On the Way and Already There

The Labyrinth, Nonduality, and Christ

I step onto the labyrinth. Slow walk, steady breath, follow the path. Its circular course, doubling back on itself, moving toward the center.

Like the ancient labyrinths, the ground of this labyrinth’s path on which I step is no different than the ground on which the labyrinth itself lies. It is composed of earth. Earth outside the labyrinth, earth as the labyrinth path, earth at the labyrinth’s center. Is there even an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of this labyrinth, or is it all one thing?

Yet there is undoubtedly a course laid out, lined by rocks. I am, in fact, walking it. The course moves around its center in sweeping circles. The circular path takes me closer by the center at times, then farther from the center at others. But even when, by the judgment of the eye, the path draws me away from the center, I am always walking toward the center. Is there even a center, or is the center all along the path?

I arrive at the center. There is nothing there. No well-meaning person has made the mistake of decorating it – with a rock, a cross, a flower.  There is nothing there but the ground on which I have been walking all along. The earth… and me. Did I even walk anywhere, or was I always already here?

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Many of the world’s religious traditions – maybe all, but I don’t know them all – offer two simultaneous estimations of our situation:

We are in deep need and there is a path on which we must go to be whole.

We are well and whole and there is nowhere to go.

The affirmation of two contradictories. Not a dialectic, not a paradox, but a nonduality.

Consider:

“On the great road of buddha ancestors there is always unsurpassable practice, continuous and sustained. It forms the circle of the way and is never cut off. Between aspiration, practice, enlightenment and nirvana, there is not a moment’s gap.” (Gyoji)

“Just understand that birth-and-death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth and death to be avoided. There is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth-and-death”. (Shoji)

~ Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō

“We were indoctrinated so much into means and ends… that we don’t realize that there is a different dimension in the life of prayer.  In technology you have this horizontal progress, where you must start at one point and move to another and then another.  But that is not the way to build a life of prayer.  In prayer we discover what we already have.  You start where you are and you deepen what you already have, and you realize that you are already there.  We already have everything, but we don’t know it and we don’t experience it.  Everything has been given to us in Christ.  All we need is to experience what we already possess.

~ Thomas Merton, to David Steindl-Rast, before his journey to Bangkok

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Dōgen, the 13h century founder of Soto Zen, and Merton, the Cistercian monk, are evoking the nonduality that marks the spiritual life. It is a practice in which we go deeper and farther into what is, at the same time, already given.

“Nonduality” has become a thing in popular religious writing. I won’t call out the names of any authors, but I’m sure you can supply them. I must say that many of these popular books are quite dualistic. How so? Put it this way: if you are offering “nonduality” as the goal, the better way, the truer reality, you have simply set “nonduality” over against “duality.” What do you have? Another binary. Another duality.

But a true nonduality has room for both the sense of arrival and the need for progress. Room for both the nondual and the dual. (This, I learned from the Buddhists.)

Merton, in the same conversation that I quoted above, when Steindl-Rast asked him whether in something like the practice of intercession there was an inherent dualism, said:

“Really there isn’t, and yet there is. You have to see your will and God’s will dualistically for a long time. You have to experience duality for a long time until you see it’s not there.  In this respect I am a Hindu. Ramakrishna has the solution. Don’t consider dualistic prayer on a lower level. The lower is higher. There are no levels. Any moment you can break through to the underlying unity which is God’s gift in Christ. In the end, Praise praises. Thanksgiving gives thanks. Jesus prays. Openness is all.” 

This experience of nonduality is, it seems to me, an experience of movement inside of rest; progress inside of gift. It is, I think, the fullness of life that the Jesus of the gospel of John promises. To be in him as branches to the vine, while we follow him to Jerusalem. To know the full presence of the Spirit while we yet long for Christ who has now gone ahead. It is what we celebrate in baptism – an already beloved child of God enters the path of formation as a disciple. It is what Augustine said of our receiving the eucharistic bread and wine: “be what you see, become who you are.”

It is what happens for me, on a good day, when I walk the labyrinth, walking toward the center that I have not yet reached, the center that already surrounds me with love, grace, and shelter.

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The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Colossians 1: 18-20

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Life, a labyrinth. Suffering and joy, a labyrinth. Struggle and darkness and light, a labyrinth.

Christ, the Labyrinth.