The Three Tiered Integration of Self: A Spirituality by Christian Anthropology Through Comparative Studies

The Three Tiered Integration of Self

A Spirituality by Christian Anthropology Through Comparative Studies

I. Introduction

II. Anthropologies Cosmologies and Teleologies: The Three Tiered Field of Experience 

A. Two Fundamental Views

B. The Self and the Three Tiered Field of Experience 

C. Bio-fulfillment Experiences of the Guru, Buddha, and Christ

III. The Meaning of the Body and The Three Tiered Integration of Self

A. Two views on bodily Meaning

B. Collapsing the self and the Auxiliary self with the Environment

C. Interfaces for The Three Tiered Integration of Self

IV. Personal Discipline and The Three Tiered Integration of the Self

A. Christian Contemplative Prayer

B. Reimagining the Corporeal Self as a Self of Prayer         

C. Three Tiered Integration and the Sacramental System

V. Conclusion

Introduction

Once I was honored to see the Dalai Lama give a talk.  Before the event, some friends and I were having a conversation.  These friends are fairly typical “progressive secular”.  They generally see religion as a problem, until it comes to Eastern religion and especially the Dalai Lama.  During that conversation, in a moment of excited whimsy, I said something to the effect of, “I’m really excited to see him talk, but I’m not falling for his skillful means”.  It was at this point that the difference in our opinions on religion in general became clear.  I was quite comfortable with the rest of the conversation, I’m used to talking about religion.  But my friends, who aren’t used to confronting religion in a way that is open minded, but respectful of the differences, were not as at ease.  It became quickly clear that they hand little to no grasp of Eastern cosmology or the basic goals of the religion, but saw it more as a “self help” spirituality that reminds us all to be kind to each other.  Conversely in 2016 there was an article by the Christian Satire site Babylon Bee entitled “Man Accidentally Performs Yoga Pose, Is Possessed By Horde of Demons” which pretty much hilariously sums up some Christians’ view of yoga.  These together demonstrate the complex relationship that Western culture has with Eastern religions.

I am not one to disrespect any tradition.  In the former treatise Ordinary and Extraordinary Religions I took great pains to show how God can be at work through any people and/or peoples.  In the treatise Digital Evangelization I recommended a fulfillment evangelization, which begins by recognizing and celebrating similarities.  When a religion has aspects that are not similar, but are compatible, it is even possible for a Christian to have an expansive attitude and develop religious technique and practice based on the other tradition.  This process is how the various gentile based ancient Christian traditions, such as “Roman” Catholicism, were manifest.  But it would be foolish to buy into the idea that “all religions say basically the same thing”.  There are many ways we are the same and there are many ways we are different as traditions and as practitioners.  Our question is how, as Christians can we utilize our relationship with other traditions to further our own faith.   

The purpose of this treatise is to take what we will call the three tiered field of experience, mind, body, and external world and collapse them by means of a three tiered integration of self in order to develop a spirituality that will facilitate a more invested experience of the sacraments.   The lens through which we will develop our technique will be a comparative study of Christianity with Eastern religions.  The treatise will particularly concern the mind/body interface and the extension of self, as well as how these shape and are shaped by each views cosmology. 

In the first section we will start with an introduction of how religions exhibit similarities and differences and a reflection on why comparative religious studies can benefit a person’s investment in their own religion.  We will then compare and contrast the cosmologies of Eastern religions and Christianity, paying particular attention to the human condition and the ultimate goal of for a human in each religion.  We will start with an exploration of the basic cosmology of Hinduism and Buddhism. We will then contrast how these Eastern traditions and Christianity seek to integrate mind, body, and environment into one reality, how each tradition seeks integration utilizes completely different cosmological assumptions. Lastly we will explore the role that the body plays in the various religious heroes of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity by exploring the seven chakras points of Kundalini Yoga and the five wounds of Christ.  In this analysis we will pay close attention to the mythic role of the serpent in each narrative and use that exploration to discuss how the religions regard the relationship between the mind, the body and the world. 

In the second section we will begin by exploring the functional meaning of the body in each tradition.  We will unpack the Christian functional meaning of the body as a means of communication, especially communication of self.  Contrasting this with the Eastern function of the body as an illusion, or a carrier of suffering will allow us to examine how the body itself can be the used as the bridge between the inner self and the exterior world, especially by means of the senses. We will then apply that examination to how Christ shared his “self” with his followers as a church and with the exterior world as a whole through the process of redemption by means of his physical self.  We will end the second section by discussing three tools a Christian practitioner can use for self communication typological investment, ritual action and the body of the Church. 

Having explored the necessity of the three tiered integration of self, in the final section of the treatise we will develop a spirituality using the techniques we have discussed.  The personal application will involve three elements, one for each field of experience.  First we will explore the inner element, where we will discuss contemplative prayer and cognitive emptiness.  Next we will employ our previous reflections to better utilize a bodily element and an environmental element.  We will explore these respectively as contemplative prayer, corporeal prayer, and integration through the sacramental system.  We will end with an analysis of each sense, visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory.  We will apply the corporeal reimagining to how each of the five sense interacts in the ritual sacramental system of the Catholic Church.  The hope is the development of spiritual practices that allow the participant to become a fully integrated part of creation by use of the sacraments.        

 

Anthropologies Cosmologies and Teleologies: The Three Tiered Field of Experience

Thus far our treatises have not done much concerning comparative religious studies.  Most of the commentary here is how Christians or Catholics should approach other traditions rather than any attempt to compare and/or contrast. Though I do teach a world religion class, I don’t try to be an objective expert on someone else's faith, and would much prefer to have a representative there to engage and correct me if I stray in any representation.  Therefore, in this treatise and any subsequent treatise we will remain firmly in most general belief structure of any other tradition.

When I teach the world religions class I answer a very important question right up front, Why should one study the world religions in a Catholic school as part of a religion class? Why not in history, or literature, or anthropology, or sociology? There are two reasons, one more conservative and one more progressive.  The more conservative reason is that study of other traditions is useful because it is necessary for effective evangelization.  Why would one not want to know how to discourse on one’s target’s own level?  This was certainly Saint Paul’s strategy, “all things to all people.”  If one is completely unaware of the target religion, one can waste hours of time with a practitioner talking past one another.  But if one has a good grasp of the target religion, meaningful and effective evangelization can begin immediately.  

The legitimate fear concerning learning another religion is that one will be lead astray by seductive teachings.  But with a firm foundation in the faith and proper direction, study of the world religions can be useful and edifying.  Thus, the progressive answer to why study the world religions as part of a religion class is where one moves from “useful” (for evangelization) to “edifying” (for one’s own spiritual journey).  When studying theology in college one of the ways my understanding of the faith greatly increased was when I studied the early heresies of the Church.  It is by being exposed to these, again, after I had a firm faith, that I began to be able to see a fuller picture of how and why we believe what we do as Catholics.  The same is true of the world religions.  By studying them, one can certainly come into contact with many things that we do not believe.  One also comes into contact with many things that we do, but explained in differing ways, lastly one can come into contact with things that are not the same but compatible, which allows for expansion of practice. 

Proper study of other traditions can enrich one’s faith in many unexpected ways and lead to a more beautiful understanding, exercise, and devotion in one’s own faith.  Examples of such appropriate synchronicity would be Saint Paul himself and Greco-Roman synchronization of Christianity, Saint Augustine and Platonism, Saint Thomas Aquinas and Aristotelianism, St. Teresa of Calcutta’s effective use of the caste system to demonstrate true Christianity, Thomas Merton’s utilization of Eastern prayer techniques in his life as a trappist, or all of the original evangelizers of the Roman empire, whose effective evangelization by means of Roman culture gives us the Roman Rite.  

This second purpose is our aim here.  The hope is that by the end of our endeavor we will have garnered a spiritual discipline and practice that is born out of serious reflection on Eastern cosmology, without adopting the cosmology itself.  There we will exploit similarities in the traditions but also point out major differences.  The hope is to find the middle ground of compatibility, where the religions may be different but not incompatible.  This sets the conditions for expansion in ritual practice, spiritual practice, or discipline.  

Two Fundamental Views

All that being said, we can now turn back to our introduction and reassert, “all religions do not say the same thing”.  Usually someone who takes this position thinks of religion as mostly an interpersonal moral code.  But religions are far more than a moral code.  They are entire interpretations of reality.  In that they are usually far more encompassing than a standard secular empirical view.  Any given religion generally has multivalent epistemologies and multifaceted approaches to human existence.  Even regarding the moral code, there is often a fundamental difference between “why” someone follows the code, and then considerable difference between what any given code is.  The view that all religions have the same fundamental moral code springs from the 19th and 20th century attempts to distill a pan-human morality from the many varied moral codes of the world religions.  Those “synthesis codes” dropped moral obligations such a diet or ritual engagement, marking them as obsolete, and what was left was a basic list of inter-social dictums that fits a secular utilitarian bill.  Such moralities are not bad, they are just not reflective of the breadth actual codes of religions.  It is not fair to deduce from this extremely particular philosophical endeavor that “all religions say basically the same thing”.  

This historical development is what lead to my friends’ surprise when I pointed out to them that the end game of Buddhism is self extinction.  They seemed even more dismayed that the world view was, on the whole, “negative”.  This is where we must be very careful to represent a tradition as best we can.  It is not to be suggested that Buddhists are negative people.  Anyone who knows a sample of practitioners knows this is not the case.  But my friends seemed shocked when I told them that the Buddhists religion see life fundamentally as suffering.  Again, even in that conversation I was quick to qualify.  It is not even that Buddhists practitioners operate with that view.  Most followers of any religion are not philosophically systematic.  Most practitioners take a praxis methodology, not a reflective one.  Therefore it is not uncommon to find Buddhists with a generally positive outlook.  But for our purpose we must explore the fundamental difference between the First Noble Truth (Life is suffering) and the first chapter of Genesis (He saw everything he created and it as very good.).  

As the reader will know, the Eastern cosmology is based on a cycle of reincarnation, birth death and rebirth.  Most of us have taken time to fantasize that we were past royalty.  But this only gets at about half of the picture. The Eastern view also asserts that reality is eternal, not created.  There are two fundamental “situations” Sat, which is fundamental stuff, and Karma, which is fundamental law.  The interaction of the two in the cycle of Samsara generates Maya, this world of illusion.  In this cycle, Karma mechanically pulls out pieces of Sat (so to speak) and forms them into beings.  These beings live lives that accrue Karma by the deeds done and then die.  At death the “piece of sat”, called an Atman, merges back into the whole of Sat to be pulled out again by Karma taking the new form it shaped from the Karma accrued.

The entire process is analogically explained in the Chandogya Upanishad to Svetaketu by his father Uddalaka,

One day he [Uddalaka] called him [Svetaketu] and said, "Son, I think you feel you have mastered all knowledge on the face of the earth; but, have you ever learnt that knowledge, by which we can hear what is not heard; perceive what cannot be perceived, and know what cannot be known?"

Svetaketu was a trifle upset. He asked humbly, "Sire, won't you tell me what that knowledge is? Seeing that his son was coming round, the father said, "My dear, let me explain myself fully. When, for instance, you know one clod of Clay, you can know all that is made of clay. When you know a nugget of gold, you can know all ornaments made of gold, because the essence of it is gold. When you know a nail-cutter, you can know all that is made of iron, the truth being that all of them are iron. The only difference is in their names and forms. That is the knowledge I am talking about." Svetaketu said, "Sir, my venerable gurus did not perhaps know it.

Had they known, why would they have not taught it to me? Please teach it to me."

"My child, the rivers that run in the different directions rise from the sea and go back to the sea. Yet the sea remains the same. The rivers, while in the sea, cannot identify themselves as one particular river or another. So also creatures that have come from Sat know not that they have come from that Sat, although they become one or the other again and again." 

The cycle is not something that ever started.  It is an eternal process that makes up reality.  In Eastern religions, this cycle leves one with two basic options.  The first option, hinted at in this passage, is to learn in the best detail the laws of Karma for one’s situation in life (dharma) and manipulate them in order to get born into better and better situations.  

The popular Western mind lacks any sort of imagination when it comes to this.  We imagine being royalty or rich.  We seem to think that Karma only applies to this Earth, we may even assume that Karma is enacted by the Hindu gods.  But Karma is not just applicable to this earth.  Hinduism does have heavens and hells.  One can certainly end up there, if one plays one’s card right (or wrong).  The difference is that one does not stay there “forever”.  The reason is that any heaven or hell a person may end up in is made of Sat, because everything is made up of Sat.   And any heaven or hell a person may end up in is also subject to the law of Karma, because everything is subject to the Law of Karma.  Karma was not instituted by Eastern god’s, the gods themselves are under its purview.  If one can learn to effect dharma properly, one can become a god by manipulation of Karman and the cycle of birth, death and rebirth.  The Western mind may now be tempted to find rest.  We may think, “now we can stay forever in a blessed state”.  But alas, no, being a god also means being subject to Karma and having a darma.  

If one takes Uddalaka’s implied route, one is looking for the manipulation of Karma in order to better one’s lot, but, when one adds eternity to that problems begin to arise that the Western mind, with it’s linear and limited view of time, finds hard to perceive.  To illuminate the problem we will relate another story, the story of Indra and the ants. This classic Hindu myth in the Brahma Vaivarta Purana involves Indra, King of the gods.  

Once the god Indra summoned Vishvakarman, the god of arts and crafts, and commanded him to erect such a palace as would be worthy of Indra's own unequaled splendor.  Vishvakarman worked very hard and in a year succeeded in constructing a shining residence that would surely satisfy Indra.  But this was not the case, for every time Indra visited this new creation, he developed visions beyond visions of new and more complicated marvels that he ordered to be added to his beautiful palace.  This was understandably frustrating to our craftsman,Vishvakarman, and he decided to seek help from the creator god, Brahma.  Brahma assured Vishvakarman that he would soon be relieved of his burden.

The next morning, a boy appeared at the gate of Indra.  The king instantly recognized the holy nature of the child, ushered him in, and asked the purpose of his coming.  The boy told Indra that had heard of the mighty palace he was building and then commented that “no Indra before you has ever succeeded in completing such a palace as yours is to be.” Indra, full of the wine of triumph or pride, was amused at the boy's pretense at knowledge.

  

“So then”, he chuckled. “And have you seen a number of Indras come and go?”

The boy addressed Indra calmly.   “Oh King of the Gods, I have known the dreadful dissolution of the universe. I have seen all perish, again and again, at the end of every cycle. At that terrible time, every single atom dissolves into the primal, pure waters of eternity, whence originally all arose. Everything then goes back into the fathomless, wild infinity of the ocean, which is covered with utter darkness and is empty of every sign of animate being.  Who will count the universes that have passed away, or the creations that have risen afresh, again and again, from the formless abyss of the vast waters? Who will number the passing ages of the world, as they follow each other endlessly and who will search through the wide infinities of space to count the universes side by side, each containing its Brahma, its Vishnu, its Shiva?  Who can count the Indras in them all--those Indras side by side, who reign at once in all the innumerable worlds those others who passed away before them or even the Indras who succeed each other in any given line, ascending to godly kingship, one by one, and, one by one, passing away King of gods, there are among your servants certain who maintain that it may be possible to number the grains of sand on earth and the drops of rain that fall from the sky, but no one will evernumber all those Indras. This is what the Knowers know.

The boy continued to speak in this manner meanwhile, a parade of ants appeared in the hall. This sight set the holy child to laughing. At Indra's stammering request, he explained his reaction. “I laughed because of the ants. The reason is not to be told. It is the secret that smites with an ax the tree of worldly vanity, hews away at its roots, and scatters its crown.”  But with great humility, Indra begged the holy child to share this secret.  The boy conceded and said, “See these ants, O Indra, filing in an endless parade. Like you, each one, by virtue of pious deeds, once ascended to the rank of a king of the gods. But now, through many rebirths, each has become again an ant.  This army is an army of former Indras.

This story, among many, is meant to wake one up to the scope of time we are dealing with in Eastern cosmology.  Brahma, in speaking of all the endless destructions and creations he has seen, even hints at his own subjugation to this process.  If one were to take the time to study the following chart of a “Brahma Life” one could see the dizzying scope of Eastern cosmology that cycles again and again eternally as karma and Sat interact to draw out and shape atmans.  By this chart one can see that even Brahma is subject to this cycle.

   

                                                   

In short, Brahma lives 100 (brahma) years.  Each day Brahma makes and remakes fourteen “humanities”.  That is, fourteen scopes of human history from the first man (Manu or Adam if one prefers) to the end of humanity.  Then, after all is made and destroyed for the fourteenth time, he goes to sleep for an equal length of time.  That, on the chart, is called a partial devastation.  After 100 years of this, brahma dies and there is stillness for another 100 Brahma years (full devistations).  Then Karma mechanistically pulls another Atman out of Sat to be Brahma and it all starts over again.  

This is easily contrasted with the most basic understanding of Christian cosmology.  Here time is linear and has a definite beginning.  From that beginning there is development, a Fall, struggle and then an afterlife where some are rewarded and some are punished.  But those states are permanent not transitional or recurring.  There is, in Christianity, death and rebirth.  But the “rebirth” is not from a natal state, it is a glorification process.  Also, again, it is a one time shot, not a cycle.  The result is permanent.     

Manipulating karma to get better situations in future lives turns out to be short term gain.  No matter how high one climbs one can always fall.  It is not just that one “can” fall, one “will” fall.  Nothing survives a complete devastation.  In that 100 Brahma years after Brahma has died all Sat is at rest.  When Karma kicks in, all of reality starts again with a Brahma made from a new atman.  The ennui of constant inescapable existence leads one who ponders it to angst regarding their state of affairs.      

This leads to the second option, which is escape.  The second option is striving for Moksha.  Moksa is when one’s atman merges with Sat never to return again.  The way to achieve this is to be aware of one’s dharma (what one is “supposed to do” according to the law of karma) and to use that knowledge, not to accrue good karma, but to balance one’s karma.  When moksha is one’s goal there is no “good” karma. All karma leads on back into maya through samsara.  One holding this view is on the cusp of (if not buying into) the first noble truth, life is suffering.  The only option is to be able to escape this cycle completely, not to a heaven of bliss, but into the stillness of static fundamental being.  But there is lingering anxiety, how can one be sure one will never “come back”?  This anxiety may lead to the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism.

Buddhism has much the same cosmology as Hinduism but with some key exceptions.  The major difference is that Buddhism does not believe is Sat.  There is karma and dharma, but in the Buddhist view all is illusion, change and flux.  The conclusion of this is the First Noble Truth, “Life is Suffering”.  This striking assertion jars many westerners when they hear it because such an assertion does not fit the image of the joyful Buddhist one may have.  It is also completely at odds with the progressive understanding of the secular world, that we can make the world a better place.   But the same confusion holds true of the secular view of Christians.  Our assertion is the exact opposite, “all is good”.  But the image painted of us is often that of the stern adherent standing in judgment of any expression of joy.       

A second divergence Buddhism takes from Hinduism is that in Buddhism there is no Atman, no true self.  This absence stands to reason in Buddhism since the great secret of the Upanishads is that Atman and Sat are the same.  Given that there is no “true self” a major distinction between Buddhism and Hinduism is the distinction between Moksha (escape through permanent mergance with Sat) and Nirvana (escape by extinction into nothingness).  This position is so disturbing that, much like Christ’s injunction to sell everything and follow him, it is quickly and skillfully walked back by many Buddhists and varieties of Buddhism.  It is at the very least a grasp at framing the necessity of the permanent nature of escape in Eastern cosmology. 

To say, “all religions basically say the same thing” becomes absurd once one begins to see these fundamental differences.  An Eastern religion is seeking knowledge to escape what is perceived of as the negative experience of existence.  Christianity is looking for a savior to grant us the redemption that will bring the joy that creation should have because creation is fundamentally good.

All of this background is finally leading us to the topic at hand, how each tradition views mind/body relationship and what useful information one as a Christian can glean from this.  To start one may notice two major overarching symbols in Catholicism and Buddhism, the Crucifix and the meditating Buddha.  Each of these symbols depict the moment of fulfillment for the hero of the religion.  

                     

  

In one instance you have a worldview of life as suffering, but a religious symbol of a being who has found ultimate peace and serenity.  In the other instance you have a worldview that all is good, but a religious symbol of a man being tortured to death in the most horrific of circumstances.  Each religion is making an attempt to explain or come to terms with the fact that the world often presents the opposite of what it believes about the fundamental nature of reality.  Our focus for the remainder of this treatise will be to notice how bodies play a role in the moment of fulfillment in these two figures and draw out what their corporeal realities teach us about each religion, but especially about Christianity and then to formulate from that a helpful spiritual technique for a practicing Christian.

The Self and the Three Tiered Field of Experience 

Philosophy has long been plagued by the mind/body problem.  Religions usually use philosophical technique to discuss and discern its accepted assumptions concerning this problem.  Humans seem to intuit a difference between their physical existence and their psyche.  Christianity and Buddhism approach the topic from very different angles.  For the Eastern religion the question is, “what is the part of the human that is everlasting?”  In Eastern cosmology there is a striving for the eternal, which mainly means “that which is not subject to flux”.  The Hindu answer for the eternal aspect of the human is the imperceptible “Atman”.  Atman is not one’s thoughts, feelings, memories, hopes, dreams, etc.  It is the unchangeable Sat that one’s changale aspects are molded from.  For Buddhism, such a thing does not exist, all is flux and illusion.  The Hindu anthropology is dualistic (sat and maya), but in the Buddhist view, all is integrated under the same ontology (illusion), and this existence is not a “good” thing. 

For Christianity there is a cultural assumption of dualism, especially in our post enlightenment varieties.  Many Christians assume a body and soul that are different things.  Many even assume a body that dies and a soul that lives forever without it.  The former treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton we took pains to point out the inauthenticity of this belief and not only that, but also to expand seculation on just how a “body” may participate in the Eschaton.  There is an assumption in Judaism that the body and soul are a unit.  When one reads the later works of the Hebrew Scriptures, 1 and 2 Maccabees for example, one obviously sees a reaction to encroaching hellenistic dualism that rejects the body as corrupt or evil.  These books focus particularly on bodily resurrection.  Pious Judaism and subsequent Christianity saw a dualism that rejects part of God’s good creation as unacceptable. 

Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity each seek to integrate the psyche, the body, and the exterior world under a common categories.  For Buddhism and Hinduism that category is illusion.  Whatever one perceives one’s self to be is an illusion, even the perception itself is such.  This is deducible in Eastern cosmology because one’s self is in constant flux.  Flux indicates non permanent, therefore illusion.  In this regard, body, the soul and the exterior world are cut from the same cloth, the religion regards them on equal footing concerning how essential they are to the “makeup” of the person.  The same “equal footing” is true in Christianity, but from a completely different set of assumptions.  The body is seen as the physical extension of the soul, the soul is the imperceptible nature and personhood of the body.  In Christianity both are bound for an everlasting state in the afterlife.  Each consists of a complementary and necessary piece which forms a whole person. And each abides as a creature in creation.  Creation is good and the exterior world, the body and the soul are all part of it.

The understanding of integration is not the common assumption. There appears to be a difference between those parts of us that are “physical” and those parts of us that are “intangible”.  To have a sense of “self” gives humanity the ability to understand aspects of himself as intangible to himself and other people.  This experience of self sets up the three tiered experiential field.  The first tier is the sense of the “interior self”, the psyche.  The interior self does not seem to exist as part of the physical world. The second tier is the sense of the self as bodily, this is one’s “self” as it abides in the physical world.  The third tier of experience is the sense of the “external world” that is the physical world beyond the body.  

The problem of Philosophy concerning the three tiered field of experience is two fold.  First, where does any given tier end and another begin?  Second, in which tier(s) does one situate the “true self”?  

To answer the second question off hand, most people would state; the psyche is the true self, the body is the auxiliary self and the external world is not the self.  But even with casual reflection one can see how inadequate this is.  Most people would admit the psyche has commerce with the body in that it “controls” it.  But the body most certainly has commerce with and is integral to the psyche.  To see the absolute union one only need suffer an illness and note the effect on one’s psyche.  To see the integration of environment and self, need only need consume an effective inebriant.  This extreme example is played out in all the subtle ways that the environment, the body and the psyche interact, inform, and effect one another.  For a more healthy example, regular exercise, good diet, and subsequent good health have an accruing effect of positivity on the psyche.     

As we have seen, Eastern cosmologies do not believe the three tiers of experience are in any way fundamentally separate.  For Hinduism, what one perceives as one’s psyche is equally illusion for the only true self is the Atman, which is, as Uddalaka notes, is imperceptible to most people.  For Buddhism there is no Atman, therefore there is no self, there, is no independent psyche, there is no body, there is no external world, all is illusion.  Nothing is “passed on” from one life to the next, but rather it is “like flame touching off flame.”  However, major traditions do hold that there is “buddha nature”.  This is the “subtle self”.  It is the knowledge one accrues , like the actuation of karma across lives, that allows one to “progress” toward enlightenment from life to life.  Buddha nature is the seeds of buddhahood, as manifest in the cycle of samsara.  

 

To understand how Christianity integrates the three tiers one must look back on the topics we discussed in the former treatise Christian Ontology.  For Christians, reality is simple and manifold at the same time. All of reality is one, yet at the same time infinitely divisible. So even though there is a three tiered field of experience one can obviously dissect each of these fields almost infinitely.  We commented in the former treatise Christian Ontology on the ontological conundrum of the body.  “Is a human [body] real or just a system of organs, or just a collections of cells or just a collection of atoms?  OR just part of a family, part of a city, state, nation, culture species, an example of a mammal, part of biomass in toto, part of the cosmos?” And lastly, the third tier is also integratable.  It integrates ontologically in that we collapse into oneness with the reality of the cosmos.  This is obvious in paradise or the eschaton, though hard to grasp now due to the alienation of sin.  

Bio-fulfillment Experiences of the Guru, Buddha, and Christ

To help us understand how the body and psyche are integrated in each tradition and how that speaks the person’s relation to the outside world we are now going to explore the bodies of certain people as they experience their highest spiritual achievement. We will begin with a bodily reality in the Eastern tradition, the chakra points.  These are points or gates within the body that are opened or activated and allow for a balanced life and an opening of the knowledge that leads to one having the ability to escape.  Thus when a guru in Hinduism practices Kundalini yoga effectively, the highest spiritual achievement would be accessing these chakras and experiencing perfect knowledge for the purpose of escape. 

The word chakra means wheel.  In Hinduism they represent the interface of the body and the psyche, and are believed to be part of the actual physical body, whilst also originating within the imperceptible psyche.  Thus they are not points one finds with a microscope, much like one would not look for DNA in the Eucharist.  But given the collapse of the three tiered field of experience these instances physical and spiritual realities are seen as contact points of unity.  In Buddhism, any reference to a chakra is a reference to the knowledge the Buddha teaches the “wheel of dharma”.  

According to Kundalini Yoga the inner journey is a process of opening the chakras.  Allen Watts, in his work Myth and Ritual in Christianity, points out, “Now the serpent and tree is a common mythological theme, for one calls to mind not only the World Ash, Yggdrasil, of Norse mythology, with the worm Nidhug at its roots, but more particularly the Kundalini symbolism of Hindu Yoga.”  The opening of the chakras is done by the motion of Kundalini, the inner serpent that sleeps at the bottom of the spine as it moves upward.  Watts continues,  

In the symbolism of Kundalini Yoga the "tree" is the human spine considered as a flowering plant. At the top, within the head, is the thousand' petalled lotus sahasrara, emblem of the sun beneath the dome of the firmament, archex type of the skull, since here as in almost all mythologies man is seen as the universe in miniature. At the root of the spinak tree, at the sexual organs, there sleeps the serpent Kundalini entwined about the phallus. So long as the serpent remains at the root of the tree, asleep, man is "fallen"; that is to say, his divine consciousness is asleep, involved in the darkness of may a, since at this stage the divine has identified itself with the finite world. But when the divine consciousness awakens, Kundalini ascends the tree and passes up to the thousand' petalled lotus in the head. 

Thus the serpent has two roles, which, in Hindu mythology, correspond to the two "movements" in the eternal play (lila) of God: the one where God (Vishnu) sleeps, and dreams that he is the multiplicity of individual beings, and the other where God awakens and realizes his proper divinity. Downward in the roots, the serpent is the divine One asleep, enchanted by his own spell; upward in the sun/lotus, the serpent is the same divine One disenchanted, free from the illusion that he is divided into many "things".

According to Kundalini anthropology, when this serpent is awakened it climbs up the spine opening the chakra points as it progresses.  

 According to Buddhism, he sat, entered deep meditation, and through an inner journey of self knowledge became enlightened.  The corporeal state of Siddhartha Gautama was that of absolute stillness. This bodily state reflects the goal of the Four Noble Truths, a stillness that images the cessation of suffering.  Buddhism may or may not invest in Chakras per-say, but one will notice that at the moment of Buddha’s fulfillment (enlightenment) or the fulfillment of one practicing Kundalini yoga, the journey is completely inward and it is a journey of negation of the self.  This is opposed to the moment of fulfillment in the life of Christ, which works from the outside by wounds and is an acceptance of God’s providence.  

In the previous treatise Paradoxes and Disorders we laid out the pattern of alienation of humanity from God and the process of reintegration through salvation history.  For this treatise our interest lies in the actual turning point of that process where the diversification and alienation begins its turn toward unification in Christ.  This fulfillment also involves parts of the body, but in this case they are not “internal”/spiritual.  They are very external.  Fulfillment narratives in Kundalini yoga, the Buddha and in Christianity each involve a sort of bio-summative experience, a physical aspect of the fulfillment of the fully actualized hero in a religious narrative.  For Christ four of the five points are on located at the maximum extremity of his physical person, the two hands (stretched to their widest), and two feet and the fifth point strikes directly to the center from the side.  The five wounds of Christ are not internal moving out, like the gnosis a guru who has opened his chakras brings to its adherents.  Instead they reflect a fallen world and its interaction from the outside inward upon the God/man Jesus Christ.  

One will often notice a serpent at the bottom of older crucifixes referring to back to the prophecy in Genesis 3, fulfilled by Christ’s death, that humanity would strike the serpent’s head.  In this case one can draw a relationship between the sleeping Kundalini that satiates one in “this World” and keeps on from the experience of the sharing of divine life available in Christ.  The serpent, in many symbologies across the globe, signifies some sort of transformation or new life.  In the first volume of his work Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell writes 

And this is the force that comes to view in the myth of the serpent and the maiden, where the basic elements are: (1 ) the young woman ready for marriage (the nymph), associated with the mysteries of birth and menstruation, these mysteries (and the womb itself, therefore) being identified with the lunar force; (2) the fructifying masculine semen, identified with the waters of the earth and sky and imaged in the phallic, water like, lightning like serpent by which the maiden is to be transformed; and (3) an experience of life as change, transformation, death, and new birth. 

In Kundalini yoga the change is imaged as the raising of the serpent from the base of the spine to the summit of the crown.  Again, it is noteworthy that for Eastern cosmology the change is placed internally, whereas in Western cosmology it is very much external both in form and across the mythic scope of time.  The serpent rises up the chakras in the East, but in the West, “just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”  So for John, the bronze serpent of the desert is some sort of typology of Christ’s healing power.  Christ is the serpent, but only in the lifted up position, the ascent so to speak.  The tree is not the spine and mind (internal) but the tree of life (the cross), counterposed to the tree of knowledge tempted by the previous serpent in the lower position.  Each of these trees are part of the third tier of experiential knowledge because Christianity works from the outside in.   What one gets from the lifted up “serpent” is a healing of the way one encounters suffering, however the solution is not knowledge, but salvation and redemption.   The summit of these upward motions each signify a fulfillment moment in the perspective religion, but the methodologies and experiences speak to opposing anthropologies and opposing views of the interface of the inner and outer self and their relationship to the exterior world.  

In the case of Buddha it is an internal journey that is completed, then the gnosis expanded to the third tier of experience.  When Buddha accesses the gnosis of enlightenment he attains the ability to be beyond suffering until his parinirvana. Buddha abides in samsara for almost thirty years bringing others further along on the path to enlightenment.  The same would be true of a guru who accessed such knowledge by activating chakras.  In Christian symbology, the serpent at the bottom of the cross  was indicative of unhelpful knowledge, the knowledge of rebellion of humanity against God attained at the beginning of human history.  This knowledge leads to a skewed view of God’s good creation.  This is the alienation of humans from their environment brought about by original sin.  

Jesus lived to be only slightly more than thirty years old in all.  Almost all of his teaching in the gospels takes place previous to his fulfillment experience on the cross.  This shows that “teaching” is not Christ’s summative religious achievement.  His “lifting up” as a sacrifice was the achievement.  That experience was not a movement beyond suffering from the internal out, but an acceptance of suffering as a part and parcel of the fulfillment process and an integration of suffering into the personhood of Christ himself.  The knowledge Christ imparted is only completely understandable after these piercings, though his teaching was given before he received them.  Knowledge is not the foundation of the Christian religion, whereas the knowledge Buddha imparted is the fulfillment experience of the religion itself, not the Buddha, anything he did, or anything that happened to him.    

These different motions of fulfillment, inner to outer, verses outer to inner demonstrate a difference with regards to the three tiered field of experience.  Jesus’ fulfillment story works from the outside, first focusing on Christ’s relationship to the Father and then his relationship to his fellow humans.  This  external focus is revealed in the significance of his wounds.  The bio-fulfillment aspect of the Christ story reminds one of so many physical sufferings that were integral to Jewish heroes during their theophany.  There is the covenant of circumcision with Abraham, the physical wounding of Jacob’s hip, the multiple strippings of Joseph, or the burning coal of Isaiah.  Christ’s suffering is the summation of these typologies.  Since each involves a process that begets a special relationship with God, they speak to the truest sense of what a human is in the Judeo-Christian cosmology, they speak to how we relate to God after we gained the knowledge of evil (suffering) in Eden.   The knowledge we are seeking is how to equivocate the three tiers of experience and see them all as equal aspects of self because all fall under one ontological category: God’s good creation.

To embrace a Judeo-Christian cosmology one must first embrace the equivalence of spirit and body, that they are equal and compatible parts of the self.  Any practitioner that is imbued with a post hellenic / post enlightenment anthropology, which is just about all Christians, would find even this first step difficult.  It is why we have such a hard time with bodily resurrection, even though the belief is part and parcel of our religion.  The second maneuver for a true Christian anthropology is equivalency of the “external world” to the self.  Hence Christ is equivocate with the bronze serpent of Moses that heals the snakebites.  Christ becomes the thing that is “wrong”, he takes on our sin, in order to heal the thing that is wrong.  For our image, as the snake lifted up, he heals “the ultimate snake bite” of suffering from Genesis 3.  He appears to be the snake (a snake of bronze) but is actually victim of the snake through his unjust suffering as a result of our sin.  The narrative of the five wounds brings a oneness that runs from the inner spiritual, through the bodily, and binds them to the external world to such an inclusive sense that the hero, Christ, becomes bread that becomes his body, the labor and suffering of humanity that sustains life in both masculine and feminine form, for our consumption and sustenance.  We hinted at this complete collapse of self and environment in the former treatise Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent,

According to our sacramental cosmology everything you need is present in the Eucharist.  This makes sense because the Eucharist presents Paradise.  In Paradise the Garden of Eden is the matrix through which humans live out their relationship with God.  This physical environment has a part to play in our relationship with God.  The host itself is Paradise, the cup contains Paradise, yet they are appear as the lowliest element of that Paradise.  The greatest has become the least of Paradise and vice versa.  With this descent complete the perfect inversal unity of Paradise is demonstrated The Son of God.                   

Christ in giving himself to the plan of the Father, gave himself to creation and united all of creation, as it is, with his “self”.  This began the work of the justification of humanity and the reconciliation of creation to God, a work the Church as the body of Christ continues to ultimate fulfillment.  The second and third descent of the Son of God, from human to bread and from bread to sinner, represents a three tiered integration of the self by Christ, where he unites himself to the environment as it is, postlapsarian.   This self integration is a trusting act that the Father is providential and that all things work to good for those who love God.  Christ did not wait until all was complete to integrate himself with his church, he does it now as things are developing.  The result of this is the five wounds, our constant rejection of him and his constant reaching to us.  Because of the magnitude of this saving act, these wounds travel with him into glorification, they are his crown of victory and paradoxically his absolute submission to the will of the Father.        

 We have attempted to compare and contrast the cosmologies of Eastern religions and Christianity.  We spent time contrasting how these Eastern traditions and Christianity seek to integrate mind, body, and environment into one reality.  In the East we understood the unifying category as illusion, in the West we assert the unifying category as “creation”. We went on to explore the role that the body plays in the various religious heroes of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity by exploring the seven chakras points of Kundalini Yoga, the stillness of the Buddha, and the five wounds of Christ.  In this analysis we paid close attention to the mythic role of the serpent in each narrative and use that exploration to discuss how the religions regard the relationship between the mind, the body and the world. 

In the next section we will begin by exploring the functional meaning of the body in each tradition.  We will then apply that examination to how Christ shared his “self” with his followers as a church and with the exterior world as a whole through the process of redemption by means of his physical self.  We will end the second section by discussing three tools a Christian practitioner can use for self communication typological investment, ritual action and the body of the Church.  In the final section we will attempt to develop a personal application will involve three elements, one for each field of experience.  

The Meaning of the Body and the Three Tiered Integration of Self

In the last section we attempted to compare and contrast the cosmologies of Eastern religions and Christianity in order to understand how each seeks to integrate mind, body, and environment into one reality.  In this section we will begin by exploring the functional meaning of the body in each tradition. We will do this by unpacking the Christian functional meaning of the body as a means of communication, especially communication of self.  We will contrast this with the Eastern function of the body as an illusion, or a carrier of suffering.  This contrast will allow us to examine how the body itself can be the used in the Christian tradition as the bridge between the inner self and the exterior world, especially by means of the senses. We will then apply that examination to how Christ shared his “self” with his followers as a church and with the exterior world as a whole through the process of redemption by means of his physical self.  We will end this section by discussing three tools a Christian practitioner can use for self communication typological investment, ritual action and the body of the Church. 

In the final section we will go on to develop a spirituality using the techniques we have discussed.  The personal application will involve three elements, one for each field of experience.  First we will explore the inner element, the bodily element and the environmental element.  We will explore these respectively as contemplative prayer, corporeal prayer, and integration through the sacramental system.  We will end with an analysis of each sense, visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory.  We will apply the corporeal reimagining to how each of the five sense interacts in the ritual sacramental system of the Catholic Church.  

Two Views on Bodily Meaning

From the last section we can see that the two worldviews of Christianity and Eastern cosmology have different “meanings” of corporeal existence.   One way to understand corporeal meaning in each system is by “function” of the body.  The body functions according to a greater system.  In Hinduism the functional meaning is as a karmic manifestation of Sat in Maya.  Each reincarnation is a new manifestation of the particular atman whose characteristics are set by the interface of Karma and Sat.  In Buddhism the functional meaning of the body is as a carrier of suffering.  Since, according to the First Noble Truth, all of reality is suffering, the body’s function is as one variety of that experience.  This can be easily observed in the four sights of the Buddha, most of which entail bodies suffering and dying. There is also psycho-spiritual suffering, and these are inflamed by the external environment.  

For Christianity the body is a communication system.  It is a way to come into communion with God, with our neighbors, and with our environment.  The harmony that is supposed to be if the human person has clearly gone awry in the third chapter of genesis, when the first parents don cloths,which are a sign of barrier and division to the harmony and openness that existed before the fall when they were “naked and felt no shame”.  

In the prelapsarian garden the bodies communicate, in their nakedness, the communion of sexuality as we described in the former treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton.  We stated there, “eating and sex don’t just communicate unity, but actually affect it, that is, they make the unity happen.  Regarding sexual action we will distinguish three ways that this effect takes place.  First through simple pleasure, second through biology, and third through spiritual union.”  We then made a detailed analysis of each mode.  For this treatise we are interested in the relationship between communication and communion.  The common root indicates that communication, even simply as talking, seems to unite the participants.  So whatever the communication is, sexual communication for example, it unites the communicator and the one communicated to.  They enter a communion.

For the first parents in Eden, this communion is expressed between them and God, in that they could perfectly communicate with him.  This communication isn’t just a verbal communication. It is Love, which is a use of one’s entire being to communicate.  So one’s physical person and how one uses that, becomes a primary communicative tool.  So we think of communicating with God as “prayer” which is talking or speaking to God.  But as we shall explore in this treatise, what one does with one’s body in a ritual symbolic system, what one tries to image by one’s body as one engages in ritual, is trying to communicate with God.  Physical ritual is prayer.  Morality is also communicating with God. How one lives one life, physically, is a communication of love.  Moral action is prayer.    

Communion was expressed between the first parents themselves.  They were ontologically a unit, this union finds it’s best expression and actualization in the sexual act as we discussed in Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton, as well as in their moral bearing toward each other. 

 Communion was expressed by the first parents in how their bodies operated in the environment of paradise.  They had jobs in the garden, to maintain it and be the bridge between God and creation.  How their bodies interacted with the environment communicated God’s glory and demonstrated it physically.  

To understand aspects of how we will go about seeking communion in this treatise we must revisit the “locus of being” as discussed in Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton.  We pondered in that treatise, 

where is your “locus of being”?  where, in your body, do you perceive your “self” to be.  Almost all modern westerners assume their locus of being is directly behind their eyes.  That’s where “I” live, not in my knee cap or this two inch diameter right here just above my wrist.  “I” am right behind my eyes.  This is where the most intense sensory data is coming in and therefore it is where our being is focused.  We love our eyesight.  It is our most cherished sense, the second most likely being hearing.  Certainly inside our head is where we assume our “locus of being” to be.  So, “where are you?”  “Just behind my eyes.”         

This sensory phenomenon relates to our rationalist understanding of the human.  Since our locus of being is “geographically” located in the neighborhood of our thinking functions and the location of the most intense sensory input, we just assume that we are “in our heads”.  This understanding is also one of the phenomenon that adds to our perception of various experiential fields.  For Christianity this is bolstered by the overfocus of the beatific vision as the medium of the afterlife.  This idea of heaven is disembodied and leans rational.  But our underemployed dogma of bodily resurrection reminds us that in Christianity the body is integral to humanity.

The way we conceive of locus of being is not appropriate to the goal of the Eastern religions.  Any mental process or sensory experience is part of Maya (illusion). The locus of being is either Atman (Hinduism) and practically inaccessible, or it is nonexistent, “anatman” (Buddhism).   Again, the entire Eastern cosmology is geared toward collapsing our sense of self into a category synonymous with the rest of reality (illusion) and striving either for permanent stability (atman and moksha) or extinction (anatman and nirvana).  As we noted earlier Christianity seeks an ontological collapse of the three tiered field of experience as well.  But in this case it is an actualization of the goodness of reality, a three tiered integration of the self, instead of a rejection of what is “perceived of” as the self.  In Buddhism the self is seen as a series of empty relationships, contrary to Christianity where the self is seen as series or interconnection of three fundamental relationships which, as we asserted in Christian Ontology, are as real as objects.  They all fall under the unifying category of “creation”.  We discussed those relationships in the treatise Paradoxes and Disorders saying they were hypostatic relationships, consubstantial relationships, and loving relationships.  The three tiered integration of the self is an expansive giving of self to the “other” in a way that is binding, even to an ontological level.  The purpose is to heal the divisive alienation (broken relationships) shot through creation by original sin.

Our Christian technique of the shifting of locus of being, as we explained it in the treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton for sexual purposes, illustrates an exercise that can help the practitioner communicate their very self by collapse the three tiered field of experience into a three tiered integration of self.  In that treatise we relayed a story of sharp intense pain in the tip of the finger.  At the moment of the pains presentation, the mind is empty and the locus of being is in the tip of one’s finger.  Once one starts to “think” or process, one is back in one’s head.  But, as long as one is in a state of cognitive emptiness and the major stimulus reception is in the finger, one’s locus of being is in one’s finger. We then applied what was painful to what was pleasurable and discussed the ability of each partner to intentionally shift their locus of being to one place in the sexual act, to become one in being.   In this situation one can experience an three tiered integration of self, the perceived self, the bodily self, and the environment (in this case the sexual partner).  The suitable relationship for this exercise is one of the three fundamental relationships, a “loving” relationship.

[T]he third and most complex fundamental relationship, . . . is the binding interpersonal relationship, love.  This relationship is approached hypostatically, but it involves more than just hypostasis.  It implies an awareness of individuation, a self awareness.  This is different then a hypostatic relationship by, say, the physics of gravity, where atoms make a desk.  In  Christian Ontology we discussed how the primary oneness of God as trinity is God’s self awareness through an analogical psychological interpretation of the dogma of the trinity. In a loving relationship, the “objects” in relationship are aware that they are separate and must come to oneness through a process of self emptying and the mysterious force of will.

The third fundamental relationship is the most complex and we shall assert that the cosmos mysteriously reflect the other two in order that we can experience the third.                    

The sexual shift of locus of being is certainly should be a personal willful engagement.  Yet the experience itself is in no way a rational exercise, because the second one starts to “think” one’s locus of being shifts away to one’s head. It demands a cognitive emptiness and “being” with another.  This exercise is focused on the experience of the sexual act “as it is experienced” because this focus is directed towards the unitive end of sexuality.  This can be contrasted with the hierarchy’s obsession with the procreative purpose at the expense of the unitive, and thereby their obsessive focus on consummation, the male orgasam and “where” it takes place. Interestingly, since procreation is, in some ways, an individuation, the dual purpose of the sexual act hints at another of those paradoxes we discussed in  Paradoxes and Disorders.

Collapsing the Self and the Auxiliary Self with the Environment

We have discussed previously how the psycho-spiritual self seems to be assumed as the fundamental self and the body is seen as an  auxiliary self.  In the last part of this section we saw how the body is a communication of self according to Christian anthropology.  That view could be used to bolster the presupposition of a three tiered field of experience, even though that was not how we used it.  Now we must turn to a fuller understanding of the collapse of everything we would perceive of as our “self” and everything we would perceive of as not our self.  Everything we perceive of as “not our self” is our environment.  

It may help to briefly reflect on the modern philosophical conundrum of mind/body philosophy, which manifests itself in a few different ways.  Those ways come down to solipsism, idealism, realism, and materialism.  With solipsism, the idea is that only one’s mental life exists, there is no external world.  For idealism, the belief is that one can only have commerce with the external with by means of one’s mental constructions, so for “the self” only the mind exists.  Realism asserts that the external world exists and has its own ontological status and “the self” is one’s psychological perceptions of it.  Materialism states that any intangible psychological reality is not real, only the physical world exists, so only the brian exists.  These two philosophies are seeking to “bridge” some sort of gap by focusing on how one end dominates the other.  

These philosophical categories framed how Western philosophy engaged the problem of self and environment over the past century.  These categories point to the confusing relationship between the self and the environment.  You have a spectrum of  integration by collapse in nature, intangible for solipsism and tangible for materialism.  You also have the back and forth of focus of nature between the tangible and intangible between realism and idealism, idealism focusing on the intangible as primary and realism focusing on the tangible as primary.      

Solipsism and materialism demonstrate secular manifestations of the differing integrations of East and West.   Buddhism seems to land on the end of the spectrum similar to  solipsism. In Buddhism there is only illusory self, which is brought into subjugation by exercises of introspection and mental discipline.  Again, the bio-fulfilment of the Buddha consisted of stillness, the body was only significant in that it was neutralized.  Solipsism relies on a sense of illusion as well. There is no external reality, only  self as ideas.  Hinduism and Christianity both collapse in a similar way as  materialism does, acknowledging a “creation”, but the ontological focus is different.  For Hinduism any mental awareness or sensory experience is not the reality, only that there is Atman and Sat.  Hence an inward journey for knowledge that achieves integration such as the opening of the chakras must happen.  Christianity asserts what we stated in Christian Ontology,

Here you have the crux of Christian ontology, reality is simultaneously simple and manifold.   The question is where does reality lay?  The answer is “everywhere.”  An answer that seems completely obvious, obvious that is until philosophy is brought to bear.  Reality lies both in the parts and the whole.  For this to make sense to a Westerner he has to invest in the idea that relationships are as real as objects.  

The mind may be a series of relationships or sense impressions, but that does not make this “unreal”.  The external world may be only accessible through the relationship between mind and sense data, but that does not mean the external world is not real.  The effect of “real” relationships is to collapse mind, body and external environment.  With this understanding we can have an idea of the self that is expansive toward the environment.  But how can we experience that?

We speculated that the reason for the location of self as situated “behind the eye” has to do with location of thought and even more so, location of the major amount of sensory data.  We then reviewed the practice of shifting one’s locus of being by a combination cognitive emptiness and sensory stimulus.  Now we will take a moment to reflect on how each of the traditional five sense affect the self and possibly could be utilized toward its extension under a three tiered integration.

The senses are the interface between the self and the eternal world.  This is why the various philosophical movements draw the distinguishing lines in different places.  Thoughts are experienced as sensory impressions, mostly auditory and visual, talking to yourself in your head and imagining visuals.  Interestingly the most intimately cognitive sensations, auditory and visual, are the two senses that have the most distant data reach.  They are the most invested in the external world, yet are the most intimate to the psycho-spiritual self according to Western epistemology.  They seem to be long distance integrators.  If one thinks by means of voice or pictures “in your head” you have mentally integrated your environment to your “self”,  where else would the sounds and pictures come from.  This seems to indicate a deep connection between the most interior and the most exterior.    

The tactile sense is a bridge sense between the auxiliary self, the body, and the external world.  In order to experience it these two fields of experience must collide.  At its point of experience the tactile sense necessitates an integration, at least on the atomic level, of body and exterior world.  The tactile sense is also the sense that is most readily available to practice shifting one’s locus of being.

The olfactory and gustatory sense are sense that internalize the external world, not by psychological impression and appropriation as the auditory and visual do, but by physical integration into the second tier of experience, the body, and by effect of the causal relationship between the bodily self and the psycho-spiritual self. 

As we shall explore in the next section, these integrations of environment by the sense are key players in the sacramental nature of the cosmos according to Ancient Christianity and are imperative for full understanding of the ritual life of the Church, especially the “matter” or material used in the seven sacrament.  For example, we will be taking the aforementioned meditation on the sense and reflecting on the two species of Eucharist as ingestible. This exercise hopes to give one a much deeper experience of the sacrament, which leads to a deeper ability to cooperate with the grace provided.                

With a better grasp of the anthropology inherent in each cosmology and their different assumptions we can re-apply our greater myth involving the upward journey of the snake and its relationship to knowledge and the body in order to grasp the Christian understanding of extension of self to environment as a communication of self.  In kundalini yoga the snake makes a motion from bottom to top of the body, up the tree of the spine, from base primal to opening charak to enlightening the individual mind.  This is an inward journey of an individual to understand their situation in the Eastern cosmology one of onui in Hinduism, or one of fundamental suffering in Buddhism.  Either way the result is the knowledge of escape, moksha or nirvana. 

The Christian snake is also the snake that travels across the tree, but this time it is the tree of humanity, not a particular human.  And instead of shutting off the sense in yogic practice, Christianity will embrace the sense as a methodology for extension and a three tiered integration of self, such that one can garner a true experience of Christian ontology, all of reality is simple and manifold at the same time.  In the Christian framework there are two trees, the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life.  There are also two (according to Pauline thought) people who presence all of humanity, Adam and Christ.  

In the first case there is the “lower snake” which is “part of the external” world.  This snake represents and is the cause of alienation from God, environment, and self.  Contrary to the yogic journey of acquisition of knowledge that leads to escape of illusory reality, this snake offers knowledge that sets a good reality in a bad way for humanity.  The journey of this snake from tree to tree is the journey of salvation history and it is the journey of the cosmological paradox we spoke of in Paradoxes and Disorders,

Here we have the simplicity of humanity and the absolute complexity of humanity which form a unit through the process of reordering we are calling salvation history, the process we abide in.  The motion of this process at the extremes is the process of a communion of two persons who form the basic unit of humanity, the First Parents, splintering into multiple billions of self regarding sentient beings that must first self regard (alienation) then turn from that splintered selfishness back to a relationship of oneness.  It is a motion from dyadinal mutual appropriation to seeming infinite self regard to maximal mutual appropriation at every level.             

      

The pivotal point of this paradox for humanity is the raising of the snake in John’s gospel.  It is at this point that Jesus turns the tide of salvation history and allows for the integration of humanity into himself by giving himself to humanity.  Jesus is the snake who makes the journey to the height, upon the tree of life, the cross.  This journey is not an inner journey of personal knowledge affected by the opening of chakras.  This journey is an extension of self to the environment epitomized by the wounds of Christ.  These wounds are on the furthest extensions of his physical person yet also at the heart of his physical person.  Given what we have explored about the shifting of one’s locus of being, what we see with these wounds is Christ in his own sacred heart, burning with the passion, also extending his locus of being out to the furthest reaches.  We see him internalizing his environment by means of wine while on the cross, a “fruit” connected from Noah's story of the second fall in Genesis chapter 9 back to the fruit of the first fall.  At the same time his environment in some unique way is now seen to presence him.  

This precensing is most notable in John’s gospel where he breathed his spirit from the cross onto the beloved disciple and his mother, who together presence the Church.  As his breath (life) brushed across their faces, if practicing deep cognitive emptiness, by detachment through the grief of suffering, they would shift their locus of being to the surface of their faces to meet the life breath of Jesus stimulating them there.   Again in John’s gospel is the peculier post resurrection scene between Jesus and Thomas in Chapter 20.   Jesus shows up and breaths upon all of then apostles in the upper room, again allowing some sort of sharing of being with his life force, his breath.   

Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.  So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nail marks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”  Now a week later his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.”  Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.”  Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!”  Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”

Thomas’ experience was one of physical contact, a situation where if both were practicing cognitive emptiness, as we have described, both can locate to the point of contact and share being.  This differing sensory methodology speaks to the fact that God will approach each person as they need to be approached. 

Christ’s identification with his believers is presented by his identification with the group as he proclaims to Paul, but he also identifies with individual believers as is seen in this scene.  Here we may interpret this scene as an exercise in the shifting of locus of being for both Christ and Thomas particularly.  If, as we have described, they had used their sensory experience to shift their locus to the point of the finger and the wounds, we can understand that Thomas is having an experience of Christ and with him through his suffering. It is in this direct phenomenological experience of union, absent cognition that Thomas comes to “know” Jesus.  

There are two special graces that demonstrate this link even now, stigmata and transverberation.  Stigmata is when the contemplative so identifies with Christ, especially in his passion, that they demonstrate, by some corporal link, the wounds of Christ.  This happens either visibly, they bleed form the five points, or invisibly, they feel the pain, but to stave off pride they do not physically present them.  These marks identify Christ’s extension to the exterior world, and when present on a member of the Church, they reiterate our mission to do the same through Christ.  They reinvest us in our teleology of suffering as redemptive as opposed to something to be escaped. But, Christ enjoined us to take up our cross, which may differ significantly from his.  Thus another example of corporeal unity with Christ’s suffering would be a transverberation or piercing of the heart.  This was first noted in the Luke Chapter 2, “Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother, “Behold, this child is destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted (and you yourself a sword will pierce) so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”  Mary’s experience was different than that of Christ, her “cross” was experienced internally but physically.  This same experience was visited upon other saints in church history, most notable Teresa of Avila.

Believing in both communal and individual experience and presence of Jesus is not off the rails theology.  It is traditional to understand that the Church Given Christ’s self identification with his church and the individuals therein.  But Christ by his action and his sharing of his passion in various ways also takes his environment as his very self.  It is by this action that he begins the cosmic process of three tiered integration of the entirety of reality into himself.  This reintegration is the fulfillment of cosmic paradox for Christianity.  It is the healing of all of creation, such that we can understand ourselves as part of the good creation of God.  

This corporeal aspect of Christ’s fulfillment stands in direct contrast to the Buddha’s.  Even in Mahayana Buddhism, where compassion is the pivotal moral impetus, the ultimate regard for this world negative and the solution is the sharing of knowledge to allow its passing away since it only consists of illusion and suffering.  For Christianity, there is an embrace of this world, even in suffering.  Suffering itself becomes a tool of redemption.  The compassion of Christ is not one of aid in escape, but integration and collective unity.  Cosmologically the difference between the compassion of the Mahayana tradition and the Christian tradition is the difference between suffering to be escaped and suffering that is redemptive.  He takes on our sin and our suffering, even though he himself is blameless.  Hence the wounds are not just an embrace of suffering, they make suffering a tool of extension by means of a shifting of the locus of being.  Christ in his suffering moved his person to the extreme of his physical person.  He also, in this moment, internalized whatever the environment sought to give him (the gaull and wine). He uses his body to  demonstrate integration and the motion from a three tiered field of experience, which is alienating, to a three tiered integration of self, by which he binds all to himself, as do we, inasmuch as we are able to bind in him by means of his church.  Thus Christ says in the  sixteenth chapter of Matthew’s gospel,

Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.  For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.  What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life?         

The cross is the tree of life, and is itself the external world.  We see it as “other” because of alienation.  The only way to truly have it is to make it our life, to appropriate it into our very self as Christ did.  We must carry it, but it must become us, so to speak, by means of the three tiered integration of self.

Interfaces for The Three Tiered Integration of Self

Thus far we have begun to unpack how the cosmologies of the East and Christianity impact the corporeal reality of the heroes as they reach their fulfillment.  Each cosmology gives the believers an angle on their relationship with the external world, and thus the experience of each heroic figure helps the practitioner understand their role in the cosmos.  Our purpose is to garner a spiritual practice, the three tiered integration of self.  We already noted how each tradition seeks to lump the three tiered field of experience into one category, in the East illusion and in Christianity creation.  Our task now is to use our comparative study to begin the development of a Christian spiritual practice to facilitate an experience of that integration.  In this last part of the second section we will explore the “toolbox” available to us before launching into the  personal discipline necessary in the last section.  That toolbox will consist of three types of tools, typological, ritual, and ecclesial.

The first type of tool for gaining access to a collapse of the three tiered field of experience is typological.  We defined typological interpretation in the former treatise Anthro-Expansivity and the Natural Next Step of The Great Commission,  

The reader will remember that typological interpretation is the interpretation of the Old Testament based on the assumed fundamental theological unity of the two Testaments.  This type of interpretation sees the prophetic nature of the Old Testament not just as a series of pronouncement by inspired men called prophets, but remembers that God is the master of all creation, and therefore it sees an entire narrative that in multivalent ways proclaims the coming of the Messiah.  

When using this type of interpretation the reader takes something in the Hebrew Scriptures, a person, thing or event, and uses it as a foreshadowing or prefiguration of something in the New Testament.      

Our next task is to understand how the typological narratives can impact our personal lives.  The great figures in the metanarrative of sacred scriptures present and are presented by typologies.  Sometimes these typologies are stories of relationships between people that play out repeatedly through scripture.  Sometimes these typologies are objects in the external world, whose role in the community comes to prefigure the hero, and always to prefigure Christ.  The latter is interesting for our purposes.  The collapse of, say, a bronze snake with the person of Christ shows a willingness to collapse the external world with both the body and soul of Christ.  It is common in yogic practice to understand the human practitioner as the microcosm of the macrocosm.  The body, as it moves and positions, accesses the link between the two through the chakras and also the motions themselves present and image the greater world, “as above so below”.  

In our case it is not a static eternal world that is being imaged, or even the flux of illusory maya, which is also eternal, it is some element in the flow of salvation history, an unfolding of a story whose interconnectedness makes it an integrated whole.  One can see the complexity of how this type of interpretation operates in St. Augustine’s typological commentary on the psalms concerning Christ and the Temple,

Because Solomon had built a temple to the Lord – a prototype and an image of the future Church, the Lord’s body, which is why the Gospel says Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up – because the Solomon of history had built that temple, our Lord Jesus Christ, the true Solomon, built a temple for himself. The name ‘Solomon’ means ‘Bringer of Peace’, and our Lord, the true Solomon, is the true bringer of peace, which is why the Apostle says He is our peace, who has made both into one. He is the true bringer of peace, who has taken two walls coming from different directions and joined them through himself, becoming the cornerstone that unites them: the believers who come from the people of the circumcision and the believers who come from the uncircumcised. He has made one Church from the two peoples, he has become their cornerstone and their peacemaker.

Augustine, like most ancients, is a master of this type of interpretation, which today seems jarring to us.  He examples the same complexity in the City of God when he links Noah’s ark to the body of Christ and that same body to the body of the Church,

Moreover, inasmuch as God commanded Noah, a just man, and, as the truthful Scripture says, a man perfect in his generation,—not indeed with the perfection of the citizens of the city of God in that immortal condition in which they equal the angels, but in so far as they can be perfect in their sojourn in this world,—inasmuch as God commanded him, I say, to make an ark, in which he might be rescued from the destruction of the flood, along with his family, i.e., his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law, and along with the animals who, in obedience to God’s command, came to him into the ark:  this is certainly a figure of the city of God sojourning in this world; that is to say, of the church, which is rescued by the wood on which hung the Mediator of God and men, the man Christ Jesus.  For even its very dimensions, in length, breadth, and height, represent the human body in which He came, as it had been foretold.  For the length of the human body, from the crown of the head to the sole of the foot, is six times its breadth from side to side, and ten times its depth or thickness, measuring from back to front:  that is to say, if you measure a man as he lies on his back or on his face, he is six times as long from head to foot as he is broad from side to side, and ten times as long as he is high from the ground.  And therefore the ark was made 300 cubits in length, 50 in breadth, and 30 in height.  And its having a door made in the side of it certainly signified the wound which was made when the side of the Crucified was pierced with the spear; for by this those who come to Him enter; for thence flowed the sacraments by which those who believe are initiated.  And the fact that it was ordered to be made of squared timbers, signifies the immoveable steadiness of the life of the saints; for however you turn a cube, it still stands.  And the other peculiarities of the ark’s construction are signs of features of the church. 

This typological view is not just literary, it is historical in nature, drawing on the connection of the self as psyche and body with elements of the external world, especially as they concern the narrative of salvation history.  Our narrative, liner view of time, as opposed to the Eastern statice/cyclical view, particularly lends itself to narrative appropriation, not just as a psychological trope, but also as an ontological binding, where the practitioner can garner skills for a three tiered integration of self.  

The full collapse of these elements, the inner, the bodily, the outer and the narrative, are best seen in all the skills brought to bear in somnium spirituality, where one experiences an entire world as inner and then brings those experiences to bear upon the external world in lucid waking, all the while gathering symbology for the retreat to the dream world.  This exchange points to the deep connection between the inner and outer, signifying the fluidity between the two.  We went on to discuss the connection between these two worlds and ritual in the treatise concerning Somnium Spirituality and then in further detail in the treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment.  This leads us to the second tool for the practice of the three tiered integration of self, ritual.

In the treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment we defined calculated ritual thusly,

Calculated ritual is a ritual action that utilizes a symbolic language symbiotic with dream and myth, which seeks to invest one in and actualize deep human meaning.  It is calculated because it adds or is the interface of the collective unconscious expressed as myth and how this myth is consciously acted upon ritually.  This type of ritual is calculated for an effect.  The ritual allows for participation in meaning and myth and allows the participant to activate myth and meaning in their own life. 

 

Having pointed out the importance of narrative in the cosmology of western religions, which view time in a linear fashion, we can see now that the drawing power and activating meaning and myth in one’s life can be a trope to collapsing the outer and the inner into one self.  Jesus was able to presence all conceivable myth and typologies succinctly by his life and collapse all of them into one by his extension on the cross that people point to the synchronicity as evidence of his life being a non historical myth.  But our argument is that, being the Son of God incarnate, Jesus is able to perfectly balance and integrate inner self, outer self and environment, especially by means of the paschal mystery.  We discussed this previously in Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent as well as how his followers are able to participate in his sacrifice by means of the Eucharist.  Now we will layer onto the narrative of the divine triple descent the facts of our sacramental ritual system as laid out in our treatise Sacramental Cosmology where we discussed the corporeal nature of our prayer life and how our senses must be engaged in our ritual life.

In Eastern traditions physical ritual such as yoga represent a process of self mastery such that by discipline one can attain knowledge needed to further one upon the path of enlightenment. The ritual system in ancient Christianity seeks to integrate one with one’s environment through manipulation physical matter as well as corporeal motion and position.  These things together place one within the narrative, bind one to the external world and invest one with meaning.

The last tool we will briefly explore before going on to personal disciplines is the body of Christians itself, the ecclesia.  As we have noted, when Christ effects the three tiered integration of self on the cross he binds with the Church, which becomes his body.  This bonding gifts us a church through which we can participate in Christ’s life in manifold ways.  For our purpose the way we will explore is the way of self giving to Christ, in order to presence Christ, especially in his suffering.  Christ prescences the previous typologies and prefigurations, but now the Church precenses Christ in its sacramental action and as his body.  So much so that the resurrected and glorified Christ self identifies with the Church when appearing to Paul on the road to Tarsus.  When employing Christian ontology and understanding the Church as a body, the sacramental ritual of the Church can be seen as our yogic action, but not for knowledge of escape, rather, for integration of self and environment. This is why the physical elements of the sacraments are so necessary for the healthy life of the Church. They involve all five of the traditional senses as well as motion and direction (if ad orientem is employed).  But again, this physical posturing is not for the purposes of gaining knowledge from within, it is for the purpose of re ordering creation.  This sacramental reconstitution achieves such sanctification and integration first by the justification of humanity, which if successful will make the human a gateway between divinity and creation.  Then the sacraments do this by justifying and sacralizing creation itself, by employing the material world into the prayer life of the Church, into the body and self of the Church and its individual members and therefore into relation with God.                   

In the first section we attempted to compare and contrast the cosmologies of Eastern religions and Christianity in order to understand how these Eastern traditions and Christianity seek to integrate mind, body, and environment into one reality.  We spent time contrasting how these Eastern traditions and Christianity seek to integrate mind, body, and environment into one reality and explored the role that the body plays in the various religious heroes of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity to help understand that integration. 

  In this section we explored the functional meaning of the body in each tradition. We did this by unpacking the Christian functional meaning of the body as a means of communication.  When contrasting this with the Eastern function of the body as an illusion, or a carrier of suffering.  This contrast will allow us to examine how the body itself can be the used in the Christian tradition as the bridge between the inner self and the exterior world, especially by means of the senses and the ability to shift one’s locus of being. We applied our examination to how Christ shared his “self” with his followers as a church and with the exterior world as a whole through the process of redemption by means of his physical self.  We ended by defining three tools a Christian practitioner can use for self communication typological investment, ritual action and the body of the Church. 

In the final section we will go on to develop a spirituality using the techniques we have discussed.  The personal application will involve three elements, one for each field of experience, the inner element, the bodily element and the environmental element.  We will explore these respectively as contemplative prayer, corporeal prayer, and integration through the sacramental system.  We will end with an analysis of each sense, visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory.  Lastly, we will apply corporeal reimagining to how each of the five sense interacts in the ritual sacramental system of the Catholic Church.  

Personal Discipline and The Three Tiered Integration of the Self

In the first section we attempted to compare and contrast the cosmologies of Eastern religions and Christianity in order to understand how these Eastern traditions and Christianity seek to integrate mind, body, and environment into one reality.  In this section we explored the functional meaning of the body in each tradition.  This contrast will allow us to examine how the body itself can be used in the Christian tradition as the bridge between the inner self and the exterior world, especially by means of the senses and the ability to shift one’s locus of being. We ended by defining three tools a Christian practitioner can use for self communication, typological investment, ritual action, and the body of the Church. 

In this final section we will seek to develop a spirituality using the techniques we have discussed.  The personal application will involve three elements, one for each field of experience.  First we will explore the inner element, where we will discuss contemplative prayer and cognitive emptiness.  We will explore the techniques of the via negativa and understand the similarities and differences between this prayer technique and Eastern meditation techniques.  Next we seek to develop a means of corporeal reimagination, to better understand our bodies as the bridge between inner self and the external world, the bridge by which these two realities are collapsed.  We will analyze each sense, visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory and understand how they can serve as a functional bridge between the inner self and the external world.  Lastly, we will apply corporeal reimagining to how each of the five sense interacts in the ritual sacramental system of the Catholic Church.   

 

Christian Contemplative Prayer

Christianity has a long history of deep inner prayer which is technically (that is, by technique) indistinguishable from the cognitive meditative practices of yoga.  There is most certainly a theme of withdrawal from the world that is practiced by some orders of consecrated.  They seem to share disdain for the world in a similar manner as Eastern religions, though for differing cosmological reasons.  We sought to demonstrate how the Church reflects two traditions, one of withdrawal and one of engagement in the former treatise Two Paths for Expanding True Love, but even in that withdraw we showed that engagement of the world is a Christian imperative.  Even the most secluded consecrated or hermits are not individuals on a path to salvation.  

In the person of Jesus himself we see a pattern in Mark’s Gospel of Jesus engaging dynamically and vigorously, then withdrawing and seeming to recharge through his prayer life.   We typified this back and forth in the treatise Two Paths for Expanding True Love by illustrating it in the story of the transfiguration,

In this situation Peter James and John are struck by the Glory of God present in Christ. What better time than on that mountain top to sit and bask in reflective contemplation.  Peter suggests such, offering to set up three Sukkots, and begin a stable monastic community of prayer and mystical union as one may find in Qumran or of the variety that developed in European Christianity from Egypt.  Instead they are awakened from their stuppor by the booming voice of the Father and hustled off their mountain top back down to “reality”.  In Mark’s account this is directly followed by a reminder that Jesus’ redemption is achieved by entering the hustle and bustle and facing the suffering inflicted by the secular world.  In Mark’s gospel, Jesus is portrayed as extremely engaged and active.  It is the prayer times, when he retreats from the crowd, that come off as a stopgap measure, offering brief respites in order to accomplish the task of redemption. 

The habit of Jesus, undulating between action and rest is firmly established in hebraic law as a necessity for humanity to engage God properly.  We are going to focus briefly on that rest as exercised in contemplation.  We shall see that the rest we are alluding to here is simply that, rest, not escape as an Eastern religion would have it.  We are also going to turn the technique of quietude and contemplation toward created reality and seek to utilize it as a place of skill honing for the three tiered integration of self.  First it may be helpful to review the basic practices and techniques of deep contemplative prayer.

Prayer is an approach to God.  We are seeking an integration of self and environment, but that integration takes place by and through one’s relationship with God. According to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite there are two basic methodologies for prayer, the via affirmativa and the via negative.  The via affirmativa is the more commonly used in prayer as an approach to God.  First one assigns an attribute to God or defines God in the way that seems most fitting.  Then one seeks God by means of one’s attribute or definition.  This is done by exploring God’s creation and trying to find there the fullest understanding of definition one has come up with.  For example, a good attribute of God is “God is beautiful”.  This is an excellent starting point and by itself has many different routes one could take to explore one’s understanding and experience of God.  It’s obviously a great way of coming to understand God for an artist, or a scientist.  Another common example is “God is Just”.  This would be a useful attribute for a lawyer, politician, a police officer or worker in various non-profit fields.  For such a person, the actions of morality and consequences of choices are extremely important.  We will return to the via affirmativa when we discuss corporeal prayer. 

For now we are more interested in the via negative as it is the basis for contemplative inner prayer.  The Via Negativa is the way of denial, it concerns emptying the mind in much the same way a yogic practitioner does, but not for the purposes of extinguishing self.  Rather the purpose is union with the other, union with God.  Its methodology is far less employed and far less casually talked about given how easy it would be to misunderstand it.  The via affirmativa relies on knowledge and experience, but the operative human dimension for the via negativa is desire.  Knowledge, particularly the type of knowledge sought by the via affirmativa, definitions and attributes, are seen as harmful and possibly dangerous, thus it must be cleansed.  Once one has abandoned all concept of God one is left only with the desire to know God and one stops telling God who he is or how he must act and just listens and desires.  At that point it is up to God to take initiative.  If God so desires, he will come to you in perfect union.  

Following the methodology of the via negativa there are three levels of conceptual cleansing that need to happen.  The first would be to cleanse oneself of any overtly harmful notions of God.  For example the practitioner would meditate, “God is not wrathful, God is not vengeful, God is not evil.”  Most people understand that the Scriptures do use adjectives like jealous, wrathful etc. to describe God.  But with that comes the idea that God and creation are good, therefore those adjectives are human ways of trying to understand God’s mysterious ways.  

The second way one needs to cleanse one’s conceptions of God would be to deny neutral images and attributes given to God.  For example, “God is not tall, God is not heavy, God is not a grey-haired old man (who lives in the sky), God is not male” etc.  Most people engage in prayer or devotion with an image that they employ.  The grey-haired old man and pure light are both very popular images.  But the via negativa reminds us that these are our projections of God and not actually what God is.  Useful as they may be for devotion they are our creations and all people can stand to be reminded of their inauthentic nature from time to time.  

The third level of cleansing is not so overtly accepted, but only in small bits and pieces here and there.  For this level one must negate all good attributes of God one holds.  So, “God is not just, God is not peaceful, God is not loving” etc.  Why negate that God is good?  Because our understanding of goodness does not measure up to the goodness of God.  We tend to define all of these attributes based on self serving models that undercut what they would truly mean if we could step outside of our own self interest.  When we think of justice we think reciprocally, and we think about what we’ve earned or deserve.  This is inapplicable to God.  He is the standard of justice, but what we conceive of as justice is nothing like the true justice of God.  We root our concepts of peace in a fleeting sense of pleasure or satisfaction as compared to our discomfort.  God is eternal and peace when applied to him can have no human parallel.  The same calculations are applied to love.  We love in a way that is completely self interested and rooted in temporal considerations.  It is finite and directed at finite things.  Whatever we mean by Divine love, we certainly don’t have a clear picture of it.  One of my favorite quotes concerning this exact point is by the 13th century mystic St. Angela of Foligno, 

Once my soul was elevated and I saw the light, the beauty, and the fullness that is in God in a way that I had never seen before in so great a manner.  I did not see love there.  I then lost the love which was mine and was made non-love.  Afterwards, I saw him in darkness, and in a darkness precisely because the good that he is, is far too great to be conceived or understood.  Indeed anything conceivable or understandable does not attain this good or even come near it.  My soul was then granted a most certain faith, a secure and most firm hope, a continual security about God that took away all my fear.

  If one read such a passage without knowledge of the operation of the via negativa it would seem heretical and sacrilegious at parts.  But it operates on the spiritual model of desire not the knowledge, it rejects definitions and words as inadequate.  

The entire process is a process of cognitive emptying for a union with God based on desire.  Much of Christian spiritual history has demonstrated a methodology of conquering desire by intellect and will.  When one’s sees “concupiscent desire” as the main mode of unhealthy attachment this makes sense.  But concupiscence can just as easily corrupt intellect, turning it to an object of summative importance over even God.  In this case, just like desire, intellect must be sacrificed.  We must be willing to hand off our understanding if it stands in the way of coming to better know God.  God wants us to have all goodness that is ours, intellect, desire, will etc.  But he wants us to have these things by their proper operation.  Any exercise in detachment from these things should not follow an Eastern pattern of escape, but a Christian pattern of redemption.  We are sacrificing them knowing the major narrative is that one gets back from sacrifice more than one expects.  In this case redeemed desire or redeemed intellect.        

For now we may also turn the exercise of detachment from the intellect, cognitive emptiness, to the purpose of building skills for union with the environment.  It must be remembered that the overarching skill to be employed when one shifts one’s locus of being is the skill of cognitive emptiness.  This allows for the tactile union of two people’s “selves” as we described in Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton.  Cognitive emptiness allows for the tactical and gustatory union of self and environment through ingestion.  It takes an empty mind to perform this shift.  This emptiness is the condition of the first tier of experiences if one is going to empty one’s “self” and give one’s self in union to one’s environment.  The next step is a reimagining of how one’s uses one’s body in the environment       

Reimagining the Corporeal Self as a Self of Prayer         

To begin the second part of section three we will define a technique we will call corporeal reimagining.  The basic idea is an expansion of Pope Saint John Paul II’s general intention in his Theology of the Body.  What we are seeking to reimage here is the off base Christian bias against what is called the body that has infected the Western tradition since its birth in the hellenistic milieu.  It would be natural for an Eastern tradition to have a skeptical view of the body, which it deems illusory.  But for Christianity the corporeal self should be part and parcel of how we perceive yourself as a creature in creation.  It is a bit of a scandal that practitioners of Eastern religions stereotypically have a healthier sense of self bodily self than Christians.  It is true that the physical yogic practices, which seek to demonstrate the macrocosmic in the microcosm, are a means to a view of the body itself as an instrument of “prayer”.  Whereas in our tradition, the devaluation of sacramental engagement that took place after the protestant reformation shifted our major expression corporeal prayer to a hyper focus on complex and elaborate ritual rule following. If bought into, this robs us of a one major outlet for a corporeal spirituality.

As we noted earlier, we tend to see the body as an “auxiliary self” to the mind, especially in our post-cartesian, post enlightenment culture of cognition.  Prayer, in the Christian tradition, means stilling one’s body such that one can operate cognitively by one’s mind.  The process of corporeal reimagining first recognizes this alienation of inner self from body.  This “gap” must be exploited, because despite its existence, we do intuitively still see our bodies as somehow manifesting our selves.  This tension, once recognized can allow our bodies to become the “bridge” between what we see as our “self”, the inner, and what we are trying to see as our “self” but cannot, the external world.  This gap allows us to utilize the body as “self and other” in order to collapse the “complete other” (the external world) into self.  This collapse is done in order to recognize bodily prayer.  

One lense through which one can view our task is to meditate on corporeal reimagination as an exercise of Christian ontology, where reality is simple and manifold at the same time because objects and relationships are seen as equally real.  One of our analogies for understanding the trinity and the makeup of all reality as simple and manifold at the same time was the “object, object, relationship” dynamic. To apply this same analogical lense will enlighten both corporeal reimagination and Christian ontology.  There are two “objects” in this meditation, the psycho-spiritual world and the physical world.  The body is the “relationship” between the two, it is the self and the exterior world at one time.  This is in contrast to an Eastern view of Chakras which are the gates between the physical and the spiritual, yet as we have often pointed out, they are internal.  

That being said, our practice here is a simple appropriation of what Eastern religions immediately recognize, that the body can be manipulated as an instrument of prayer just as the mind can.  They more readily do this because their cosmology more easily recognizes the collapse of the three tiered field of experience under the category of illusion.  Our practice is to engage creation as a reality to be collapsed under a cosmology informed by Christian ontology, and then also be able to use the corporeal as a means of cosmic meaning and union.  There will be two methodologies for this, moral life and the sacramental system of the Church.

The easier of the two to grasp is the bodily self as a moral agent in the world.  We are going to explore this as a seeking of God in the external world.  This seeking takes place by means of the body as a prayer instrument, utilizing the via affirmativa coupled with the idea of vocation.  As we said before, the via affirmativa seeks a decided upon definition of God, the looks in the world to find God by means of it.  This seeking is prayer.  So if beauty was an example we used, the artist, by their life and the work of their body, will seek God by recognition of beauty in the physical world and integration of that beauty into his or her self.  This entire interchange speaks to the way that the senses impress upon the inner self by means of the body, making the outer one with the inner.  The artist then utilizes their auxiliary self to bridge their inner realizations back to the external world through art.  Once this entire process is conceived of as a prayer, the seeking of God through beauty, the artist has, through their bodily action, integrated inner self with the external world.

More commonly, one sees moral action as presenting one’s body to God.  We will link this to utilization of the via affirmativa and defining God as “justice”.  This justice is not just “social justice”, but the all encompassing quest for moral harmony on the social and individual level.  This quest is the quest for justification.  Again, traditionally, morality has been framed as the willful use of reason to detach from desire, discover the will of God and perform it.  We will offer a bit of a different framework by seeking God through the via affirmativa and employing corporeal reimagination.   

A person who sees God as just, seeks to presence that by doing just goodness with their auxiliary self.  That is, they abid bodily in the external world as an agent of moral action through the knowledge and will of their inner self.  They seek to exhibit and prescience the state of justification by and through their corporeal existence.  For the purposes of three tiered integration of the self, we must learn to cognitively understand all of these realities, inner, auxiliary, and outer, as one under the cosmology of Christian ontology, simple and manifold at the same time.   If one can consciously reimagine moral action as corporeal prayer, then one has begun to utilize the  auxiliary self in the manner we described, exploiting the intuitive tension between the alienation of corporeal self and the intimacy of corporeal self in order to bridge the inner psycho-spiritual self with the external world “as self”.  This is a conscious and cognitive exercise, fitting to the via affirmativa.  But now we must proceed to the more difficult reimagining of corporeal self, which utilizes the via negative, an emptying of cognition.

One main goal in the practice of meditation and yoga is detachment.  The ultimate goal of this detachment is to free one of desire, there by freeing one from karma.  This facilitates escape either into moksha or out by means of nirvana.  Again, in Christian cosmology, detachment for this purpose does not make sense.  The purpose of our detachment is a prioritizing of our sense of attachment.  The main goal of detachment is not to destroy commerce with creation, but to let go of things that draw you from love of God.  The exercise of the via negativa reminds one that even one’s own cognition can be such a barrier.  Thus practice of cognitive emptiness, the emptiness of willful intellect, will allow one to focus self in other places.  The via negativa puts the focus on God alone and allows one to seek him by sheer desire as opposed to intellect and will.  One can see here how the shutting down of the cognitive aspect of self allows one to utilize an alternate aspect, desire.  For our purposes we are seeking to reimagine the corporeal aspect of self.  This calls for contemplation in action. Usually the term “contemplatives in action” is adopted by contemplative consecrated communities who have a ministry of social justice.  But our term indicates the utilization of contemplation, particularly the skill of cognitive emptiness, in order to better experience and use corporeal action period.  

Again, in our mythic interpretation of the cosmos, the snake in the low position does not only stand for the temptation to physical reality, “the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes” but also a warped sense of knowledge, “and the tree was desirable for gaining wisdom.” In Kundalini Yoga the snake moves from carnal desire to edifying knowledge.  But from our cosmology one can see that in certain circumstances a detachment from cognition itself, even to indulge is the physical world can be spiritually advantageous.      

The idea of cognitive emptying coupled with some sort of physical action may seem counterintuitive.  But it is a page from the yogic playbook of pure self awareness through emptying the mind and disciplining the body by meaningful yogic posturing.  That yogic posturing involves the auxiliary self imaging the macrocosmic external world, but not engaging it.  Remember, the goal is the knowledge that facilitates escape of this world.  Our practice will be slightly different. It will bet the ritual system of the sacraments.  For the rest of this treatise we will explore this practice and how it allows for the three tiered integration of self, starting with corporeal reimaging of the body as sacramental and even a sacrament.  It is here that we can begin to utilize the comparative studies between East and West to fill out aspects of our faith in creative, dynamic, and yet orthodox ways with differing but compatible aspects of Eastern faiths.  Our practice will be to use cognitive emptiness to refocus the corporeal self as sacramental.  

We discussed the sacramental nature of reality in the former treatise Sacramental Cosmology,

[C]reation is the communication system setup to convey a good relationship within itself and extent love between God and humans.  Therefore the creation itself is an outward sign, instituted by Christ (being made by the Word of God) to convey grace.  The whole process of creation is an outpouring of God’s love that is to also a means by which to be drawn into God’s love.  The absoluteness of these statements cannot be over exaggerated.  One must approach the world with a multivalent epistemology and a coherence model of truth as primary to a correspondence understanding.  How complex this can be becomes clear in this quote from Somnium Spirituality

If something is known by this method it is called part of the “physical” world. One thing that will be explored throughout this treatise is the mistaken perception that the physical world is what you experience by your senses.  This may be commonly assumed as a definition for the physical world, but when pressed on the nature of dreams or what a hallucination is, these things, though valid sense experiences of the individual, are not part of the “physical world”.  Hence in this treatise we shall distinguish not just between the dream world and the physical world, but also between the “waking world” and the “physical world”.  The waking world is one’s every experience as they are awake, but the secular scientific definition of knowledge concerning the “physical world” and public verifiability would exclude ghosts, hallucinations, visions etc.  

 

Every facet of creation is able to be a communication between ourselves and God.  The dream world will supply the symbology for sacral rites, and the physical world will supply the ability to willfully express those symbols as effective signs in a calculated ritual.  The creative and ordering principle of reality, The Word or Son of God, is the foundational source for all of this.  

The Humans created in this communication system are made as the part of that creation that receives, processes and cooperates with that grace in order to be drawn into the loving relationships.                        

That treatise went on to discuss the human relationship as sacrament, most obviously in the confines of marriage.   We explored throughout the treatise how bodies in the vocational sacraments become sacramental matter attuned to specific functions in the sacramental system.  For example we said of marriage,

Effective married life is a living icon of the trinity when sacramentally charged. The two bodies are the outward sign, they are the matter.  The loving relationship, caught up in divine love, is the conveyance of grace, it is the form. 

 

We discussed how ritually the “manipulation of sacramental matter” that happens in marriage is the necessary consummation of the marriage.  In the treatise The Onesiman Interface we discussed how ordination makes the body of the priest into sacramental matter,

 By their ordination, they [priests] become vessels by which Christ, through the sacraments, conveys grace.  During a sacramental ritual, the priest stands in persona christi not just in a dramatic or theatrical way, but in truth by his ordination.  The human priest himself is inconsequential in this position, but his physical body is a necessary part of the outward sign of the sacramental ritual.  

In each of these cases, the physical body becomes part of what is seen as an “exterior system” of ritual artifacts.  The body becomes the bridge between the inner self and the exterior world, as interpreted by the sacramental system.

These two particular cases of sacramental corporeal integration fold into a greater system of inclusion through baptism.  Baptism itself integrates the whole person body and soul into the body of Christ.  Since it is a corporeal as well as spiritual integration, the believer is required to change the way they utilize their corporeal existence.  This could be by means of  the artistic or moral integration we discussed earlier.  But, in truth, it should engage all levels of one’s being and action.  The corporeal reimagining that must take place is expansive, ranging from one’s use of clothing as a communication system (modesty) to the exercise of a slight locus of being shifting during the handshake of peace at mass.  Awareness of the indelible marks of baptism and confirmation allow one to reimagine one’s corporeal existance as an existence of prayer which engages in and binds one to the external world, such that the external world becomes as much one’s “self” as one’s inner life.  It also binds one into the sacramental system of the Church.  For the last part of the last section we will explore how the sacramental system of the Church offers rituals that allow for a three tiered integration of self through the discipline of cognitive emptiness and the extension of self by awareness of locus of being.

  

Three Tiered Integration and the Sacramental System

To wrap up our exploration of the three tiered integration of self we will explore how the sacramental system offers four ways to integrate the external world into the self.  Those ways are audio visual cognitive integration, integration by human tactile contact, integration by material tactile contact, and integration by ingestion.

First we will take the audio visual cognitive integration.  This simply takes the epistemological facts we have already covered and applies an awareness of them to ancient Christian ritual.  What we said earlier was that the exterior world is already integrated into the inner world by means of the most far reaching of the senses.  Visual and auditory sense data reach the furthest into the exterior world, yet are they comprise the imagery of conscious thought, our most inner self.  Ancient Christian ritual relies on a certain type of beauty to strike the participant by means of all of the senses.  So when we assert that the mass, for example, shapes the mind, or impacts the soul, we are not simply talking about a well delivered homily that offers good moral or theological ideas.  We are talking about the calculated ritual that through sensory experience extends the self into the ritual, it’s story and meaning and impresses that meaning onto the self. This is the effect of each variety of ritual investment described in the former treatise Intuitive Ritual Investment and Conscious Ritual Investment.  One will recall that the technique of conscious ritual investment works on three levels a teleological level, a cognitive level and on the level of somnium spirituality.  For the purposes of this treatise we are focusing on the cognitive aspects and zeroing in on our sensory experience of the ritual.  The more we can understand the symbology of our ritual, the more we can invest in them, and the more their impressions become part of who we are, integrating the external world into our inner lives.  In short, this is why the gestures and vestures, smells and bells so maligned in Catholicism by certain types of protestant faiths are so important.    

As we pointed out in the former treatise Sacramental Cosmology the peripheral aesthetics of the sacramental ritual are of culturally relative importance.  The fundamental matter was explained in that treatise and consisted of human persons, water, olive oil, wheat flour, and grape wine.  To conclude we will take each of these in turn as facilitators of the three tiered integration of self through locus of being maneuverability.

    We will start with the humans and discuss integration by human tactile contact.  We discussed in great detail, in the former treatise Corporeal Unitive Fulfillment in the Eschaton, how the sexual act, as consummation is a manipulation of sacramental matter (human bodies), which allows for the shifting of the locus of being and facilitates the unitive function of sexual activity.  In this treatise we have expanded that tactile ability by reminding the reader that such a shifting is most noticeable in the extreme (sex or crucifixion were our examples) but it can be practiced even in the mundane.  We hinted at this mundane angle recently when pointing out a brief locus if shifting as part of the handshake of peace in mass.  It can be extended to any tactile blessing given and now we can explore an example that is a manipulation of actual sacral matter, any time that a priest touches a person in a sacramental environment.  This could be the laying on of hands in an ordination or confirmation and the anointing in confirmation, baptism or the anointing of the sick.  With each of these tactile sensations both parties have a chance to practice cognitive emptiness, which can be acquired through contemplative practice, in order to unite in their very being in the Church.  The priest or bishop in these rituals stands in persona christi thus sacramentally, his physical body prescences the person of Christ for the purposes of the ritual.  When a participant touches the priest with an emptiness of cognition and shifts the locus of their being they are shifting it outwardly to the person of Christ.  Conversely, the priest does not “inwardly” become Christ by ordination.  But if he practices cognitive emptiness in order to give his bodily existence to Christ for ritual use, he has sacrificed his cognition in order to allow the shifting of his being and this can become an experience, for him, of the outward giving of Christ, in as much as the priest abides “as his body” in the ritual.  In this way participants in the sacramental ritual system can practice an interpersonal extension in the context of ritual itself and bind with the Church and with Christ phenomenologically.

What the reader will notice with Jesus’ interaction in the Thomas story noted above is a shift from interpersonal sharing to something else.  In the story of the anointing at Bethany, the sinful woman cries upon Jesus’ feet and dries them with her hair.  If Jesus, in perfect harmony with himself as self in psyche, body and environment, felt her tears and hair, he through cognitive emptiness could shift his locus of being to his feet.  The image is Jesus going to her, but she not quite reaching out to him because of the alienation of sin.  Jesus uses this situation to teach a point about humility, forgiveness, and gratitude.  This story and lesson can then be linked to the story of Jesus washing the feet of the apostles, an interpersonal tactil communion and integration that seeks to demonstrate Christian power dynamics.  With Jesus’ Mother and the Beloved Disciple at the foot of the cross, the breath he breathed on them is an interesting example of  integration by human tactile contact as well as integration by material tactile contact.  Breath in hebrew is life, the life force.  So though the implication is a union with Jesus.  But one cannot sensorily shift their locus of being to their breath.  So though the Beloved Disciple and Jesus Mother meet him, by his life force, in their being, his body is not involved.  This is obviously relevant given his imminent death and subsequent post resurrection ascension.  When he breathes on the apostles at the first appearance in the upper room, that is enough, but for Thomas, something more is needed, that interpersonal tactile sense, only in that corporeal personhood can thomas believe.  It is a harder skill to use locus of being shifting to effect integration by material tactile contact.  It is not quite as easy for most of us.        

In our analysis we will be discussing integration by material tactile contact, that is, integration by contact with sacramental matter that is not personal.  It is the same basic exercise, but without an interpersonal sharing.  Rather the practitioner is practicing integration of the inanimate exterior world (the physical world if one prefers) to one’s self.  If that seems impossible or useless, please remember that according to Christian ontology, God’s good creation stands as a single ontological unit on one level.  In reality, the subject is already one with the object, and will perceive themselves as so in the Eschaton.  Also the reader will remember that as the major sign of his communion, Christ chose to present as inanimate objects, bread and wine, a fact we discussed in painful detail as the “second descent” in the former treatise  Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent.  A tactile shift toward impersonal material in the sacramental ritual system can happen whenever sacral matter comes in contact with the sacral practitioner.  Examples would be the water and oil of baptism, the oil of confirmation, and the oral tactile sensation of the Eucharist. In the case of the water, all of the symbology of baptism stands and a conscious ritual investment would allow one to connect cognitively.  But a cognitive self emptying couple with a tactile shift in the locus would allow one the phenomenological experience of oneness with the water that will allow them to experience as connection to the water “in their being”.  That experience could enhance later cognitive reflection.  Granted, this is an unlikely scenario, given most Catholic baptism are of infants.  Though, a baby may be more open to the experience of locus of being shifting by material tactile contact than an adult, they just wouldn’t remember it in adulthood. 

The inability to practice  integration by material tactile contact may be true of the oil of confirmation, given the age and likely spiritual maturity of the participant, but with anointing of the sick the possibility is there that a spiritually advanced person, in facing the inevitability of suffering and/or transition from one life to the next, may utilize this tactic.  By it one can begin to practice an extension of self to the external world and a subsequent integration in order to understand how Christ not only unites himself to his followers, but truly gives himself to all creation.

The last practice is integration by ingestion.  This is perhaps the most shocking of the integration of self and the external world, because it quite literally means taking the external world into one’s self physically while at the same time practicing a shift in the locus of being by both tactile and olfactory sensation.  

The olfactory sense ingests the environment into the being of the participant.  This is experienced by incense, chrisam and the cup of blood as one lifts its contents to one’s mouth for oral ingestion.  This type of integration is hardest to explain by language because the sensation itself is so far from cognitive “thought”.  There is something primal in the way it integrates the person with their environment if they are disciplined enough to practice cognitive emptiness.  It literally gives one the experience of one becoming one’s environment phenomenologically because the experience of smell is not “located” in the nose, but seems to bridge the locus of perception and the exterior world. The olfactory sense seem to create an environment of its own where perceived and perception are one, but, again, awareness of this is not a real time cognitive exercise, in fact, typical of the sensorial exercises we have been discussing, cognitive activity is an inhibitor.  The sense of smell is also the most redolent of the senses.  It seems to be phenomenologically geared to take the experiencer “back” to another place, allowing them to experience the interconnectedness of experience, self, space, and time.  One need only remember that seeming universal experience of being an adult and walking into a place that smells like one’s grandmother’s house from youth.  The teleportation is immediate and present as long as one remains cognitively empty and “in the moment”, a “moment” that transcends time.  Interestingly,  Though the auditory experience of hearing words may not have this same effet, music most certainly can.  

This practice concerning the olfactory sense can be utilized a few ways once one has engaged in our process of corporeal reimagination.  One can use the smell of liturgical incense to “shock” one into cognitive emptiness and begin to appropriately give one’s “self” to the liturgy in all the other ways we are discussing.  Also, the smell of chrism has the same redolence for highly solemn liturgical ceremonies, binding any participants (attendees) to a baptism, confirmation, ordination, or anointing, back to their own, at least confirmation, if not others, if they stand redolent in memory.  It is yet another way ritual, by corporeal prayer and three tiered integration can transcend time and space and position participants as their very selves “in” the ritual, because in some strange and inexplicable way, all of these things, person hoods, physical existence as bodies, physical existence as material environments, have collapsed into one experience.

We will put off this enigmatic experience for one that allows a little better reflection, integration by oral ingestion.  Absent the salt of baptism, this is basically a reexamination of the third descent as described in Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent.  That descent is the descent of Christ into the sinner by means of the Eucharist.  But for this treatise we are going to focus on the actual reception and the significance of this for the three tiered integration of the self.  By the act of taking the species into our mouths, we are allowed the opportunity to shift our locus of being there, with Christ through the tactile sensation and the sense of taste.  This process is of course facilitated by our much touted cognitive emptiness.  But if one is reflective enough in one’s prayer life to fully invest in a imaginative meditation of the crucifixion where the smell of the gaul played an impactful role, reception of the cup may offer a resultant extension of self by transcendence of self, time and space as we just described.  That is advanced, but could be effective.  The tactile sensation is one of mastication, which is integrating in and of itself. The chewing is a grinding of being into being.  Much like the tactile sense of the priest standing in persona christi the tactile experience of the host offers an integration through physical contact with Christ, but this time it is material instead of personal.  This is key because as we described in Inversal Unity and The Divine Triple Descent the Eucharist is Christ as he is completely integrated.  

One can begin to see that the species of the Eucharist itself contains all elements of the original hierarchy of Paradise within it, yet it abides as one reality, a perfect example of the true inversal unity of Paradise.  It contains the soul and divinity of Christ, thus it contains the nature of humanity and the nature of divinity.  It also contains the accidents of the sustaining elements of the environment of the Garden that sustain humanity, bread and wine, grain and fruit, which the man would gather from the soil. One will notice that at the reception of the Eucharist all elements necessary to sustain the Church is present according to how we discussed the matter in Sacramental Cosmology.  

 

In the Eucharist one ingests Christ’s own three tiered integration of self.  He accomplishes this great feat and then offers his accomplishment to the sinner to aid the sinner on their own journey toward this self same integration.  This is not an Eastern escape from a reality seen as suffering, but a Christian redemption of both suffering and reality itself.

Now one can employ the typological integration for Christ, who is the living temple, destroyed and rebuilt in three days, has completely integrated the three tiers of experience within himself, all have been redeemed in him.  Now he descends into the participant/sinner in order to make them a temple.  The receptores job is to the go out and sacralize reality in the way most appropriate to them as an individual.  This most certainly will involve a collapse of self and neighbor, and we add collapse of self to environment.  The process of this will be both cognitive reflective and a phenomenological practice of cognitive emptiness, an undulation that must continue until all experience perfect Christian ontology in the Eschaton.    

Conclusion

 In the first section we attempted to compare and contrast the cosmologies of Eastern religions and Christianity.  We spent time contrasting how these Eastern traditions and Christianity seek to integrate mind, body, and environment into one reality.  In the East we understood the unifying category as illusion, in the West we assert the unifying category as “creation”. We went on to explore the role that the body plays in the various religious heroes of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity by exploring the seven chakras points of Kundalini Yoga, the corporeal stillness of the Buddha, and the five wounds of Christ.  In this analysis we paid close attention to the mythic role of the serpent in each narrative and use that exploration to discuss how the religions regard the relationship between the mind, the body and the world. 

In the second section we explored the functional meaning of the body in each tradition. We did this by unpacking the Christian functional meaning of the body as a means of communication.  When contrasting this with the Eastern function of the body as an illusion, or a carrier of suffering.  This contrast allowed us to examine how the body itself can be the used in the Christian tradition as the bridge between the inner self and the exterior world, especially by means of the senses and the ability to shift one’s locus of being. We applied our examination to how Christ shared his “self” with his followers as a church and with the exterior world as a whole through the process of redemption by means of his physical self.  We ended by defining three tools a Christian practitioner can use for self communication typological investment, ritual action and the body of the Church. 

In this final section we attempted to develop a spirituality using the techniques we had discussed up to that point.  The personal application involved three elements, one for each field of experience.  First we explored the inner element, where we discussed contemplative prayer and cognitive emptiness.  We explored the techniques of the via negativa and sought to demonstrate the similarities and differences between this prayer technique and Eastern meditation techniques.  Next we attempted to develop a means of corporeal reimagination, to better understand our bodies as the bridge between inner self and the external world, the bridge by which these two realities are collapsed.  We analyzed of each sense, visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory in order to understand how they can can serve as a functional bridge between the inner self and the external world.  We then applied the corporeal reimagining to how each of the five sense interacts in the ritual sacramental system of the Catholic Church point by point.

One of the saddest developments of post reformation Christianity is the loss of the sacramental understanding of the cosmos.  The protestant tradition jettisoned the ritual system because it seemed unbiblical out nothing but a bunch of pagan magical rites with the names changed.  Roman Catholicism's response was to lock down on the rules and structure of the rite only minimally focusing on the deep meaning.  Even in that focus there has been a loss by the people of God of any investment if the rituals as an experience of God.  

Since the thing that threw off our technique and skill of experience of the sacraments was the developmental matrix of Christianity itself, the methodology of this treatise was to utilize our fellow sojourners to God, the world religions, especially the Eastern religions.  We sought by compare and contrast to Eastern cosmology, anthropology, and soteriology in order to learn and expand our understanding of our own tradition. The techniques we have tried to develop by our exploration of the Eastern religions should allow for that deeper experience in the rituals themselves and, appropriate to the function of the rituals, a deeper experience of the practitioners entire life.