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Dissection

God gave himself up to our dissection.
An ultimate openness; a kenosis.

“Leaves don’t exist as such”—sure.
But can there be such a house with no foundation?
Can there be haecceity all the way down?

Things evolve at random when there’s nothing at stake;
but what strange trajectories mine have!

And when does the bread I eat become me?
Where does it become not-bread?
And shouldn’t I ask this on Sunday?

Oh, what can I make of all these games?
Only silence! Breath. Heartbeat.

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I was asked recently to share my thoughts on kenosis. This is a topic that is very close to my heart, for reasons that will become obvious shortly.

I believe that God, in revealing Himself to be the Totality, i.e. by becoming immanent in creation, became as nothing in particular. And why?

I believe it is so that I may become to myself something in particular: part-and-whole of the Totality.

God has given Himself over to co-creation with His parts. God, being Totality, became as Other to Himself, and in so doing created Himself as conscious agent. In other words, God became the arena which is co-conceptualized with the agent and with which the agent is in constant exchange. He engages in self-Othering in order to create the conscious agent.

Reality is a divine stage upon which the divine incarnate acts and interacts. This stage is not static but is in constant co-conceptualization and exchange with the agents acting upon it.

Why do I believe this?

Because I saw the meaninglessness of the Real, of being truly one-without-another. It seems that information lies in contrast; meaning lies in difference and relationship. I then decided to “divide” myself by taking actions to confuse and contradict myself until such a time as I would not remember the Truth of my aloneness; or at least until I could always doubt it.

I have this actual memory from my lived experience. It turns out that the individual effort to escape from solipsism serves as a wonderful analogy for the metaphysical process of the Totality becoming self-aware of its status as such. Indeed, from my perspective, I was the Totality becoming self-aware of my status as such, and I decided to sow confusion within myself to escape from the despair of solipsism.

What came next was profound psychosis, depression, anxiety, and groundlessness—as well as a book that I developed throughout this time period, which I called The Trinitarian Mystery: Escaping Solipsism.

So in short, I believe in this kenosis because I simply remember deciding to do it and carrying it through.

Christ’s self-emptying in becoming man, i.e. in manifesting the immanence of the divine within creation, and the further self-emptying in His death on the cross, serves in this model as the culmination or turning point of the Process of Creation. And why this design? Perhaps only so that I might come to know myself to be the divine made manifest as self in and through relationship with the divine Other.

In my most faithful moments, I believe that the Spirit revealed to me (or through me) the crux of Christ’s message, the meaning of His death for me personally, and the significance of the mystery of His resurrection. I think this is a personal revelation (or conversion, or enlightenment) that cannot be generalized and cannot be readily transmitted through language. It can be pointed to and testified to, as I have here and elsewhere, but it must be a personal, experiential realization. This is why I write in the first person and in my own language, and why I do not attempt to generalize.

Of course, all of this is one manner of speaking about the Totality—one way of holding the mystery of existence and experience. I continue to doubt this system of purported truths, even as I testify to it.

And yet what I testify to in my book is exactly the dialogic process between assertion and doubt, self and Other, or the Real and the true-to-an-agent. Each apparent dichotomy really describes one and the same Totality in the form of a process of relationship between two abstract objects that together compose the Totality itself. As I have written elsewhere, “Life without a reference is all one piece; and gosh, it isn’t much.” But it seems that in dividing the Totality into at least two objects, e.g. “self” and “Other,” and understanding their unity in a process of relationship, I can get somewhere practically without solipsistic despair.

The storyline of kenosis I have just described will no doubt be jarring to some, or confusing to others. I have always been capable of seeing multiple storylines within my life. Sometimes I can’t decide very well what is “true” and what isn’t. In fact, the very notion of truth seems to break down to mere coherence between propositions (including propositions of instantiation like, “this [reading on a machine] is due to an electron,” or, “that is quartz”) and subjective endorsement of alternative systems of propositions. Nonetheless, I believe that the scientific method provides a self-consistent attitude and methodology for disconfirming purported systems of truths, and I try to apply this methodology to discern between my competing personal storylines.

This understanding of truth was destabilizing for me to endorse. I grew up being taught that there is one Truth, which was the Roman Catholic faith. I don’t endorse every proposition of the Roman Catholic faith now, but clearly my upbringing has influenced my own system of propositions, which is simply the best way I have learned to discuss things. My own system is the first reading of Christ’s life and death that has made sense to me, and one that seems so far to find resounding alignment across my understanding of various mystical, scientific, philosophical, and religious traditions, including Buddhism, Taoism, Advaita Vedanta, cognitive science, information theory, epistemology, philosophy of science, and modern physics.

I am always glad to discuss these topics in more detail. Thanks for reading!