And Her Name Is Chuck!

                                                       Steven Spielberg and Actors from Ready Player One


​A weirdly fun movie, from a few years ago, is Ready Player One, based on the book by the same name. Out of context and with no explanation, I have pulled five words from the movie as title for this blog, and her name is Chuck! I figure that it's a good place to start with another pondering of soul, person, Tao, and Gospel... I guess that you could say, now go figure...

​In other words, the idea of who someone is (perhaps you) is a mental construct of an environmental construct: in spite of the photos I present of myself, with accompaning philosophy, I just might really be Chuck... Maybe, in fact, you are... Chuck is the illusory idea of any and every individual self... We build our sense of self from the tools of self-identification that we are taught, along with the overwhelming influences of place, class, race, gender, education, culture, and religion: all together, they (we!) are an environmental construct...

​But, who would either you or I be, if we were born with our opposite gender, up or down on the class-ladder, and so on? If every conditioned, environmental, construct was stripped away, who would you be? Who would I be? 

Perhaps most religious philosophies, insist that, in our essence, we are soul... Western religion generally thinks of soul as something that we have, sort of like an interior ghost that we possess... And that it is our soul that is of primary interest to G-d... or so it seems... Delving a bit deeper, there is also the philosophy of person: a person being the union of body and soul, and it is as person that the Divine relates to us... but, that still begs the question of ideas and constructs: both mental and environmental... It seems to me, as I both ponder and write, that the idea of both soul and person are themselves constructs of mind, time, place, and environment...

​Is there even a me without each and all of the constructs with which "I" am inundated from birth-through-life?

​Why should I even care? This, too, is a construct. Going along, being "saved", being forgotten, whatever: it's all just ideas, right? Decide to agree with this, disagree with that, and so on, neither proves nor means anything at all... Everything happens in our Mind, right?... A current catch-phrase is mindfulness: a word-construct meaning attention to the moments... It seems to me that we are always, always, full-of-it-in-our-mind! Isn't it time for some classes in mindlessness?

​"Chuck" is whomever we think that we are. But, who were you, before you were "Chuck"?

​This question of "Chuck" is the essence of the mystic-path: "not him, not her", not this, not that, all the way to the very bottom of emptiness... It is precisely at that zero-point, that un-conditioned Real Reality, that we see our face before we were born... Infinity begins in no-thing... Heaven is exactly beneath your feet... Ego-annihilation is a trip into our own personal Chuck... Zero-point is such Radical Grace, that every mystic turns and turns and turns and runs away, back into her Chuck! This is the spiritual life, the building of your sacred life!

​Here's my own, very first, zero-point story. (It's true!) As you likely already know, I started a Catholic Worker Community back in yonder-years, with my life savings being our start-up funds. Inevitably, within a few months, all the money ran out (a bit over $6,000)... I collapsed into a complete ego-annihilation: I had "lost" my savings as I had "lost" my Catholic Worker vision and project: no money, no food, no way to any longer serve the folks who had come to so appreciate the free meals we gave them...

​Completely empty of both faith and possibilities, I told the first volunteers who showed up that we were done... Kevin suggested that we say a prayer, Anna Marie selected the silly scripture of Jesus of the Beloved taking five loaves of bread and two fish and with them feeding over five thousand people. Welcome into what is possible with Radical Grace at the Zero-Point: we gathered into a circle of five people, listened to the scripture, recited the Our Father, and that was it... within minutes, a white, unmarked, semi-truck parked in front of our CW House... the driver knocked on our door, "Would we like some bread?"

​We unloaded the truck: bread was three feet deep across the sofa: bread was stuffed everywhere it was possible to stuff bread... Now, remember that zero-point: I walked from our front door into the kitchen: at that precise moment, our phone rang: I turned to the volunteer on my right, Bob, and said to him, "God, I hope that's not a donation of more bread!" I answered the phone: a fisherman in Moss Landing wanted to know if we'd like to have 400 pounds of frozen fish?

​The impossible miracle story of the Loaves and Fishes, is the kind of explosion that happens whenever "Chuck" disappears somewhere into the zero-point: when our original face before we were born: conditioned by everything into our very own personal Chuck... has ceased, even for just a moment, to exist... Exactly this, is the high-point, the end of evolution: infinitity... heaven... didn't Jesus say: the Kingdom of God is within you? Ultimately, building your sacred life is learning how to get out of the way... Everything that Jesus taught was a "how-to" in getting out of the way... it's all a road-map into ego-annihilation... like what Hafiz said: "Zero is where the real fun starts!"