Christianity: The Spiritual Realm Is Inside Your Consciousness
Deconstructing Christianity: The spiritual realm is not some imaginary heaven. It is the intrasubjective facet of reality deep in the human psyche.
Next to Paul of Tarsus, who wrote some of the most consequential epistles of the New Testament, arguably no theologian had a more profound impact on Western Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, than Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius (354–430). In his treatise On the Trinity (De Trinitate), after addressing the Trinity itself, Augustine articulates a trinitarian theory of mind: It is the self-aware part of the human mind, operating on the level of contemplative experience, that reflects our creation in the triune image of God. This triad of the exalted mind entails its memory of itself, pure knowledge of itself, and love of, or goodwill toward itself. The corresponding Latin terms, with meanings somewhat different from their English friends, are memoria, intellectus, and voluntas).
For one of Augustine’s destructive theological contributions, see my post:
For Augustine, knowing God comes through the introspection and meditation necessary to apprehend such a reality through the mythos of this theology. It is beyond thought, through pure mind or intellectus that one may encounter God. In his Confessions, Augustine reveals that though beauty, wonder, and the glory of God are to be found in the natural world, God could not be accessed through such outward experience. Augustine searched outside himself, only to find that it was his “inner man” who apprehended the beauty and complete satisfaction of knowing God.
Paul refers to this “inner man” in the fourth chapter of the second epistle to the Corinthians, and Augustine quotes it in De Trinitate: “So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer person is being destroyed, yet our inner person is being renewed day by day.” Ephesians 6 has this: “...that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person.” In First Corinthians 2, Paul writes this: “But the natural person does not receive the things of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they cannot understand them because they are spiritually appraised. But the spiritual person appraises all things, and is yet appraised by no one.”
It is this inner, spiritual person—the one who experiences consciousness—who understands spiritual things, who is strengthened with power through the Spirit, who is renewed day by day, even as our bodies and cognitive functions interact with the natural world and approach their temporal fate. Augustine understood that access to God is through this inner person, that the path to ultimate reality is an inward journey. Put another way, there is a realm of the psyche where the heart and mind can reach beyond itself.
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So, Augustine sought God in the beauties outside himself, discovering that the object of his love was not to be found in any of them. Or, in the terms of the Upanishads, the All (brahman) pervading the inner self (atman) is not to be identified by the objects and states of mind that define our ordinary lives and the world about us. We can look at each of them and identify that the transcendent Unity of Being is not in any one of them: neti... neti... (not... not...).
And this reflects the apophatic theology of the Desert Fathers and Mothers: As God is ultimately beyond definition, we can only look at the terms, attributes, categories, and metaphors by which we approach God, and acknowledge that God is per se none of them. We are left with an astonishing collection of all the things that God is not, and can only retreat from there into the silence of hesychía before a God that is beyond all names and forms.
For more on the Desert Fathers and Mothers, see my post
Christianity Was a Religion of Silent Meditation from the Start
That God is beyond all names and forms is the truth reflected in ancient prohibitions against pronouncing the sacred Name of YHVH, requiring the substitution of Adonai, or Lord, and against crafting any form to represent God. It is also the truth reflected in early Christian discomfort with, and later Calvinist prohibition of iconography, and with the Islamic prohibition against visual representations of God (Allah), the Prophet—peace be upon him, or anything related to them. And, it is the truth represented in the statement from the Dao De Jing that, “The Dao that can be named is not the Dao.”
The purpose of all these proscriptions is to prevent confusion of physical, verbal, or conceptual signifiers with the indescribable Unity that is signified. Idolatry can be rightly defined according to this confusion. Conversely, signifiers that direct our attention past themselves to the signified are thus not idols, but aid in our apprehension of a deeper reality.
God beyond all names and forms can only be accessed through the part of our inner consciousness that operates beyond all names and forms. An ongoing practice of silent meditation trains us to develop a subtle sense of the Ground and Unity of All Being, and our connectedness to it. This causes us to be more skillful in maintaining the peacefulness, equanimity, and compassion exemplified by Jesus, no matter what is happening around or inside us. It is what trains us to love God with our whole being and our neighbors as ourselves.
That is why Jesus meditated (The Lord's Prayer Doesn't Ask for Stuff - It's a Guided Meditation). That is why the apostles meditated (Why the Apostles Were Meditating, Not Begging for Things). That is why Paul engaged in prayer as a contemplative practice (Prayer Is Not Really About Asking for Stuff, It's About Meditation).
That is why the Desert Fathers and Mothers continued and refined the contemplative practices of Jesus and the Apostles, starting a tradition that kept Christian spirituality alive for centuries afterward (Christianity Was a Religion of Silent Meditation from the Start). And, that is why Christianity must realign itself with its ancient practices of silent meditation. In this way, Christianity can remain useful in our context rather than becoming so irrelevant that people begin to abandon it in droves—a process that is already well underway.