience: that we and everything that exists are incessantly torn and torn from, by time and space, by words, by pain, by loss. Or we feel we are constantly entering more deeply into a union of love, we are swelling with knowledge of oneness, we are enraptured by a magnitude beyond time. No surprise: there is no direction to go but Continuity. Into the gloom or out, into the stars or past them all, That is Continuity.

18.2

It is not wrong to view That as a psychic or suprapsychic substance, spread in gradations from pure source (below and/or above) to faintest inconscient hint of quark.

It is not wrong to view That as the Thing which animates all desire and makes an impasse of all symbolization.

It is not wrong to view That as the differentiated evolution of substrate into sentience, or to view this evolution as culminating in perfect love at its Omega-point.

It is not wrong to view That as the creative vibration of pure consciousness projecting out and drawing back in the million concrete images of its unstained Self.

It is not wrong to view That as the saint-making play of the Divine Mother, or of the Divine Son emptying himself out into the Alienation, or of the Father gaining awareness of his own double in the Diabolos.

It is not wrong to view That as inculcating a journey from fallenness to self-realization, from the unconscious shadow-world to a wholeness of eternal life.

It is not wrong to view That as the One emanating or causing-in-the-last-instance the real or unreal Something which it calls to remember itself and so fulfill what arose from It.

It is not wrong to view That as untampered boundless sky-awareness, in which sorrow and delusion alongside bliss and liberation are not-dual.

It is not wrong to view That as the wink of the gods, the tremendous reflux of Spirit incarnate, the miraculous experiment of cosmic transubstantiation, the Kingdom of God.

It is neither right nor wrong to view That thus, but what we adore is this: the Continuity which nothing can sunder, abhor, or define further, save to illuminate the way to It, to understand the a priori which It is—for all world-happening, all self-knowledge, and all love-relation.

18.3

We are holy ghosts, moving through a medium of Holy Ghost, moved of and by the Holy Ghost.

Ghost of which we and all else are made.
Ghost of unbound extension to the farthest reach of space,
Ghost of unbound intraction to the innermost finitude of self.
Ghost all-pervading of thought and sensation.
Ghost the identity of whatever is or takes place.
Ghost the event unfolding into past and into future tense.
Ghost the eternal event of seamless becoming in the Unchanged.
Ghost the bifurcation of two infinities in the now wrapping itself around both ends.
Ghost incessantly refreshed,
Ghost total continuity,
Ghost ever-continuitous and smooth,
Ghost smoothest at its toughest edge.
Ghost infused in every essence and accident.
Ghost the pleasant and unpleasant,
Ghost the middle ground of all and its truth.
Ghost every look and sound and touch and taste and word.

18.4

Consciousness cannot be divorced from continuity but it cannot encompass it entirely.

19

Every belief is ultimately a belief in how the relation between words and God works. A belief means that I trust X idiom to stabilize this relation and render it reliable. I trust the idiom to communicate true knowledge about this relation.

An overlap between Buddhist conceptual analytics and post-Holderlinian poetics can be seen in a certain “free distrust” in idioms.

On the spiritual side, this leaves open the question of a translinguistic knowledge that is spontaneous, that is, not needing belief or words.

On the poetic side, this produces the “danger” where the “saving power” also grows, as Holderlin said. Or even more effectively he said: “the absence of God helps.” Poetry is the ongoing discovery, not of an idiom to believe, but an idiom of distrust in language as equally of disbelief in any verifiable man-God relation. As a form of thinking, poetry is the unverifiable idiom of a vigilance in relating that never believes in the relation. A form of knowing that dare not know.

 

Epilogue

Between May 2021 and May 2023, I ventured into Catholicsm in a way that I thought would lifelong. I was confirmed on Easter 2022, and by then I was already attending daily Mass and going to Eucharistic adoration regularly. In the second year, I did the 19th Annotation of St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. Because I was earnest about “working in the fields of the Lord” and because my way into the Church was led by Jesuits– Balthasar, Rahner, de Lubac, Teilhard de Chardin– I became an inquirer with the Society of Jesus. This brought me to many Come and Sees and retreats. I also spent time at St. Anselm’s Abbey in Washington, D.C. and did an 8-day silent retreat. All throughout, I wrote Christian essays, poems, psalms, and created YouTube content with the aim of fostering Catholic sanctity (search for “Marian Weigh” to find that).

Throughout this time, I was holding back objections and suspending other intellectual questions and influences to make my allegiance to the Church and its teachings possible. On May 30, 2023, I let the dam break, and this took the immediate form of a Letter to John. That letter, much expanded, is published as Part I. Part II is a compilation of notes I took in the months immediately following which I consider a part of my deconversion and also to John. Part III collects the poems and piths written during this period.

These other intellectual influences accompanied my deconverstion: Dzogchen-Buddhism via Longchenpa’s Spaciousness; Non-philosophy via Laruelle’s Clandestine Theology; the literary calling expounded in Pascal Quignard’s The Answer to Lord Chandos (forthcoming, Wakefield Press); Vijnana Vedanta via Upanisads, Shankara, Ramakrishna Order; Gnosticism via Jacques Lacarriere and original sources; Biblical Criticism via Bart Ehrman; Peter Sloterdijk’s Making the Heavens Speak; Carl Jung on psychology and religion (East and West); and Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits. Most of this was not new to me and had been investigated for years prior to my becoming Catholic. I am thankful they returned–who could have prevented it?– to overturn the sacrificium intellectus which had at least partially taken me over.

In the course of all this, I also spent over six months editing my first published book of poems The Altar-Gray Gaze of A Showman on the Brink. This revisitation of poetry was another primary reminder of the more singular vocation that I dare not refuse.

My Letter to John was a crucial part of this story. It gives the underbelly, some truth of the excursion out, of the dehiscence from May 30, 2023 onward that gave voice to the deconversion, the recession, remembrance, and resurrection, whose skeletal frame I have pointed out above.

Why, you ask, did I write to John? For that, a single word will have to suffice for now: friendship.