What about the single? How to live without connection?

                                                        

“Humans connect to other humans at so basic a level that when we disconnect, our souls shatter into a thousand little pieces.”

- Peter Leithart

"If loneliness didn’t exist, we could reasonably assume that psychiatric illnesses would not occur either.”

- Psychiatrist J.H. van den Berg

 Before WW II society was more naturally integrated, people needed other people. The spiritual people would say the Divine was in control. In fact, in Christianity, there’s large strain that says one ought to abandon oneself to divine providence. The Eastern religions as well. God will put things in your life as you need them.

Is this true ?

Our man made world today is premised upon the opposite of the humane, connections make us human, and we’ve created a society of isolation.

One can't take it for granted one will have friends, or a partner. We’re not embedded in social systems that way anymore.

If one wants friends, one has to work at it! Books describe how to intentionally find people, join groups, and then, since we no longer simply bump into one another, how to intentionally maintain those relationships.

They don’t just happen. Often, same with marriage. Generation Z is the first to witness this new world.

Can you simply allow God to provide? Or do you need to go out, and work hard to get a community?

In most longterm marriages each person has on average 5 close friends, you need a social nest to hold people together.

The spiritual will say, put God first, you need only God.

The psychologists say no. Family is the number one thing people get meaning from.

In fact, you need 4 or 5 things, and without these you’ll be depressed and lonely. Also you need them to regulate the negative emotions we all have.

We regulate through other people.

Jordan Peterson, despite his various short-comings, in an able psychologist, he says,

“We experience much of our positive emotion in relation to goals. We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value. Worse yet is the fact that the meaning of life without positive value is not simply neutral. Because we are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence.

We must have something to set against the suffering that is intrinsic to Being. We must have the meaning inherent in a profound system of value or the horror of existence rapidly becomes paramount. Then, nihilism beckons, with its hopelessness and despair.”

He’s right.

Johann Hari, in his best-selling book Lost Connections, identifies 7 kinds social causes, disconnection from:

Meaningful Work

Other People

Meaningful Values

Childhood Trauma

Status and Respect

Natural World

Hopeful and Secure Future (faith)

He writes HERE,

“Everyone knows human beings have natural physical needs,” he added. “Well, there’s equally good evidence that we have innate psychological needs. We need to feel we belong to a group; we need to feel we have a stable future; we need to feel that we are valued; we need to feel we have meaning and purpose in our lives.”

                                                               

In general I think we have about 9 needs, and you kind of need at least 3 or 4 to start any real movement:

Security — safe territory and an environment which allows us to develop fully

Attention (to give and receive it)

Sense of autonomy and control — having volition to make responsible choices.

Feeling part of a wider community

Emotional intimacy — to know that at least one other person accepts us totally for who we are,.

Privacy

Sense of status within social groupings

Sense of competence and achievement

Meaning and purpose.

The spiritual people will answer that those things will not lead to happiness or real fulfillment.

They are right. You get the job, wife, and house and…..then what?

However, you will be secure, and regulated. Your psyche will not be thrown to disintegration, it will withstand the ups and downs of life much more easily.

Today, many young have problems forming attachments to people.

If they wish to, they must today work at it. Perhaps see a therapist, make a plan, work hard, one’s job is rarely one’s stability or meaning these days.

It’s harder. But they ask, why not just focus on a spiritual path?

It used to be a monk or a “householder,” otherwise you need some overwhelming passion to fill up your days.

Think of the artist or obsessed mathematician on a mission to express what only they might express.

So, we have a 4th new class of people.

A monk in the world ? Will God provide ? Ought we abandon ourselves to divine providence? Let go of "me and my life ?"


What about all those social needs for connection? Not for ultimate meaning or happiness, but biologically to regulate the nervous system.

                                                       

HERE

The best predictor of happiness in America? It's Marriage, read HERE .

Many psychologists and researchers go as far as saying marriage is THE key to happiness, after 50 years of hard data, read HERE, it's hard to argue.

                         

I hear the Guru’s saying you need only spirituality, then I look at “enlightened” teachers like Robert Spira, or even high Guru’s in Vedanta, like Papaji….and they’re all married !

Or in a communal monastery setting.

Priest's too - they have a meaningful job, purpose, pastors have families….

Who exactly is living this way, with only God, and no friends, partner, or meaningful activity ?

Yet this is the advice often given.

Others will say work hard for the things of the world…

And, if these young people choose a non-materialstic life, are they avoiding the hard emotional work of relationships?

In Christianity the spirituality is to find God through and in people, we grow through relationships, as individuals we become persons in community, thus community is vital. Persons are born by *sustained loving in relationships marked by ritual/repetition - in marriage by weddings, birthdays, baptisms, anniversaries etc

The man outside of love is a bundle of dissolutions and instincts.

Paul Tournier, a brilliant Christian psychologist, argues that untold damage is done in Christian communities by curating “premature renunciation.”

He explains how nonbelievers and Christians alike (while they may not have language to express it) seem to “know” the Two Gospels of both worlds, which seem in opposition to each other. The gospel of psychology, as he calls it, is one of “self-fulfillment” and “self-assertion,” while the Biblical gospel is “self-denial” and “renunciation.”

"To how many generations of miserable exploited people has the Church preached resignation, acceptance of one’s lot, surrender, and submission?”

“We have all seen so many of those men and women who have never grown up because they have been repressed by a religious upbringing, and have been trained since infancy in systemic renunciation.”

“How many mediocre personalities are there in our churches – people who have not the courage to live full lives, to assert themselves and make the most of themselves, and who look upon this stifling of themselves as a Christian virtue, whereas faith ought to create powerful personalities?

He sees the necessity for self-actualization and self-fulfillment to come *before renunciation - first you need a healthy sense of self and self-assertion.


First you need a place. He says,

"It is readily understandable that to be denied a place is to suffer a serious moral trauma. It is a sort of denial of one’s humanity.”

Without this sense of place, the church’s language of renunciation, to “deny oneself,” becomes painful and confusing.


It is to this person that the church says, “Give yourself to the service of others, for in the service of others you will find yourself.” Tournier responds in a resounding, “No!” for he understands that since the client “has not been loved, or not loved well, he can neither love nor believe in and accept love.”

Tournier notes, the type of person it was who God “called” in Scripture; ones with a well-formed sense of place. 

Abraham was well-established in Ur of the Chaldees when God called him. Moses was asked to leave Midian, where he was tending his father-in-law’s flocks. Jesus called Simon and Andrew to leave their well-established fishing profession etc etc all well-situated in society.

                                                                    

- Abraham Bids Farewell to Hagar and Ishmael

This often can lead to denial - oh, I'm simply too spiritual to even think about getting sex or other "base" desires.

Renunciation is only possible for those who possess. The Buddha was a prince before he was an ascetic.

Premature renunciation denies and suppresses fundamental human drives. It leaves people frustrated with life and themselves.

“Base” can mean low and ignoble, but it is also something that is foundational. Our primary needs move up Maslow’s hierarchy from the concrete to the abstract. Our desires might be ignoble but refusing to pursue them out of fear is no noble example of renunciation.

So Tournier sees the necessity for self-actualization and self-fulfillment to come before renunciation, and the former movement can only occur when children experience attachment in their family of origin – when they have a sense of place within their family. It is out of this sense of place that attachment forms, which is the starting point for young people to develop a healthy sense of self and self-assertion. It is this personhood, this self, which then interacts with a spiritual movement as an adult, when they, as fully formed adults, make true commitments of faith and willingly give themselves up to appropriate renunciation and self-denial.

                                                                          

In 1980, just 6% of 40 yr olds had never been married...and after Covid these numbers will surely skyrocket.

Tournier discusses a kind of anxiety that clients must overcome as they leave the first movement of self-actualization (and its accompanying supports) and enter authentic renunciation. (This anxiety may also be experienced in a preliminary stage of self-actualization, wherein a client may realize their false renunciations and exchange them for authentic self-actualization). Situate yourself within these movements, especially in the context of this comment by Tournier: “The person who has had the benefit of a solid support in childhood from which to launch out into life, will have no difficulty in letting go of that support, and in finding fresh support somewhere else”

Ramesh Belekar, awakened disciple of Rama Maharishi would only teach those who already had material comfort, and could release the world and practice the highest Vedanta.

Psychologist too, say this is a biological need.

When you break it down, marriage does yield much more fulfillment and happiness - although mainly for the more well off, In this article HERE it reports :

"....the subtler truth seems to be that finances, family, and social fitness are three prongs in a happiness trinity. 

They rise together and fall together. 

Low-income Americans have seen the largest declines in marriage and experience the most loneliness.
High-income Americans marry more and have not only richer investment accounts but also richer social lives...

The deeper question is why the trinity of happiness is so stratified by income—and whether well-being in America is in danger of becoming a luxury good."

                          

Relationships otherwise are frankly burdens and sources of stress. You need friends and family and money and security. 

Recently a survey asked if people 1) Viewed parenthood  as a joyful vocation and 2). If they've experienced it.

Not surprisingly, the younger generations found this question baffling, after all, their own uprising, perhaps by a single parent, or with both parents workings, was quite consciously perceived as a burden and frustration to their own burnt-out overworked parents. The message was loud and clear - as children they are in the way.

Since love becomes equated with unsolicited obligation, one avoids love.

Of course, a mothers love doesn’t just confirm the self but confers spiritual fulfilment on the self. When I am truly met by the other, which I experience as being loved by the other, this recognition provides meaning in my world.

So, how can one value a world in which the founding people in ones life have refused to recognise and mirror who one is. He is not valued, so he cannot care about anyone or anything.

If a man has no external proof of value; no mentor or father figure, no compensation of his worth from society in the form of a job, no recognition of his worth simply as a man from a woman, no communal approval in the form of friends....Can he really simply overcome the world ? 

Can an experience of God be so strong, sustaining, and real, that all other evidence is counteracted and he can find peace ?

And without the world and relationships, does this make us more or less human?

Vedanta spirituality will say no to the world, let the dream would alone, focus on knowing who you are, give yourself to Isvara. Yet….India has customs - monk or family householder.

What of the third class?

Is the world, in this man made society, too closed off to the divine ?

                                                       

Orthodox Christianity will mention synergy, you work with God. He puts things in front of you, you work with them. So, go out and try, and God will do the rest.

However, there are much fewer opportunities today, and people launch an incredible effort to even create a network of friends, and this on top of jobs and responsibilities.

What society effortlessly had engineered to make easy, connection, takes real effort and energy, almost as if we have to re-create the world and society in miniature for ourselves.

Of course, one needs support, and skills, even for this. I've written on the dating scene HERE.

Or, one can take all these longings, and put them toward the Divine. Men are opting out of marriage, Men Going There Own Way groups spring up, and are told instead focus on excellence.

Easy to say, yet, I see people who do not intentionally plan, they end up all alone, perhaps in a retirement home, rotting away, with no support at all - no 401 K, no family or children, no one; and they’re message is to work hard, build those social structures and maintain them.

One of the clearest descriptions for achieving a secure life are the 4 pillars of meaning described by Emily Esfahani Smith as Belonging, Purpose, Narrative, and Transcendence. These are convergent with the (interestingly, also 4) loci of meaning John Vervaeke describes in psychological research as: 

A sense of connectedness to others and the world; to something “bigger” than oneself (Transcendence)
A sense of mattering or having significance on things (Narrative)
A sense of being cared for which includes developmental relationships (Belonging)
Purpose (Purpose)

A meaningful life is appraised by the one living it as coherent (narrative), significant (transcendence), directed (purpose), and belonging (belonging).


                                                           

So, go, get what you need, or, focus on the Divine, and things will be added, even if you do not have a base security ?

I asked a Buddhist monk who also was a youth counselor, he said in his society the eternal bachelor is despised. The single person never matures, they don’t have the responsibilities to do so. Instead of excellence or spirituality, they end up being enslaved to their own desires.

Without family, or a special social position, inevitably they yield to various temptations. Without friends, they will self-soothe with alcohol.

On the need for a social framework, Carl Jung once wrote :

"I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world, leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by a real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil.”

                                                    

Shabbat Of Lonely Man Drawing By Melita Kraus

Unfortunately, this paradigm is not understood by the older generation. They have things for granted that provide support that they’re not even aware of.

It’s like this old farmers watching their kids play in the mud at Woodstock, it’s such an alien social sphere that they simply couldn’t understand.

Often they think young folks are depressed because the secular world offers them nothing, but go to the forums, and it’s angst over having no partner, or place in society, of not having any recognition of their with as a human being.

Without this things, no matter how advanced, unless you are a monk, you will feel shame; the one emotion that psychology tells us is almost unbearable.

For most of human life, he needed to know you were accepted, a part of the group, or else you were in danger of being kicked out, and would die if left to yourself.

Alone, the nervous system is always stressed, sending out a signal that something is wrong, you are in danger, and you are - without social support even today things are hard.

For example, being married with no medicine you have a better chance of surviving cancer than being single and having chemo !

This study HERE shows for “prostate, breast, colorectal, esophageal, and head/neck cancers, the survival benefit associated with marriage was larger than the published survival benefit of chemotherapy.”




Loneliness is worse than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Lonely people need more painkillers, they heal much slower, they have more health problems etc etc

This is survival.

Plus, what does the world have to offer for the single and rootless people? Adventures often aren’t meaningful unless you share them with someone. 

Yet....Marriage is insecure these days, think of no-fault divorce, or the jealousy, insecurity, and envy rampant in couples obsessed about their partner’s past relationships, or how the pat 10 years have seen a 300% increase in men exclusively relaying on their wives for support as friendships melt away, and the incredible pressure that puts on the marriage.

It takes far more work and resources to make a marriage work today than it did in the past.  

So, just do God?

Psychologists warn that this is merely the “monk’s defense” , a kind of “spiritual bypassing” you can read more about HERE, where you use spirituality to deny the hard work of relationships and even one’s own inner purpose.

But then what of growth?

People will aks, “Isn’t this celibate life self-centred, obeying their own will and whims? Husbands and wives have obediences and responsibilities in their families and their parishes. Singles has no official obediences or responsibilities beyond themselves. It would seem that such a state would almost certainly result in self-will as a guiding principle.

Now, some have realized the “new category”, neither monk nor married, and have understood it’s unique position, one former Orthodox hermit writes HERE :

“First of all there must be firm spiritual discipline for the sake of a lively interior life. The single person must have a rule of prayer which is diligently kept, with the reading and pondering of wholesome and edifying words and images. Great attention must be given to keep oneself free of all thoughts and images which lead to spiritual and physical defilement and disintegration. The “spouse” and “life partner” for the single person in the most direct and specific way must be the Lord himself….

…these conditions are particularly necessary for the single person precisely because of their single state in a world which renders them particularly vulnerable to self –centeredness and loneliness on the one hand, and lack of commitment and accountability on the other, with the additional cross of often being misunderstood and taken advantage of by those around them because of their single status.”

Now, we all know groups like AA work became it is one small will joining itself to many other wills to become strong. Hence William James wondered why military men could will themselves to fun headstrong into a hail of bullets but couldn’t quit smoking - it turns out we need a community.

So, although an individual could make Church, or spirituality, his entire life, with so many temptations, and on their own, it seems like a possible, but awfully difficult, proposition.

   

Adam Lane Smith, the attachment specialist, explains things like this:

“Have you ever asked yourself why so many men today seem insecure or lost?

To understand where this all started, let's go back to before World War I.

Life in the West and America was much different—more people lived out on the land, on family farms than in cities.

Indeed, people often stayed within ten miles of their birthplace, creating deep and very close relations out of necessity.

For the first 190,000 years of the human species, we lived in loose-knit family groups.

We weren't meant to keep secrets or have separate identities from our tribe.

We lived openly, bonded deeply, and relied on each other for survival.
The wiring of our brain is in connection with living.

The 20th century, however, was an entirely different story and unlike any other in the past.

World War I threw an entire generation of young men into a meat grinder, many coming out shell-shocked or not coming out at all.

The survivors returned home—often feeling broke.

The following cultural upsets —such as the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and World War II—continued to strain family connections.

Post-war Baby Boomers were growing up in a new world where the family farm had been replaced with city living and long hours worked by both parents.

This tended to foster feelings of abandonment and disconnection and created massive insecurity.
Each generation intensified this cycle of disconnection and insecurity.

Today, men are brought up in cultural conditions where deep family bonds and community connections are pretty rare. 

They are placed in daycare from childhood, deprived of the close parental contact their brains are wired to expect, and grow up in a critical, competitive society trying to gain affection, approval, and stability.

If not for the above reasons, then it is the context of coming from broken families, a backdrop of cultural nihilism, that drives them into this constant state of hyper-competition, drawing them into deep insecurity.

Men feel estranged from their own cultures, and nothing seems to fit or belong in a significant way.

The result—men's anxiety, depression, and, in many cases, suicide rates soaring out of proportion.”

                                                           

  I leave you with a devastating poem Tin Ujevic, Croatia's great bohemian drunkard poet :

DAILY LAMENT

How hard it is not to be strong,

how hard it is to be alone,

and to be old, yet still be young!

and to be weak, and powerless,

alone, with no one anywhere,

dissatisfied, and desperate.

And trudge bleak highways endlessly,

and to be trampled in the mud,

with no star shining in the sky.

Without your star of destiny

to play its twinklings on your crib

with rainbows and false prophecies.

– Oh God, oh God, remember

all the glittering fair promises

with which you have afflicted me.

Oh God, oh God, remember

all the great loves, the great victories,

the wreaths of laurel and the gifts.

And know you have a son

who walks the weary valleys of the world

among sharp thorns, and rocks and stones,

through unkindness and unconcern,

with his feet bloodied under him,

and with his heart an open wound.

His bones are full of weariness,

his soul is ill at ease and sad,

and he’s neglected and alone,

and sisterless, and brotherless,

and fatherless, and motherless,

with no one dear, and no close friend,

and he has no-one anywhere

except thorn twigs to pierce his heart

and fire blazing from his palms.

Lonely and utterly alone

under the hemmed in vault of blue,

on dark horizons of high seas.

Who can he tell his troubles to

when no-one’s there to hear his call,

not even brother wanderers?

Oh God, you sear your burning word

too hugely through this narrow throat

and throttle it inside my cry.

And utterance is a burning stake,

though I must yell it out, I must,

or, like a kindled log, burn out.

Just let me be a bonfire on a hill,

just one breath in the fire,

if not a scream hurled from the roofs.

Oh God, let it be over with,

this miserable wandering

under this dome as deaf as stone.

Because I crave a powerful word,

because I crave an answering voice,

someone to love, or holy death.

For bitter is the wormwood wreath

and deadly dark the poison cup,

so burn me, blazing summer noon.

For I am sick of being weak,

and sick of being all alone

(seeing I could be hale and strong)

(and seeing that I could be loved),

but I am sick, sickest of all

to be so old, yet still be young!

What is the Christian Self & Sophia?

                             

There is, of course, no hard answer to this. Just as in psychology, in Christianity. we see multiple attempts to formalize the concept of a self.

One helpful viewpoint can be found in David Bentley Hart's book, The Beauty of the Infinite, where he gives us his take on it:

“What, indeed, is the Christian understanding of the soul? What is the imago Dei, and how does it resemble God? There is no entirely adequate answer to such questions, but any of worth will look nothing like the "subject" lost in the ruins of modern metaphysics. 

For example: the tendency to take Augustine as in some sense the father of the modern subject and the most perfect exemplar of the onto-theologian proceeds from a fairly maladroit exegesis of texts  like the Confessions and De Trinitate, one which finds in their pages simply the story of God and the soul, two discrete substances whose mutual regard insures the meaningfulness of being as a whole. 

If this reading were essentially correct, one would expect to find in either text Augustine's discovery of a stable subject, an appropriable identity present to itself, a singularity transcendent of time's motion; there would have to be some still point at which, in traversing the inward interval, one finally arrives; but this is precisely what Augustine never discovers. 

The interiority that opens up in the Confessions possesses no center in itself, nor does it depend upon an idea in relation to which it is a shadow tormented by its simulacral drift; instead, it is an infinitely revisable, multiplicit, self-contradictory text, whose creaturely contingency is restless in its longing, founded in nothing, and open to what it cannot own by nature. 

Memoria appears for Augustine - even in this fairly early text, written when the language of Neoplatonism still sprang easily to his lips - not as Platonic anamnesis, but as an open space filled with more music than it can contain, constantly "decentering" itself, transcending itself not toward an idea it grasps or simply "resembles," but toward an infinite it longs for despite its incapacity to contain the infinite; it is an interiority in which every mere "self" is swallowed up by an infinite desire. 

To cross this "moral" interval is not to transcend the accidental so as to arrive at the substantial, but is rather perpetually to transcend any fixed identity: a transcendence which is always more transcendent, an infinite scope within the self that no self can comprise, and to which the self belongs. 

The imago Dei is not simply a possession of the soul so much as a future, a hope; the self forever displaced and exceeded by its desire for God is a self displaced toward an image it never owns as a "substance." 

Thus, within himself Augustine finds no place to stand, nor does he glimpse above him a higher self, an idea that serves as the ontological treasure stored up for him in heaven, guaranteeing his identity; but he does see a light that embraces him as it shapes him -  without need - as a vessel of its glory. Even in De Trinitate's most "metaphysical" moments, the image of God is precisely that which cannot be fixed and cannot lend stability to a unified "ego," because it is a trinitarian image, whose plurality does not correspond to "hierarchical" aspects of the soul (this is a Christian, not a Platonic, soul), but rather illuminates the soul as an interdependence of equally present but diverse energies, and so leaves the self in a state of circumvolving multiplicity. 

The very meaning of the Confessions, after all, depends upon an understanding of the particular life, the particular self, as always reinterpretable; the soul is a story that can always be retold, subjected to new grammars, converted. 

The Christian understanding of the soul is, of necessity, dynamic, multifarious, contradictory; no one more profoundly expressed this dynamism than Gregory of Nyssa, for whom the soul could be understood only as an rrkTaais, an always outstretched, open, and changing motion, an infinite exodus from nothingness into God's inexhaustible transcendence (in Kierkegaardian terms, repetition). 

Theology need feel no pangs of conscience in this matter; for while Nietzsche simply draws a quasi-Platonic picture of the  self as polity (or, as the case may be, anarchy), the Christian tradition substitutes for the Platonic soul something still more dynamic: an openness of the "self" before infinite being and infinite novelty.”


David Armstrong is also helpful, he writes HERE:

"Paul’s understanding of the self is also changeable. Paul measures human beings by their concentration of spirit (pneuma): some people are “spiritual,” while others are “psychics” and “sarkics” (1 Cor 2:10-13); the future body of the resurrection will not be “flesh and blood” but “spiritual,” in the sense that it will be composed of spirit (as opposed to the present body which is psychic—15:44-51).

But Paul—who uses a wide number of terms to characterize the human condition, including “spirit,” “psyche,” “flesh,” “blood,” “inner” and “outer” human, etc.—never identifies a single one with the “self,” something perennial which is identifiable with the person. For Paul, the resurrected human exists in a world where God, through Christ and the Spirit, has become “all in all” (15:28), completely filling all things with himself as their final content.....

Early Christian interpreters of the New Testament clearly articulate an unstable, dynamic, fluid self. As St. Athanasios puts it in On the Incarnation of the Word, the self and the world do not exist independently. This is why creation lapses back into nonbeing when communion with God is broken. "

        

If one wishes a deeper, if not entirely scandalous, understanding, one would look to Bulgakov, the great 20th Orthodox theologian, whom Hart analyses for just this purpose, and comes to a few shocking conclusions.

You’ll have to read the whole thing HERE, but the main points :

                  

"The purely subjective interiority of the Son, in its full depth, simply is the Father; the Father’s fully expressed exteriority simply is the Son; the perfect life and actuality of the Father and Son as personal simply is the Spirit.

…..this is not a statement about a reciprocal relation between two selves, but rather a structural description of the divine personhood.

The purely subjective interiority of the Son, in its full depth, simply is the Father; the Father’s fully expressed exteriority simply is the Son; the perfect life and actuality of the Father and Son as personal simply is the Spirit.

The Trinity is God as the hierarchy of the hidden and the manifest. Where God is disclosed, there is the Son.

God suffered, so to speak, in the mode of the Son, as the only proper mode in which God is reflectively present to himself and objectively present to us who live, move, and exist within the life of love and knowledge that he is.

The Father is that mode of being God who, as unexpressed and unmanifest in itself, is present to himself and to creation only in the Son, and who therefore does not suffer in himself.

The Spirit is the living presence of Father and Son to one another in the one divine life of love that, so to speak, eternally overcomes any abstract opposition of hiddenness and manifestation—such as that between the not-suffering of the Father and the suffering of the Son.

Or let us put it this way: when you experience pain, the always unmanifest source of your personal existence (we may call it nous or intellectus if we like, or the transcendental or apperceptive “I” if we prefer, or even Atman or Sakṣi if we are feeling a little daring and exotic) is not in itself either the agent or patient of that experience; only the empirical or psychological self is;

*and your existence as a rational spirit is the living unity of these truths that, in being made actual, constitutes you as a real subject.*

A distant, defective, wholly inadequate analogy of what happened in Christ, no doubt, as all analogies must be; even so, the not-suffering of the Father is more like that than like your not-suffering when I cut my finger. 

                                                         

All of which is to say that the language of “person” in Christian thought…must be a language grounded not simply in the threeness of the divine hypostases, but also, and no less securely, in the oneness of the divine essence understood as the “hypostasible” oneness of the divine Person who God is.

Bulgakov insists, some prior commonality in the human and divine natures, mediating and serving as the unalterable foundation of their union in Christ; and this he chooses to call Sophia, or Sophianicity, or Divine Humanity, or the pre-hypostatic “hypostasibility” of the divine essence as it is possessed in the Father—all of which is to say, that intrinsic movement of personhood that is always already the essential going forth of the Father, in the immanent divine life and then also in creation.

….one must postulate that same “primordial identity between the Divine I of the Logos and the human I.”

…the same Logos that is the ground of the self of Jesus of Nazareth is also the ground of every self; but in Jesus the self’s subjectivity—his psychological ego—is so perfectly transparent to that ground that there is no interval of otherness, no distance between the human I and the divine I.

Thus he is truly God incarnate. But thus too all human beings, who exist only as participating in that divine source of the I, are called to have their “selves” transformed into that very same transparency before their one shared divine ground.

Sophia, hypostasibility, Divine Humanity—what have you: it is that original commonality of the divine and the human logically prior to any differentiation of the two natures that is also the perfectly concordant commonality of those natures in act, even to the point of identity in one and the same person.

Only in God is the full depth of personhood fully known and fully loved and loving.

Each of us is in transit; each of us is always as yet becoming a person; and the “I” that we are always seeking to become is the “I” who the incarnate Logos always already is:

the human being who is wholly human in being wholly God, and who thereby entirely realizes the divine-human essence of our nature.

We truly become persons only in his person, as his person is the full expression of the one trihypostatic Person of God.

When that dependence on others that constitutes us as living subjects becomes an ultimate dependence on the person of the incarnate Logos, making his manifestation of the Father the object of our own subjectivities, we are transformed into what he is.,

Bulgakov echoes Gregory when he says that one becomes a true and actual “I” only in gazing upon the divine “I,” and thereby knowing oneself as the image and reflection of that divine sun.

…it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that there must be a point in his vision of things where the distinction between the language of image and archetype and that of a yet more original identity begins to seem at most merely formal, and even rather arbitrary.

What is astonishing and new in Bulgakov’s monism, given its Christological foundation, is the discovery that it is not merely possible and coherent but perhaps also necessary to say that, among the privileged names for this most original of principles, the highest of all is “person,” or even “the Person”: the one, that is, in whom all personhood has its existence and in which all things have their ground as personal—the one divine Person who is all that is, who shall in the end be all in all, and who alone is forever the “I am that I am” within every “I” that is.


                             

Enlightenment vs Theosis , Advaita Vedanta vs Orthodox Christianity

                                                                       

Vedanta may be divided into seven main historical branches. The most popular today, Advaita, or nondual, appears to be the least compatible with Orthodox Christianity, both in theology and practice. Yet, in actual practice, many in Advaita Vedanta do worship in prayer in song; and in theology, some serious thinkers have squared non-dualism in Christianity, qualifying it of course, such as the great Catholic theologian Stratford Caldecott HERE, or the brilliant Sara Grant HERE.

Christine Mangala Frost, and Orthodox Christian Scholar and convert from Hinduism, presents a brief, clear, conservative theological comparison between Advaita Enlightenment and Orthodox Theosis or Divination.

The following is from her book,The Human Icon A Comparative Study of Hindu and Orthodox Christian Beliefs:

"There is the Self-Luminosity of Brahman and of the ‘Uncreated Light’. For Śaňkara, the self-luminosity of Brahman is an important concept, and he speaks of the liberated person in terms of that same light: he or she is literally ‘en-lightened’.

“On account of ignorance, the self appears conditioned, as it were; when that is destroyed, the pure self verily shines of its own accord, like the sun when the cloud is dispersed."

(Ātmabodha, v.4.)1

When a person is liberated, he or she is understood to have become ‘light-filled’. In fact, in many Śaiva bhakti hymns (for Śaiva bhakti tends to align itself with advaita) the poet-saint’s divinisation is described as ‘merging’ into a light that is ‘Uncreated’. Here advaita touches on a motif that is central to Orthodox theosis: that of ‘Uncreated Light’.

However, one question still remains….might that not mean that the self-luminosity (or ‘uncreated light’) of the immortal and imperishable Brahman is simply transferred ontologically to the ātman of a mortal and creaturely individual?….any total identification of the creature with the uncreated such as one might derive from pronouncements such as ‘I am Brahman’ would be rejected by Orthodox theologians as blasphemous….

                                    

The route to theosis in Orthodox theology, historically speaking, comprised two currents that in the fullness of time merged into one: first was the Platonic-Evagrian, which focussed on the ‘nous’, a term that means ‘mind’ but is more than mind, and hence is best translated as ‘spiritual intellect’: it is that ‘eye’ of the inner being of which Jesus speaks (Matthew 6:22; Luke 11:34). A second current was the Macarian legacy (originating from a fourth century Syrian monk, Macarius), which focusses on the ‘heart’, on aesthesis (sensibility) – the term ‘heart’ being used, as in the Psalms, to indicate the whole inner man.

 These two currents merged in the writings of Diadochos of Photike (fifth century ), in Maximus the Confessor (580-662) and in Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022 ); whilst the notion of bringing the mind into the heart through prayer, especially by means of the Jesus Prayer, gained currency. By the time Gregory Palamas is writing on deification (1296-1359), this integrating meditative practice is seen as one of the most effective ways to prepare oneself for the grace of deification.

If we now turn again to Śaňkara, for him the intellect or buddhi (which can be equated with the ‘nous’) plays a key role in achieving the so-called advaitic ‘epistemic switch’. Not only the intellect but the ‘heart’ is implicated in the ignorance that Śaňkara observes in the worldly (samsāric) ‘I’.

 It seems it is this ‘darkened’ condition of the inner self that Śaňkara has in mind when he speaks in Ātmabodha1 of ‘the transmigratory tract filled with attachments and aversions’. If we use Orthodox terminology, these would be called the ‘passions’, which in their unredeemed state darken the nous. In Orthodox thinking, the nous when purified is spoken of as ‘luminous’, for it regains its reflective capacity to radiate the glory of God. Given that the Church Fathers use the same idiom as Śaňkara when describing the purified nous as ‘luminous’, it is surely possible to see the luminosity of the nous as the luminosity of the liberated person’s buddhi or intellect.

It is this aspect of Śaňkara’s approach to the process of divinisation that aligns him with an Orthodox approach to theosis, even after one has allowed for major divergences. His boldness of vision enables him to speak of the possibility for mortals of a ‘divine’ mode of life. Nevertheless, there remains one crucial difference. In Orthodox thinking, the cleansed nous is an instrument, the locus of ‘divinisation’, but it is not the experience itself: the purified nous may make theosis possible; but theosis always depends on divine grace. Moreover, in Orthodox theology, divinisation always implies Trinitarian life: a life of relationship, of love, and of kenosis, self-emptying.

…..when Advaitins insist on exalting the highest state of ātman-brahman as ‘impersonal’, is this claim for the ‘impersonal’ as ‘highest’ quite so self-evident as they assume? More important still, is the exaltation of Brahman as impersonal compatible with any notion of ‘holiness’? Surely ‘holiness’ is inseparable from any idea of divinisation, yet would not that seem to require a relationship with an ‘Other’?

It is significant that questions and objections such as these, which an Orthodox Christian might well want to put to Śaňkara and his followers, have already been voiced by the founders of two other schools of Vedānta, both of them unequivocally theistic: by Rāmānuja (1077-1157 ) and by Madhva (1238-1317 ). In the skilled debates conducted by the founders and followers of theistic Vedānta, not only their questions but also their answers should strike a sympathetic chord among Orthodox Christians."

You can read more about the "light body" "HERE"

Heaven, Hell, and other “realms” as Affective *Places*.

                                                            

Jake Orthwein recently tweeted about the connection between afterlife conceits and how we experience the world affectively right now; he writes the following:


A strange consequence of taking the “ways of looking” approach to emptiness seriously is that it makes more coherent the idea of heaven, hell, and other “realms” as *places*.


We see MEANING (implications for action) and *infer* object, not the other way around.

That is, if how things appear depends on the way of looking all the way down, then ways of looking can change *where you are* or *what kind of world you inhabit*, at least from the point of view of deep parts of your nervous system.

               

This makes sense, given that the deepest sense of “place” is not about articulated conceptions of what “things” are out there but about what affective regularities obtain in experience.

                              

"The "domain of the known" and the "domain of the unknown" can reasonably be regarded as permanent constituent elements of human experience even of the human environment. 

Regardless of culture, place and time, human individuals are forced to adapt to the fact of culture (the domain of the known, roughly speaking) and the fact of its ultimate insufficiency (as the domain of the unknown necessarily remains extant, regardless of extent of previous "adaptation"). 

*The human brain-and the higher animal brain— appears therefore to have adapted itself to the eternal presence of these two "places"; the brain has one mode of operation when in explored territory, and another when in unexplored territory. 

In the unexplored world, caution— expressed in fear and behavioral immobility— initially predominates, but may be superseded by curiosity— expressed in hope, excitement and, above all, in creative exploratory behavior.

 Creative exploration of the unknown, and consequent generation of knowledge, is construction or update of patterns of behavior and representation, such that the unknown is transformed from something terrifying and com- pelling into something beneficial (or, at least, something irrelevant).

 The presence of capacity for such creative exploration and knowledge generation may be regarded as the third, and final, permanent constituent element of human experience (in addition to the domain of the "known" and "unknown").

It also makes sense of experiences that seem to suggest that ordinary existence is like “wandering a desiccated landscape, trying to find one’s way home.”

You can imagine, as an intuition pump, that if you didn’t have a prefrontal cortex and your capacities for action were more limited, the world would be filled with something like angels and demons — that is, with much more obviously and exaggeratedly affect-laden appearances."

Pure Land and Charnel Ground practices making more sense.

I think the logic of this is that by alternating the two extreme views, you accelerate the process by which you transcend the duality and see the emptiness, which ultimately brings deeper liberation than just holding the pure land view. Makes holding that (or any) view easier too.           

There’s a suhrawardi quote I can’t find along the lines of “only by standing at the border between two worlds can you transcend both”

They’re ways of stretching these deep-seated, affect-laden conceptions of place to their positive and negative limits, thereby seeing their emptiness.

A dying Rob Burbea’s 4m whispered lecture is now my favorite Christmas sermon:

“my hands, my body, now just bones really, wasted away, but some kind of perfection … perfection a way of seeing … Christ‘s blessing is there, on everything, in everything, even in the dukkha itself”

NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL FUNCTION:

THE NATURE OF THE MIND It is reasonable to regard the world, as forum for action, as a "place" —a place made up of the familiar, and the unfamiliar, in eternal juxtaposition. The brain is actually composed, in large part, of two subsystems, adapted for action in that place. 

The right hemisphere, broadly speaking, responds to novelty with caution, and rapid, global hypothesis formation. The left hemisphere, by contrast, tends to remain in charge when things-that is, explicitly categorized things-are unfolding according to plan. 

The right hemisphere draws rapid, globalvalence-based, metaphorical pictures of novel things; the left, with its greater capacity for detail, makes such pictures explicit and verbal. Thus the exploratory capacity of the brain "builds" the world of the familiar (the known), from the world of the unfamiliar (the unknown). 

When the world remains known and familiar-that is, when our beliefs maintain their validity-our emotions remain under control. When the world suddenly transforms itself into something new, however, our emotions are dysregulated, in keeping with the relative novelty of that transformation, and we are forced to retreat or to explore once again.

What we call objects are actually *internalized patterns of interaction* — perceptual, motor, affective..."

That's the end of what Jake has to say, and he's right, this has tremendous benefits on psychology, resilience, and well being.

Check out the story HERE story about two Tibetan peasants who stumble into WWII and survive astonishing odds - all the while thinking they're in the netherworld !

This paper by Stephen Asma proposes a shift in how we understand human cognition, particularly imagination. It argues for a "mythopoetic" perspective, viewing the world through narratives and personal intentions rather than purely objective laws :

Understanding "Adaptive Imagination: Toward a Mythopoetic Cognitive Science."

I sum up his core ideas below.

                        

This paper by Stephen Asma proposes a shift in how we understand human cognition, particularly imagination. It argues for a "mythopoetic" perspective, viewing the world through narratives and personal intentions rather than purely objective laws.

Understanding "Adaptive Imagination: Toward a Mythopoetic Cognitive Science" :

**Core Ideas:**

* **Mythopoetic Cognition:** This refers to the innate human tendency to understand the world through stories, attributing agency and intentionality to animate and inanimate objects. It's not just about creating myths; it's a fundamental way of thinking and making sense of our experiences.

* **Evolutionary Basis:** Asma argues that this mythopoetic cognition is not a primitive leftover but an evolved adaptation with significant benefits for survival and social cohesion.

* **Challenges to Contemporary Views:** The paper critiques current trends in cognitive science and philosophy that often focus on logic, rationality, and objective reasoning, neglecting the crucial role of imagination and narrative in human thought.

* **New Cognitive Science of Imagination:** Asma calls for a new approach to studying the mind that acknowledges and investigates the mythopoetic dimension of human cognition.

By recognizing the power of mythopoetic thinking, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and develop more effective ways to learn, communicate, and connect with each other.