Non-Buddhism

By George L. Vockroth

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This piece started as a comment I posted to an essay published by author Addison Hodges Hart on his substack, The Pragmatic Mystic. In that essay, entitled, The spirituality of ghost stories, Hart, a retired priest and fellow contemplative, discusses how the stories in his recently published book, Patapsco Spirits: Eleven Ghost Stories, relate to his non-fiction writing about spirituality. He notes: The spirits in my tales stand as symbols of the forces we cannot dominate, restrain, cajole, or control. In the stories, these are preternatural entities, some threatening, some salvific. In real life, though, we are met with equally unruly forces every day and everywhere. Whether or not we discern a moral order revealed in their interference is largely up to us.

This caught my attention because I think it bears on a ‘true life’ nightmare of a story in which my ability to discern moral order and consistently act with loving intelligence was threatened by the interference of an utterly malevolent turn of spirit in my wife’s psyche that haunted her unto death last year. In more prosaic terms Becky suffered acutely for a year and a half with a ‘mental illness’ that was only diagnosed as an organic brain disorder in the month before her passing. However, that diagnosis, Lewy Body Dementia, (as listed on her death certificate) can to my understanding only be verified post mortem on autopsy. I chose not to have that done. I did not believe any material explanation would ease the pain of losing her for those lucky enough to know and be loved by her, which was just about everyone she ever knew. Neither did I think that would make it any easier for me to wrap my head around the profound psychic disturbance she suffered through.

In contemporary psychiatric parlance that disturbance could be described as treatment resistant, self-persecutory, paranoid delusions. In other times and places it would have just been called demonic possession. The latter seems more apt I think. You see, the primary manifestation of her malady was the persistent belief in every conscious moment that she was the personification of evil, i.e. had/was a demon. This was accompanied by an unrelenting conviction that she had committed horrific and immoral acts in the past, was likewise causing terrible things to happen in the present and needed to be punished in hell. Which punishment was self-fulfilled on a daily basis in her just being conscious. Her behavior in that regard became increasingly impulsive and self-destructive over the course of time and her suffering increased to the point of her needing to be continuously sedated, ultimately into complete unconsciousness. I want to believe in moral order and ultimate goodness, however any sense of certainty I ever had about those was rendered impotent in the process of watching my partner become a tormented ghost of her former self and then just disappear into the ether.

If you ask what sustained me, the answer is quite simple, though not easily parsed — nothing! Here’s the nut — I had to lose all hope for certainty, over and over, which I did, and still do, in contemplative silence. There in the midst of bewilderment every desire for and intention directed at certainty or meaning in any thing, when precisely recognized, collapses back into now-that-is-nothing from which it arose. Yet coming to rest in the ongoing immediacy of this certainty-of-nothing, again and again, one may find everything pervaded by the presence of unspeakable goodness – goodness beyond good and evil or hope and fear – for which there is profound gratitude. If that sounds unbelievable, it is, in the sense that, as Anglican contemplative Maggie Ross notes, It is not necessary to believe anything, but only to observe one’s mind at work with the silence. All that is initially required is the temporary suspension of disbelief that certainty-of-nothing, (radical uncertainty or ‘unknowing’) could possibly be a good thing, followed by concerted attention to breath and body with inquiring intention to remain open to whatever arises. So now I am writing to support any such effort one might make in respect of this endeavor, as well as in memory of Becky, ‘Her Highknees the Darlin Mama‘ who supported me in that for over thirty eight years.

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