Shits and Giggles, Giggles and Grins: On Koans, The Cross, and Cosmic Jokes

The Father is happy, despite leaving in place the bits that egos would see as bad. Unlike egos, he can direct his attention to things that are good and beautiful without needing what's bad and ugly eliminated.  Unlike egos, he can direct his intention to a sort of "raw fascination" with even life's hard lessons, and doesn't need reasons for sadness eliminated.  Unlike egos, God can ignore the what's captivating for the sake of focusing on negative space, and thereby wait for the figure-ground reversal of a perspective flip.  That's an art term--we'd call it a "conversion experience."  Egos will call this "dissociation," but waiting for a conversion experience is very grounding--the gospels signal the prodigal's "conversion experience" with the words "he came to himself."  The Kingdom of God is within, and going within is the medicine necessary to see the suffering around us, and work for its diminishment. [bxA]

Whether self-imposed or not, suffering's reduction involves knowing the score. There are lessons in both aversion and attraction. Learning them means "setting our faces like flint" amidst the things that cause aversion responses, and intuiting when to let go of the things that cause attraction responses.  This is as simple as "expecting work to suck, and being unsurprised when it does."  It's as simple as "applying some gentle force in the service of leaving office conflict at the office."  It's as simple as saying "I want the chocolate cake, but I don't want what eating it will cost me." Gluttony, greed, sloth, sorrow, lust, wrath, vanity and pride don't manufacture control or security.  Self-pity, shame, blame, remorse, rationalization, resentment and self-aggrandizement all take a nervous toll in anxiety that exceeds the temporary highs they afford.  It's trite but true: wisdom is learning to breathe, listen and feel until these forms of self-harm recede from our attention, until we recover the intent to be here, now, just as it is and just as we are.

Christ healed the demoniac. Despite Legion's great desire to join the Apostles on the boat, he was told to go home and speak gratefully to his family and friends. In other words, he was rejected by the one who healed him, then invited to act deliberately only on the nobler half of his emotional response. More than causing gratitude, this would initially cause grief.  As in all the miracles where Jesus either does nothing or tells someone to go away, both the grief and the distance are a mercy.  Shadow work throws practitioners back on themselves, purifies ego, craving and attachment.  Divinization is a strong catechesis for the self, offering "Christ's real presence in humility" as a grounding influence.  These days, there are many people seeing God and their own ugliness--but Jesus' methods teach the lesson of Naaman the Syrian: afflicted with leprosy, Naaman was told to wash in the Jordan seven times--something entirely unglamorous.  His servant reminds him: if he'd been told to do something heroic, he'd have done it.  It's a sign of pride and vanity to balk when purification's a matter of bearing daily unpleasantries.  Jesus says "do what's normal repetitively" and leaves us scandalized by our own boredom.

Legion would have known, viscerally, why waiting is important. The question is "is the one in need the same as the one receiving?" The Teacher said "blessed are you who are weeping now, for you shall laugh." Laughter and weeping deal with the same bodily sensations--the same unremitting tensions.  When "letting go of self" happens before the disgust response ceases--when there's an energetic, emotional or perspective shift within the sensation--laughter is the result.  The Teacher said "blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled."  When a Christian hears "later," the secret's that equanimity and kenosis must come first.  Equanimity, because pain and pleasure are just sensations, and kenosis, because emptiness will not abide being pried open by the willful energy of self.  Emptiness only opens to those who have become the nothing they are seeking.

So many stories depict the tensions commending our spirits into the Father's apparent absence and coming to oneness.  Legion is like "the adulterous woman" without the crowd--whether true or false, the adulterous woman had to sit still amidst accusations.  Legion is like Peter James and John who suggested building tents at the Transfiguration, but didn't know what they were saying.   In other words, Legion had to learn to sit still in a position of tension. Eventually he'd become quite practiced at this.   He would have had to drop the rocks with which he gashed himself.  He would have had to install the Father in his mind, the Son in his body, the Spirit in his nervous system to peacefully admit what he didn't know and tolerate the psychosomatic purge.  And he would have had to listen to the silence of the tombs where he lived until that silence went, as it were, inside him.  After that, clothed and in his right mind, he would have been with Christ alone.

Laughter seems instinctual, but comedians craft sets like zen masters craft koans: "one hand clapping" invites us to intuition instead of intellect, realization instead of reason.  Koans yield no answers till egos yield to confusion.   Similarly, a good joke walks us into something we're afraid to face, then makes us sit in it.  Fear, rendered communal, loses its power.  "Punchline" is an interesting label for the end of a joke.  In Zen, a bloke walks around the meditation hall with a big stick, administering light blows (first on one shoulder, then the other) to sleepy meditators who request it.  Jesus says "when someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer them the other."  If we have the cheek to equate a joke with a blow to the face, a tooth loosened by initial witty banter requires only a well timed punchline to be knocked clean out.  In such a guts-level confrontation with divine humor: fear, aversion and disgust all shift, and our laughter is the signal we've let go of it.  

The first word of the Psalter is "Happy" and, like the Tao Te Ching, the rest of the work is an exposition of that first word.  As hard as it is to understand intellectually, sorrow and abandonment and and suffering are all contained in divine happiness.  To see all of this in ourselves is to look at the cross and live.  The Psalter's first full line is "happy indeed is the man who follows not the counsel of the wicked."  A mirthful man can be happy-in-deed, he can work without anxiety, because he's not attached to outcomes.  A happy man need not follow the counsel of the wicked.  Though it feels tense on an ego level, he'll have learned to wait while the Spirit's energy rises to his heart.  See, in the heart, divine energy is called the Spirit of counsel.  Practitioners are grounded enough, attentive to subtlety enough, that the "counsel of the wicked"--craving and attachment, in other words--are no longer interesting enough to move compel the body to movement.  If attachment is bacon, practitioners are simply too tired to break out the skillet. 

We'll be here now when we become everybody and everything. It's not that the wicked are bad, and we ought not follow them.  It's that the wicked are within us and, indeed, they are us.  The poor we'll always have with us, and the wicked will always have the option to be turds in the cosmic punch bowl.  The last trumpet is silence, and it sounds, always, for the just and the wicked alike. When we become nobody, nothing and nowhere, so will they.  Glory, glory be! 

The Mind

 

Go into silence. When the mouth gets quiet, you will notice that the head gets loud. You will notice compulsive thought, which arises on its own, and deliberate thought which you have the capacity either to author, or not.  Before you awaken, you will notice eight varieties of compulsive thought. As awakening progresses, there will be, added to those, eight more. [bxA]

The “evil thoughts of the lower self” are gluttony, greed, sloth, sorrow, lust, wrath, vanity, and pride. Gluttony is an avoidance of vulnerability using the comforts of food.  Greed is an avoidance of vulnerability using new possessions or status.  Sloth is an avoidance of vulnerability by mishandling the anxious pressures of life– doing too much or too little. Sorrow is an avoidance of vulnerability by using sadness to manipulate.  Lust is an avoidance of vulnerability by distracting yourself with attractions to others’ bodies or attention. Wrath is an avoidance of vulnerability by manipulatively overreacting in anger.  Vanity is an avoidance of vulnerability by attachment to your own excellence. Pride is an avoidance of vulnerability by preoccupation with your own self-sufficiency.

After God’s initial call, but before Christ has suffused your mind, you’ll still deal with compulsive thought, only these will be shot through with what seems to be divine mandate.  Not just “I want X,” but “God says I ought to have X.”  It will make them harder to let go of.  The “Evil thoughts of the higher self” are self pity, shame, blame, remorse, rationalization, resentment, self-aggrandizement, and entitlement.  In self pity, there is an “I” who shouldn’t have to deal with the stresses of the moment. In shame, there is an “I” who can’t deal with the mistakes involved in gaining experience.  In blame, there is an “I” who attributes causes for our behavior anywhere other than ourselves— to circumstance, to the behavior of others, whatever. In remorse, there is an “I” who emotionally grasps at past  mistakes, hoping to wield control over them. In rationalization, ego hopes  to avoid the discomfort of changing the things that we can.  In resentment, the ‘I’ uses ill feeling at “bearing unequal weight alone” to attempt to manipulate normally uncontrollable factors.  Self aggrandizement isn’t just vanity, it’s an “I” that’s avoiding lessons about nervous system regulation, because it’s so accustomed to being exempt from stress. Entitlement is simply an ‘I’ that believes the world should be as it wishes, an ‘I’  that is unwilling to deal, and incapable of dealing with the world as it is.  

Especially when combined with the legitimate trauma of personal history, the evil thoughts of the lower self and the evil thoughts of the higher self will be a source of great preoccupation.  But it should be said: your mind is built to let thoughts arise, and let them go.  Your nervous system is built for feeling and letting go.  Attachment or clinging will proliferate anxiety, and that very self-imposed suffering is just your mind and nervous system saying “this is more than we’re built for.”  Our job, with our ego, our capacity for craving and clinging and attachment, is simply to bear witness.  The more we witness our sinfulness, the more we can let the thoughts arise, let them go without acting on them.  In the beginning, there might be a painful period when we think “self is all that we are.”  Gradually we’ll come to say “I am my trauma-induced pain body, but I am also higher self and non-self” and it’ll awaken Christ within.  Eventually, once the self has entirely identified with Christ, we’ll watch as he says, in us “into your hands I commend my spirit.”  Those “steps”--like stations of the cross–will become faster and faster.

The eight evil thoughts of the lower self will be so hard to deal with that you will be tempted to attach to spiritual things just to get away from them.  This is called spiritual bypassing, where the positive content of awakening is used to ignore the negative.  You may be so unlucky as to experience great consolations, especially when the prayer journey is new, and the positive feelings of the prayer journey will make it all the easier to ignore your attachments, your ego, your unprocessed trauma.  Before the end, this will be a source of self-imposed anxiety and suffering.  This is normal, it’s perfectly safe, and it’s a terrific bummer.

The eight evil thoughts of the higher self will be so difficult that you will be tempted to use the inherent dignity of your identity to manipulate.  This is called spiritual materialism, where the consolations of the spiritual life are seen as exclusive to you–they’re seen as making you better than others.  If there are consolations in prayer, they will increase the risk of seeing yourself as better than others.  Before the end, this will be a source of self imposed anxiety and suffering.  This may render you a jerk temporarily, but don’t worry: silence will make you intolerable to yourself, and this will help you let go.

Too many years of endless crisis management and stimulus response loops of desire fulfillment have left our ability to focus attention and intention permanently damaged.  Ego is only capable of attention when distractions are eliminated.   Ego is only capable of focusing intention when gratification is immediate.  Ego is only capable of doing things that make sense.  And so the words of Matthew’s gospel prove true: “To what will I compare this generation?  It is like children sitting in the market places and calling to one another ‘we played the flute for you and you did not dance; we wailed and you did not mourn.”  To the things of life, we have all the wrong responses, because we have settled for thinking about life instead of living it.  We have substituted gratifying desire for feeling the emptiness of our physical bodies. 

The ego has no more effective strategy than to act on afflictive thought, to make it temporarily go away. There’s a need to learn to deal with afflictive thought without acting on it.  First, sit in silence 20 minutes a day.  Breathe, listen and feel.  The fear, in particularly scary compulsive thoughts, is “it’ll always be like this.”  That’s a big lie.  When afflictive thoughts arise, a number of strategies are effective in lessening their intensity. Redirecting your attention to the feeling of the breath, to the sound of the air conditioner, to the physical sensation of your left big toe–all of these strategies are effective in diminishing worry.  That diminishment isn’t instant, but as patience grows, so does confidence: “shifting attention” can replace “acting on thought” as a way to diminish their intensity. In your psyche, you may notice two difficult thoughts.  One is “a suggestion to self terminate” and the other is a deep confrontation with insignificance: “you are nobody and nothing.”  Self-termination and insignificance are difficult thoughts for the ego, because of how final the consequences are.  But learning to shift attention to physical sensation can give us an effective tool for letting go of even the scariest of thoughts.  

Over time, even the scariest of thoughts become understandable.  As the lines blur between life and death, pain and bliss, sadness and joy, we can use our higher self to care for our lower self.  The lower self’s whole identity comes from never-ending crisis.  Suicidality is an understandable suggestion for a mind at the end of its rope–the occurrence of the thought can ultimately function as a radical indicator of the need for self care.  But it’s through the daily grind–life itself–that the ego is destined to die.  Though it’s scary to hear “you are nobody, and nothing” looping through your head constantly, watching thought arise and depart while we breathe in and out teaches us that “self” is merely a thought.  It is as impermanent as everything else.  And furthermore, letting that thought go is absolutely safe. Move the body, tick items off to do lists, work a miserable job.  Even “automatic pilot” reassures us that, should we choose to let go of the voice in our head that refers to itself as “I, me, and my”--all of the needful things will still get done.  In short: In response to the world saying “nobody cares” Christ became a nobody who still manages to care, and it is absolutely safe to let go of our identity and become “a nobody who cares” along with him.

Mantra

For anyone at the end of their rope, the prayer that works is correct prayer. Other traditions depict God as humble enough to say “I am as my servant thinks of me. I am with him when he remembers me.” At the very least, for us, this means: the way that makes life manageable and serene is the right way. A grateful heart is one that knows suffering well enough to desire its diminishment for all. The advice “pray constantly” was not a mandate that should worry us. Instead, it’s an acknowledgement that, when you repetitively pray a single phrase, it will work its way inside you and become self-generating. Those working with a mantra will notice an initial period where the words compete with their worries. Then they’ll notice that, with a bit of gentle insistence, compulsive thought will diminish and the word will flourish. Mantra may attach itself to automatic movement–to rosary beads passed through the fingers, to items placed on shelves, to heartbeat or breath–and this will happen to the point where the words and thoughts themselves become sporadically unnecessary. In the press of responsibilities, focused intent will preserve a mantra that will mentally come and go. But the mantra will eventually flip–beneath all sound, always the quiet is wordlessly chanting the word, and you will simply listen. Of course, of that silence, it is correctly said: “You can show devotion to Christ, but you can’t stay.” The frustration implied there is part of everything, and the humble know the truth of it. [bxA]

There will be plenty of time for doing and thinking. God will glorify his own name. If your worries rise before the sun, say “the Lord himself will fight for you, you have only to keep still.” Zen masters report that, after the first experience of emptiness– the need to return to normalcy afterwards makes them feel “utterly ruined and homeless.” It is no wonder the Lord said “Foxes have dens, birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” The Lord’s heart, pierced by the lance, flowed with blood and water until it was empty. In the ancient world, temples were usually full of riches–but when Jerusalem’s temple was sacked, the Holy of holies was found empty. In a way that is only verifiable by experience, the mind of Christ is empty too. Contemplation is a gift, the temporary feeling of interior emptiness. Recollection turns that emptiness into a portable practice. Obedience is emptiness in action. Humility is emptiness that practice has rendered quickly accessible.

When you wake, say “morning by morning he wakens, wakens my ear to listen as one who is taught.” How many of us hoped to uplift our mind and heart to God, only to find the light of prayer making our shadow apparent? Brokenheartedness, friends, is the bride of the Word. Of the practitioner, too, Isaiah’s words would apply “He looked for justice, but saw bloodshed, for righteousness, but heard a cry.” Your own suffering will help you see the anguish of others. Jesus said “the poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” For those who think about this verse, meaning abounds. But Jesus is beginning to viscerally contend with his impending suffering and death. For those who can feel it, the silence behind these words is weighty indeed.

Whenever you begin your work, Look to Christ and say “he must increase, I must decrease.” You will begin to see what motivates your words and actions. Compulsive thought will clarify itself. Dealing with this will be the source of a great deal of inner work–some of it obviously spiritual and downright laudable. But at the end of the day, that is all “self.” And self is not an adequate muscle for humility. John said “Among you is one whom you do not know.” For a great many unresolvable mysteries, the apostles had a name, and it was “Christ.” Unknowing, nondoing, nonbeing–these are a person. Just as, psychologically, the Trinity was for Jesus–a transcendent personality both within and beyond him–so Christ is for us.

When work gets intense, say “I live, but not I, Christ lives in me” Thoughts, emotions, and sensations aren’t ours, and they aren’t rightly used to reinforce an ego story. All thought, all emotion, all sensation is Christ’s. When we can’t bear it, there is one within us who can: he sets his face like flint, and learns the lesson of aversion. Things arise and he lets them go–he’s learned the lesson of attraction. He breathes, listens and feels. Times of trouble will come, but when they do, it will be for that hour that we came into the world.

When distractions deprive the day of its prayerfulness, say “Father, why have you forsaken me” Practitioners say “I believe, help my unbelief.” Anyone in the thick of it–who isn’t connecting to what once caused happiness, is not admitting atheism, but instead embracing impermanence. Non-being purifies existing, non-doing purifies action, and unbelief, though it feels like “doubt” on an ego level, purifies belief. All flesh is like the grass. Prophesies, tongues and knowledge will all pass away. The Lord took impermanent flesh, suffered, died, was buried, descended, rose as a stranger, then ascended. Faith, hope and love will not die, but they will be changed. Impermanence is eternal–it’s a truth more enduring than even “selves and identity.”

When people’s shadow emerges, say “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” The community, see, is a mirror: and you will only respond generously when you see yourself in them. Are people attached to their preferences? So are you. Do people become angry when their plans are frustrated? So do you. What are the circumstances that find you cynical? What are the circumstances that find you judgmental? The “fullness of time” is not exclusively pleasant, and “the acceptable time” that witnesses God’s help will not be a time of abundant inner resources. Jesus was objectively, physically suffering, and he said “Father forgive them.” For us who’ve suffered less than that, admitting (in tight spots) that we, too, become jerks–this is the least we can do to be with Christ. So we say “Father forgive us, for we know not what we do.” That unknowing, when it becomes cause to diminish suffering, will become great strength.

When needs go unmet, say “I thirst.” Anger is unadmitted sadness, sadness is unfulfilled need, need highlights vulnerability, and vulnerability teaches us control and security are not guaranteed. Work remains for anyone who is, as yet, unaware of this. Meanwhile, for those pushing too hard, eat and sleep, lest the journey be too much for you. The Lord knew what we needed before we asked. In a deep sense we, ourselves, were the ones unaware. It’s a truism unless it’s simply true: in prayer, we learn to listen–not just to God, but to ourselves.

And when you must choose between suffering and prayer, entrust yourself to the one who prays when you cannot. Say “into your hands I commend my Spirit,” and go through the motions till the day is done. The Lord said “Do not worry. Who, by worrying, can add one hour to his span of life?” Just as those with addictions say powerlessness is the first step, so those with selves discover, after much faltering, that “giving up self” should be the first step. Viscerally, you will know what Jesus meant when he said “blessed are you who weep, for you will laugh.” The spring in each believer–the one that made their eyes a fountain of tears–will well up with laughter, life, gratitude. With persistence, the truth comes to light: All that’s not ego is the Almighty.

How does dissociation feel? Preparedness for Christian Enlightenment.

Start using any medicine for denial–scripture, entheogens, yoga– and they’ll tell you: awakening entails a purgative stage. This is the “psychological dumping” spoken of by proponents of centering prayer. Of the calm in monastic silence, Abbots have said “placidity teases out toxicity.” They’re right: the beginning of awakening is a real inner-garbage carnival. We would feel none of it, though, if it weren’t for love making us feel safe enough to let go of it. To remember “this whole thing is happening because of love” is otherworldly difficult, but succeeding at it pays dividends in serenity.

Here’s the bad news: for us who are called to everything, half of everything sucks. There is a stage where the psyche, in preparation for enlightenment, dissociates. If you want to know how ready for enlightenment you are, ask yourself “how does dissociation feel?” Of course, those in denial will say they don’t feel anything. And they’re telling the truth. Denial is a state where awareness is so completely turned off that we don’t feel anything.

Awakening flips that script, turns awareness to the empty spaces in our bodily awareness, so that we say, instead, “I feel nothing.” Feeling nothingness is, on a bodily sensation level, the beginning of coming out of denial. Ego will tell us we’re making progress: but this is merely the beginning of calamities.

Dissociation feels negative at first. We see ourselves, correctly, as way too identified with both varieties of evil thought–and we see our host of anxieties, produced by those attachments, as self-imposed.

Years of stress get chucked at the nervous system–and as this is too overwhelming, it’s stored in the body. Intense sensations are like traps we’re caught in: we worsen them by trying to wiggle out of them. It’s terrible on a sensation level–pains of all sorts surface, often connected to strong memories. As we become aware (and let go of) whatever memories we’ve attached to them, the various sensations diminish in intensity.

One who settles in to dissociation will witness a change in its character. Now no longer painful, it merely feels numb. The ego that wants to feel positive sensations complains inwardly, but numbness is definitely an improvement on negativity. Properly speaking, disidentifying with the “you” doing the feeling didn’t produce the change, but the changes arose together.

We realize that attention and intention, centered on sensation, accesses a spot that is both painful and blissful–a spot which eventually suspends the ego doing the labeling. As gurus have said “there isn’t much room for ego when all you’re doing is breathing in and out.” As we increasingly let go of the narratives behind our pain, ego itself relaxes. The dissociation which felt negative at first, which felt numb for a moment, has become not only tolerable, but preferable to the self induced anxieties of our egoic game-playing.

Eventually, “being in the body without a self” becomes something we’re entirely comfortable with. The disciplines of recollection, “breathing, listening, feeling and mantra” actually become anchors. Breathing, listening and feeling diminish the intensity of afflictive thought, and mantra provides “the feeling of sound” as an alternative to afflictive thought. Directing our attention and intention properly allows mind and emotion to do whatever they need to.

Triumph changes. When Jesus rose, he rose with his wounds still open. He offered Thomas the opportunity to probe his wounds–he allowed people to hurt him, in other words–so that they could awaken. Being able to feel our wounds at all, much less allow them to be worsened by others, mindlessly or deliberately–for one who was once entirely unaware, this is victory.

In the beginning, we didn’t know that indulging desire, forming an ego, coping–these all take a toll of self imposed anxiety. Now we know. Our lives aren’t necessarily “better or worse” for the knowing. But they are undeniably fuller.

The Consciousness of Christ

By self-surrender to a Triune God, Jesus anted up to the emptiness and impermanence of things. He waited, watched and prayed; he healed, eschewed judgment, gave up self because a transcendent, loving Other waited in the abyss. Jesus embraced self-emptying, even when kenosis was a cross, painful enough to make that "other" seem absent--and he did it because "living in the body free of ego, sin, attachment and craving" was possible. When we've ceased to judge, given up self, on the other side of a perspective flip, we will know the answer to how and why he did it. [bxA]

Tradition said to the Lord, "Hear O Israel," and it made, of his consciousness, an empty echo chamber filled with paradox. Jesus' heart was empty, we know that from the lance, the water and the blood. History tells us, when the Roman General Pompeii sacked Jerusalem, though he expected to find the inner chamber of Israel's temple full of riches, the Holy of holies was empty too. So when Paul says "we have the mind of Christ"--defining that involves paying dues to stillness, emptiness, humility, contemplation, obedience. Christ emptied himself--and in light of sayings like "all flesh is like the grass" it seemed, simply, to be cooperating with the impermanence of things. We're here to ask "how might we have the mind of Christ?" And--with deep reverence for the beauties of being, thinking, doing-- if we end anywhere other than serene silence, we end in error.

Responding generously to "Hear, O Israel" involves a discipline later tradition calls "recollection." Defined as "the in-gathering of the senses," recollection involves the disciplines of breathing, listening and feeling: the very things a modern psychologist would recommend to ground those having a panic attack. Whatever the goodness of recollection and modern psychology, we'd be remiss to forget: nervous system regulation and the wherewithal for radical grounding in the body are the foundation of Israel’s God concept.

• “Breathe” is the first command. People might disagree: spiritual materialists would say Moses saw a creosote bush aflame. Mystics would say Moses had a non-dual experience of the “light body” that was his own nervous system. No matter which is true, Moses emerged having heard the sound of a breath cycle, “YHWH,” and called it God’s name. 
• “Listen” is the second command. Isaiah took this seriously, saying “morning by morning he wakens, wakens my ear to listen as one who is taught.” In his cave, Elijah had to endure earthquake, wind and fire, had to give up his pious sense of identity over and over--in the end, though, he heard the sound of "kol damamah daqah" the sound of sheer silence. 
• "Feel” is the third command. Psalm 22 says “I can feel all my bones” and Ezekiel was told to prophesy to dry bones, first about flesh, then breath. 

These three commands are an entry point for the law, the prophets and the psalms. But a question remains--how did Jesus render his identity malleable enough to undertake any of this? He did it by using the Jewish ideas of "Father, Son and Spirit"--not to justify himself, but to call forth a capacity for living with things as they are. This meant that the trinity was, primarily, an inner reality, and that this 3 person deity was an "inner other" who, when he came close, augmented the devotees emotional toolkit.

From the Father, Jesus learned equanimity. Jesus learned to wait while desire and fulfillment, stimulus and response detached from each other. He learned to watch till the abyss blinked first. He felt the difference between listening to noise and listening for silence. In life's illogical spaces, he learned to wait patiently for the realizations of intuition. He sat at the feet of aversion and attraction: letting go of what was pleasurable, holding fast through what was painful, until the lessons of both became apparent. It was Jesus' "life with the father" that made him see all of this, and having seen, unseeing was impossible.

To the Father, the Lord said said "I want to see," and though he was looking for righteousness, he saw bloodshed. But what Christ beheld was also, always, the beholder. (If it were not so, why would St. John Vianney later say of Eucharistic Adoration "I look at him, he looks at me.") When Jesus looked intently, he saw himself in everyone and everything, and vice versa. In strangers, the hungry, the homeless, the poor, the naked, he saw his own consciousness gazing back at him. Christ sought the Father in his surroundings--and in bread, wine, sheep gates, light, clear paths and grapevines, a transcendence whose consciousness felt like his own seemed to be seeking him also. The "otherness" of the abyss would blink and then disappear. All of this rendered Christ gentle, made Jesus want to find the lost. Whether or not it was pleasant, Christ couldn't unsee what he'd seen.

It's in relation to the Father that Jesus saw that he could become nobody and still manage to breathe, listen, feel, and love. He gave up his "will to avoid discomfort," accepted the father's call to an "everything" that included suffering. He surrendered his spirit to a Father who seemed absent when pain and the limits of energy rendered spiritual work and bearing suffering mutually exclusive. Without control or security, Christ bore suffering in the absence of certainty that he was capable of it. He gave up his physical form, with only prophetic clues that the Son of Man would rise.

And in relation to the Father, he learned that he couldn't, and didn't have to make it happen: all that is written in the law, the prophets and the psalms was coming to pass, whether he wished it to or not. Because it was for "this hour" that he'd come into the world, he had long learned not to say "save me from this hour--" but instead, said "Father, glorify your name." He knew that his deeds of power could be done apart from the faith of the crowds, and that the sign of Jonah meant, primarily, that he himself would spend three days in the heart of the earth.

As he grew in his understanding of divine sonship, Jesus saw all that is distant and impersonal become immanent. Assimilation of divine sonship was measured in "how personally you hear the messages of scripture."

• For Jesus, in the Scriptures, time collapses into now. (If it were not so, why would St. Paul later say "Now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation.) Unless they led to remembrance of God's goodness or hope, past and future were useless. Passover remembrance was useless unless it made the past present. "Why is this night different from all other nights?" 
• For Jesus, all places were here, and all distance was the distance between the way things were, and our acceptance of it. (If it were not so, why would the psalmist have said "I lift my eyes to the mountains: from where shall come my help? My help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.) It didn't matter that the Lord was in his temple in Jerusalem if the body wasn't "the gate of heaven and the house of God" to begin with.
• For Jesus, and in the scriptures, all potential was realized, and must be realized. This wasn't all good. (If it were not so, why would Christ, who knew no sin, have become sin?) For every three youths whose suffering lead to "one who looked like a God," there had to be a Nebuchadnezzar. And those voices were, somehow, parts of Jesus' psyche. In this way, Jesus cathected the grace of sacred history, and used its evil as material for shadow work in preparation for bearing the great suffering of the cross. 
• For Jesus, in the Scriptures, all agency was personal. The question "whom shall I send" didn't matter if the answer was "someone else." It only mattered to the extent that the answer was "here I am, send me." 
• In the scriptures, all dualism collapsed into sameness. (If it were not so, why would Laban and Bethuel have said "The thing comes from the Lord. We cannot speak to you bad or good.") Psalm 139 says "if I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths, you are there." After a while it didn't matter whether it was height or depth we're talking about, but only being with the Lord. 
• For Jesus, in the scriptures, links between cause and effect were shaken. The Galileans whose blood pilate mixed with their sacrifices were not worse sinners than others. The man born blind wasn't a terrific sinner, nor were his parents, to merit blindness.  Jesus essentially said "Spend more time thinking about repentance and less time thinking about cause.  Spend more time thinking about God's glory, less time thinking about blame." 
• In the scriptures, for Jesus, all desire collapsed into need, and it completely undermined the utility of power and control.  (If it were not so, why would Jesus have said "I thirst"?) Jesus hoped to free us from worry: "This very day your life will be required of you" he said, "And the things you have laid up, whose will they be?" And again "do not say 'what are we to eat, and what are we to drink. Your Father knows that you need these things." Just as they did with Christ, the collapses of time, place, agency, potential, dualism cause and desire serve to make each of us, personally, ready to live in the now, reconciled to the past and willingly prepared for what was to come.

As he became increasingly conscious of the spirit, Jesus also grew in suffering. Both suffering and bliss made him hyperaware. Action was motivated by thought. Freedom on the level of action entails paying attention to thought. Thought was motivated by emotion. Freedom on the level of thought entails paying attention to emotion. Emotion was motivated by sensation. Freedom on the level of emotion involves paying attention to sensation. Sensation was motivated by energy. Freedom on the level of sensation involves paying attention to energy. Energy is something we judge. Freedom on the level of energy involves giving up self and not judging.

Christ and the Chakras

Your spine is the Mount of the Transfiguration and the Via dolorosa all at once. Whether it’s painful or blissful, at each chakra: Christ becomes literally present in what he means to teach you. [bxA]

At the root chakra, the spirit of fear of the Lord rests and remains.  Here, Vulnerability is Christ, and Christ is vulnerability. Over time, it becomes willingness. 

At the sacral chakra, the spirit of knowledge rests and remains. Here, Poverty is Christ and Christ is poverty. That becomes gratitude.

 

At the solar plexus, where the spirit of might rests and remains, Lack of control is Christ and Christ his lack of control.  That becomes virtue. 

At the heart Chakra, where the spirit of counsel rests and remains, Christ is empathy, and empathy, is Christ. That becomes compassion.  

At the throat Chakra, where the spirit of understanding rests and remains,  Silence is Christ, and Christ is silence. That becomes honesty.  

At the third eye, where the spirit of wisdom rests and remains, Consciousness is christ, and Christ is consciousness. That becomes acceptance. 

At the Crown Chakra, where the spirit of the Lord rests and remains, Nothingness is Christ, and Christ is nothingness. That becomes commitment to others.

Recollection, a spiritual path

Remember Moses, who said "The Lord himself will fight for you, you have only to keep still." Recollection, or "the in-gathering of the senses" is the law, the prophets and the psalms. Breathe.  No moment exists when we are not praying. Listen: we will be not two with all who say "Hear O Israel...the Lord is one." Feel.  Our own dry bones are the whole house of Israel.  Doing this, we will be happier--nothing we need will be outside of us. 

Ego and craving, thought and manipulation--they leave anxiety and self-induced suffering in their wake.  Spiritual bypassing will ask us to cling to prayer's consolations, but it is an end-run around trauma that we can no longer afford, and spiritual materialism will tempt us to use even our prayer for self-exaltation.  But we are not special: instead--like Christ--we are everything seen and unseen, and we are also nothing at all. [bxA]

We cling to what we're attracted to, and the joys are temporary.  We push away what we're averse to and the relief lasts only a moment.  From the impermanence of things, learn that letting go is the lesson of attraction, that setting our faces like flint is the lesson of aversion.  The gospel is written in "the way things are" and the stones are crying out.  Learn to transition from "not hearing anything" to "hearing nothing."  When we accept the lessons in everything, it creates equanimity. When we hear nothingness, we will see the Lord face to face.

Attention is impaired, but it's ok. Survival involved a hustle our nervous systems were unprepared for.  Vulnerability is scary, but that's why the Lord gave us the sacraments--so we could walk real slow into our basic human needs.  Gluttony, greed, sloth, sorrow, lust, wrath, vanity and pride will present themselves as solutions to our poverty.  If they say to us "Look, he is in the wilderness" do not go out. After the self dies in baptism, you will no longer need security to live in happiness.

Intention is impaired, but that's totally safe.  If "getting what we want" no longer satisfies, that's by design.  We're wired for "willing simplicity."  Self-pity, shame, blame, remorse, rationalization, resentment, self-aggrandizement and entitlement will assert themselves as distractions from vulnerability. If they say to you "look, he is in the inner rooms," do not believe it.  When the self dies daily, you will not need control to rejoice. 

When stored trauma fills us with physical pain--if you cannot forgive those who caused it--abandon judgment of the sensation.  It will feel dissociative, but dissociation is a cross on which our perspective will shift.  We will be one with him who said "My spirit fails, my heart is numb within me" and dissociating will feel negative.  We will be one with him who said "heal me, my body is racked, my soul is racked with pain" but we will notice that attentiveness to sensation has increased.  Eventually we'll say "I can feel all my bones," because the one who said it from the Cross is within us. We will be glad, at least, to be able to face the sensations.  When our perspectives flip away from self, we will be one with him who said "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."

Give up self, and do not judge.  Use the Eucharist to grow in virtue and intentionality.  When the lower self shows us our own ugliness, say both "I am not that" and also "I am more than that."  When the higher self shows us the divine image, say both "I am that" and also "I am nothing."  On the cross, Christ became "a nobody who cares"--and just like him, we can still love, long after letting go of our "somebodiness." 

For the humble, neither life nor death can threaten.  For the obedient, neither emptiness nor fullness can terrify.  For those given contemplation, impermanence is the door to the eternal. For the recollected, neither light nor darkness is blinding.  Die in baptism: you will see people but they will look like trees.  To die daily, look intently: you will see things as they are.  You were blind because you only saw what you wanted to see--namely, what's pleasant, on your own terms.  To be restored to sight, want everything--even what's painful--on God's terms.    

  

The Mind of Christ

Paul said “we have the mind of Christ” but he didn’t talk about it. We can infer, from the fact that the heart of Christ was drained empty, from the fact that, when the temple in Jerusalem was sacked, the holy of holies was found the same way: the mind of Christ is an empty mind. Contemplation is a temporary taste of emptiness, obedience is emptiness carried into action. Humility is emptiness that’s become an effortless default. “Christ” is the name for when emptiness eclipses identity. “I live,” says the scriptures, “but not I, Christ lives in me.” No sensation, emotion, thought or action is ours to build an ego story from. They belong to Christ: if you want to be freed from anxiety, say “always carrying in the body the death of Christ, so that the life of Christ may be made known in our mortal bodies also.” If what you can’t accept becomes Christ, there might be reason, in the end, to not only allow it, but be devoted to it. [bxA]

Turning the grace of emptiness into a virtue is quite a task. The way to do this is “learning to focus and direct intention and attention.” Focus attention and intention on sensation until thoughts of self cease: as it is written, “keep looking, but do not comprehend, keep listening but do not understand.” The way to do this is to learn the mechanics of bearing aversions and attractions. Christ became the true nature of all things seen and unseen, and half of that is terrifically unpleasant. He became strangers, the naked, the homeless, the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned. All of those often need more than an individual can give. He became sheep gates, light, bread and wine–things that his audience would have interacted with daily–and he did not become only those few things so that he, or God, could be accused of absence from everything else. Where is God? God is everywhere. No thought, sacred or secular, can say otherwise without proliferating suffering.

When you can finally do, instinctively, what you could never have done for yourself, Christ has come to live with you. Turning your attention toward what’s joyful without reasons for sadness being eliminated, Steeling yourself to sit the lessons of aversion, learning to let go of the temporary enjoyments of attraction, learning to use sensation to focus attention and intention, learning to pay attention to subtle variances in negative and positive sensation, to direct focus toward negative space in the body–all of these are signs of the presence of Christ.

The Trinity within becomes the mental manifestation of the invisible evolution of your consciousness. With the Father, you learn to observe ego without identifying with it. You learn to create without controlling, to be still in insecurity until the energy shifts, to be fascinated with the opportunities of vulnerability instead of fearing them. With the Son, you learn to choose compassion and reframing. You reparent yourself, and join in Christ’s recapitulation of all things. With the Spirit, your character flaws become your gifts: you turn the trauma responses of hypervigilance and impulsivity into deep presence and obedience. You see what motivates choice, action, and emotion, and can care for it.

Students who have the mind of Christ have been made aware of, and sufficiently freed from ego, attachment and craving–such that they have been rendered basically voluntary. They will have sat next to gluttony greed sloth sorrow lust wrath vanity and pride until the long term costs of following those thoughts exceeds the short term benefits. They will have sat next to self pity, shame, blame, remorse, rationalization, resentment, self-aggrandizement and entitlement until the limits of their effectiveness at meeting needs emerges. If they have an attraction response, their enjoyment of it is not clingy. If they have an aversion response, their disgust with it does not forestall learning. They have let go of security and control, faced fears and vulnerabilities, developed inner and outer hustle.

None of this is a great revelation. It’s just claiming the space that is your own incarnate wonkiness. But where self help, the help of others, solutions sought in prayer have all failed, this has succeeded: not permanently or perfectly, but in a way you those who do it can truly bank on.

The Pitfalls of the Higher Self, and why "The Name of Jesus" is the Solution

Quiet, if it is complete enough, is revelatory. But practitioners may not dig what it reveals: "Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Sorrow, Lust, Wrath, Vanity, Pride"--these are the bits that add up to the ego.  Fine and good--it's important to figure out what our relationship's going to be with our basic needs for food, shelter, security, affection.  And it's important to feel the anxious uselessness of our manipulations at need fulfillment.  Letting go will be easier if "waiting on providence and the Spirit" are the only paths that create serenity. [bxA]

Ego and God have the same name, so confusion is understandable.  The bits that God sends to clear up that confusion aren't fun: the dark night of the senses purifies our cravings for "snacks, stuff, sensuality, security."  And we get to the point where we can want them without imposing a timeline or expectations on fulfillment.  The dark night of the soul purifies our desire for things of god: consolations in prayer, ecclesial status, agendas around what's sacred--in the end they can be just the same flavor of "running the show" rebranded for the "sunday go to meeting crowd."  And there's one last dark night: the dark night of the self.  When elijah was in the cave, he kept saying "I have been very zealous for the things of God and they are seeking my life." God's response is "shush and listen."  

The "perilogismoi" or evil thoughts are insufficient to describe the pitfalls of the Christian life.  They describe initial purgation perfectly--and anyone who claims to be done with them puts himself in a dangerous situation indeed.  Incomplete struggle with the evil thoughts perfectly describes "why ego is an issue in the first place."

But there are also "pitfalls" of the Higher Self--and looking squarely at them is necessary for efficient use of the spirit's energy.  They are: blame, Shame, resentment, remorse, rationalization, self pity. self-aggrandizement, entitlement.  We see these everywhere: Jesus tells parables about folks hanging out at the Lord's vineyard "because no one has hired them"--that's resentment.  The apostles say "we have left everything to follow you, what will we have." That's a most-likely unmet expectation, ripe for creating resentment, indicative of entitlement.  The consolations we might have had, as newbies in spiritual life--they may now function as remorse-fuel. "I made a bunch of choices based on a prayer life that now looks much different, and those choices have only netted struggle."  Or "I had a sense of myself being a better bloke than I am.  Now that this path comes with no rewards, I have a real tendency to become a basket case."

What's to be done?  When you've finally "had it up to here" with your own bullshit: seek to become the kind of human who can bear with stress without asking that those stressors be eliminated.  Trying to accumulate enough comfort to offset chronic stress is a fruitless task anyway.  If God eliminates a stress, fine.  But if he doesn't and we become little monsters, what does that say about our attachments?

If you've seen your attachments and you can rouse appropriate regret for them, then there's only one apostolic solution. Only this: the name of Jesus--which is "a power mantra for letting go."  If you decide to let go, then regret it, chanting the name of the Lord is the solution.  It's "give to God the things that are within, and behold, all will be made clean for you" even if what's within makes you and me look like garbage piles with legs.  If "thinking about what could or should have been" is causing remorse, look intently at whatever's in front of you, then pronounce the name of Jesus.  Unmet needs may remain mental conundrums, but injecting "the sound of the name" will give you the feeling of vibrating sound to focus on while the contradictions gradually reduce ego and mature into paradoxes.  

And that, perhaps, is full of divine intention.  "Self" is just a thought.  Needs and desires are more real than self, but there's a real upper limit to how effective manipulation is in meeting them.  And in the end, if those tensions remain, it might be so that we'll see the uselessness of willful manipulation, so that we can see "give up self, do not judge" as the key to serenity.  So it's "the word is near you, on your lips and in your heart.  You have only to carry it out."  Ultimately, it's not just the bad stuff we have to let go of.   Our teacher said "into your hands I commend my spirit,"--and that kind of surrender is our lot as well. For us who are called to everything, calm in the face of nothingness is surprisingly descriptive of the fruit of the spirit.  

As to what will get the job done, we'll only know when we become what we seek. The truth is silent:  To the pure of heart, all things are pure.  The eyes that see are not the same as  the ones that were told "keep looking, but do not understand."  The ears that hear are not the same ones that were told "keep listening, but do not comprehend."  When you know why I am lying, you will see it.  When you know how what I'm saying is lacking, you will hear.

  

Christ and Oneness: Tools for Inner Quiet from the Transfiguration and the Adulterous Woman

Were I to say, as I do indeed say, that "All that is, is Christ," it'd be a fair thing if you replied "hogwash, bollocks and nonsense! Prove it!" I'd certainly fail at any efforts in that direction.  Basic acceptance, like belief, requires a receptive disposition.  To the unwilling, no proof exists, to the willing, none is necessary. But it's still important to say "all that is, is Christ" and I practice that because it pays dividends in increased serenity.  Both self and other are Christ. Paul said "I live, but not I, Christ lives in me." Jesus said "whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me." Motivation is Christ. To the Philippians, Paul said "I press on toward the goal of the heavenly call in Christ Jesus." All that you're attracted to is Christ, to be let go of, and all that you're averse to is Christ, though realizing it takes a bit of fortitude. The epistle tells us we're "always carrying in the body the death of Christ, so that the life of Christ may be made known in our mortal bodies also."  [bxA]

Later tradition bears this out. St. Cyprian says "The Christian is another Christ." Lawrence of the Resurrection says "in everything you encounter throughout the day, the Triune God is coming to meet you." Jean Pierre de Caussade says "abandon self, and everything that's left is the Triune God.  Trappist tradition has a story of a alcoholic monk who, tempted to drink, bowed to the altar with intention, and was set on the path toward sobriety.  Another story tells of a monk who would, using his thumb, press his many concerns into the handle on the Church door.  When he came out, sometimes he'd consciously pick them back up, sometimes not.  Alcoholics Anonymous has a story about a fellow whose "higher power" was the lamp post outside his weekly meeting.  He'd admit he was powerless, remake a decision to turn his life and will over to God as he understood him--then literally surrender his whole self to the lamppost.  Sometimes he'd re-adopt his preoccupations afterwards, sometimes not.

It helped him bracket his concerns, and in AA--where whatever keeps you sober is counted as miraculous--one adheres to whatever get's the job done.

Note that all the above takes just a little inner hustle to see.  Fortitude, attention and intention require focus and power.  To capably point attention, what's necessary is "letting go of many things for the sake of what's right in front of us."  To capably rouse intention: we have to allowing ourselves enough time with mantra so that the body and mind will easily circle back around to it amidst distraction.  The body is a great help here.  We breathe, and eventually hear the name of God coming from our own lungs.  We Listen because the scriptures say "Hear O Israel." Both the pains and the ecstasies of the body are intense sensations that say "for your own good, slow down and pay attention to more subtle sensation." With practice, it's quite grounding to place your hands on the cold surface of your desk, to take a few deep breaths, to listen to the air conditioning or to the silence, and to let go of all that isn't those sensory experiences, including thought.  The body becomes means of emptying the mind.

If all things are Christ, it makes a quiet mind easy to obtain.  Take note of your mind, noticing many things, and use that as a springboard into oneness.  Practice it.  Notice many things, and its ensuing host of worries.  Give yourself a safe space in which to admit "I've labelled things in a way that's not helping me, perhaps there's a better way."  Then push off into "all that is, is Christ" and pay attention to how the body responds to it.  Done with persistence, this may well have a palpable positive effect on your nervous system. 

In the gospels, there are two examples of this "going from multiplicity and worry to unity and Christ."  It's interesting to note that one is a relatively blissful experience, one is full of affliction, but the end result of "being with Christ" is the same. 

First, remember the Transfiguration.  The Apostles witness Jesus glowing white, talking with Moses and Elijah.  They say "let us make three tents."  Matthew's text says the apostles became afraid, Lukes text says "they did not understand."  In Matthew it says Jesus touched them, in Luke it says the apostles heard a voice in a cloud--note that those are both sensory experiences--and that afterwards, the Apostles saw no one but Jesus.

Second, remember the story of the adulterous woman brought to Jesus.  Without an attempt to shame, it's to be noted that the woman has very real faults to deal with--which I'm sure rendered her ultimately a nervous wreck.  (Acting willfully on desire always creates anxiety, quite unlike the serenity created by acting willingly according to providence, the spirit,  and God's will.)  The crowd, full of various jewish authorities, points out that she'd been "caught in the very act of committing adultery."  And then there's this debate, around "all that the law commands be done to such a woman" and the silence of Jesus.  Then Jesus says "let the one without sin cast the first stone."  To the credit of the crowd, the rocks drop one by one, and the people depart.  The woman is left with no one but Christ.

It'd be fair play for the Logos to hide necessary lessons in both affliction and bliss.  Please hear this without allowing your egoic craving for hardship to kick in, but know that the end result of suffering is a skill--one that makes us capable of doing voluntarily what we once did at the prompting of grace alone.  Whether we have a blissful experience of Tradition's oneness in the Lord, or an afflictive experience of "judgment forestalled" by Jesus, the end result is the same.  All that is, is Christ.  Now please, for Christsakes, listen.

When Christ speaks to me, through me: a careful, apologetic, grossly long-winded missive.

 

Prologue

God called all things good and holy, revealed himself as “I am,” then called you to self-emptying, in imitation of your teacher.  And that begat a fair question.  You looked at holiness and goodness, at everything that makes up your self, and said “if I give all this up, what will you use to guide me?”  I watched the question play hell on mind, emotions and nervous system. I kept whispering “give up self, do not judge.” I kept saying “prophesy to the dry bones, the flesh and the breath,” so that every level of your embodied existence could let go and hear what I am telling you.  In reality, you will be listening ever more deeply until your last breath.  So settle in.  Eat something–lest the journey be too much for you.  “Who you think you are” will not get out of this alive.  But rejoice, because the rest of you has a fair chance at it. [bxA]

You have heard it said “if the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?”  And again “keep listening, but do not understand.  Keep looking, but do not comprehend.”  I’m inviting you to let go of “mind.”  Therefore, though you know that what’s in front of you is the holy one of God, listen when the abyss says “be quiet and come out of him.” When the mind sits still enough so that both you and the hearing are here and now, it will be the Lord who speaks.  To the question “what will you use to guide me” the Lord’s answer is “everything.”  

On every level, I am working for your healing.  The Word--as some have called me--doesn’t always beget an intellectual process that proceeds, by reason, toward certainties of faith. The Word isn’t always the “ordering principle of the universe.”  Sometimes the Word permits fears and doubts so you can intuit the truth by realization, make decisions, work toward increased manageability.  This means that “the Word is a double edged sword”--that it creates discernment, teaching the difference between action and thought, thought and emotion, emotion and sensation, sensation and energy.  Slowly you will learn how your own judgment negatively affects your serenity.  The key of knowledge will always be experience, and you must never deprive yourself of it.  

That you might, more deeply, catechize yourself: I am the one who, in your prayer, creates the echoes.  You told the Father you were tired–and you found no rest–until you heard your own prayer and began to create rest for yourself.  You lifted your eyes to the mountains–wondering where your help was going to come from–until you saw yourself doing it, and began to help yourself.  I am the one who helped Christ see himself in all things, and all things in himself.  As it is written “whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me” and again “I in them and they in me, that they may be completely one.”  I am the one who waits at the question words–until who becomes “you,” until where becomes “here,” until what becomes a paradox of nothingness in everything, until when becomes “now” and “how” becomes just like this.  I am the one who helped you hear God say “know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go…and I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”  Indeed, it’s never “that” that is the house of God and the gate of heaven.  It is “this.”  It is never “that” that is the body of Christ, it is always “this.”  You have heard it said “the glory of God is man fully alive.”  I say to you “A person fully alive is a student, here and now.”

If your track record with right belief and right practice is spotty–or even if all of your efforts in that direction have only left you exhausted, then right transformation is the only goal worth pursuing.  It is to those who can hear when the Teacher says “give up self, take up your cross and follow” and “do not judge, lest you be judged”--it’s to those, see, that what follows is addressed.  You will know in your body how much calmer you could be if you ceased using the positive feelings faith creates to end-run around your flaws and trauma.  You will know how much more energy you’ll have if you stop viewing your consolations like merit badges that make you better than others.  You will be asked to get honest about your attachments–the impairment of willingness that’s limited by attraction to pleasure and aversion to pain, the impairment of assuming God is present only in what’s positive.  But it’s only so that you can be here, now: fully rested, attentive and schooled in serene use of the spirit’s energy. 

Right now, realize the degree to which, despite your best efforts, you’ve misdiagnosed things.  Don’t let spiritual teachers tell you this, and don’t let their questioning of your responses become a way they exert control over you.  Simply realize that there’s a part of you that panics, defers, and misdiagnoses what it sees–and that there could be a more skillful means of getting through the day.  If you can hear and self-apply any of this, that’s ok.  It’s totally safe, something that everyone under the sun has to contend with.  Especially given the lack of clear rule books, it remains problematic for everyone.  If you’d like to see clearly, what follows might clarify how that would look.  

To begin, simply say “it’s not my fault, but it is my problem.” For instance: listen the next time you say “I feel anxious.” Without diminishing how hard that is, I’m asking you to consider whether “daily doses of creative tension as part of the way things are” wouldn’t be a better way of framing the psychological and physical sensations.  Imitation of Christ is designed in a very particular way, so that psychological reframing at the service of serenity becomes our share in the way Jesus recapitulated and remade all creation.  In other words, your happiness depends partly on viewing your suffering in ways that don’t, themselves, make it worse.  If the Lord wants you to become aware of your nervous system, (and of the Spirit within) he’ll make your own calm rest on doing this exact kind of transformative work.  That’s rough, but you’re not without a toolkit.  Right now, breathe, listen and feel.  Keep doing it, withdrawing attention and intention from everything but breathing, listening and feeling.  Thoughts of self will eventually subside, and you’ll be a good bit calmer.  If this happens while you’re at a pizza parlor, there will be two slices and a beer right in front of you when you realize you were never anywhere but in God’s kingdom.

Putting Prayer First

I am trying to teach you what happens when the Church’s prayer teaching is placed before all else.  Perfect peace is all of your faculties at rest in oneness. The Mind of Christ is utterly empty: so was the Holy of Holies, and so, in the end, was the heart of Christ. Before humility renders the empty mind of Christ permanent, see, you will experience contemplation (a temporarily quiet mind, scattered by labeling) and obedience, (a quiet mind borne into responsibilities.)  The somewhat frustrating alternations of prayerfulness and focus will teach you to part more instinctually with your torpor, to work and focus more naturally.

After a long time of imitating the Teacher, after a long time of inviting him into your every activity, thought and emotion, you may find yourself still anxious.  You see, after imitation of Christ, after intimacy with Christ, there is the further step of internalizing Christ.  If the Lord has withheld serenity, it may be because your mind and body, soul and nervous system are begging you to pursue recollection.  Recollection, the in-gathering of the senses, is the discipline that makes Christ and his devotee entirely not-two.  It also allows you to hear with your ears, not your mind, to see with your eyes, not your cravings, to feel with your hands, not your overextended nervous system.  I’m trying to show you, in the end, that internalization of Christ through recollection is a larger piece of the apostolic tradition than you thought.  And this is important not for the sake of intellectual awareness, but to turn the gifts of grace into a skillset of virtue.  Counter-intuitively, recollection renders Jesus “invisible” just as the ascension did for the apostles.  You see him in fewer places, think about him less.  The saints bear witness: “on the mountain, nothing” is the end-game of “Christ has no body but yours, no hands but yours.”  This is only so that, recognizing the limits of “self’s value” we can hear and feel without anxiety, make a decision to taste and see with gladness, though the reasons for dread remain. 

Contemplation–stillness of mind and “just being with God”--is a tremendous grace.  It’s not to be willfully grasped, but leaves us with a sense of how easy it would be to respond to God more fully than we are.  Meditation–in the sense of “active thought about spirituality”--is so enticing a tool that, once implemented, is hard to know when to lay down.  Vocal prayer can often feel like “words thrown at an abyss.” I mean for you to feel all these emotions–they’re a means of “throwing you back on yourself” so that when you come to yourself, you will return to the Father.  

This process will teach you to focus your attention and intention–too often dissipated by the things of the world.  Physical sensations, particularly those involved in the sacraments, will be a great help with this.  Your willfulness will slowly be replaced by willingness, your “active volition” will become “passive volition” as you go from running the show to cooperating with others.  You will withdraw your attention and intention from the many things among which they’re scattered–and you’ll do this hundreds of times a day–until sustained concentration is possible again.

There will be difficult bits.  Tradition calls these the “dark nights”--it says there are two of them, though there may well be more.  A dark night is simply an emptying-out of value.  The dark night of the senses is no big deal–it’ll just take the things of the world and render them less distracting.  (How often are you sitting at work, thinking of the beer that you’ll have after work, to the diminishment of productivity?) On the other side of the dark night of the senses, you’ll find yourself thinking of two things at once less often. And this will mean that expectations won’t bar you from accepting that what’s in front of you is Christ.  Having learned to mentally let go of “what christ used to look like” you will find it much easier to accept, as a candidate for Christlikeness, the very unique stranger in front of you.  The dark night of the senses is totally safe–though it will feel like an internal tempest in a teapot.  

The dark night of the soul is necessary as well.  Unfortunately, attachments to spiritual things, too, can also keep you from accepting or efficiently interacting with what’s in front of you.  (How many priests, after quarrelling with their bishops, have distractedly crashed their cars because they were continuing the argument in their heads on the way to Mass?)  The dark night of the soul feels terrible, but the end of its purifying work is effective focus.  

A lesser-known third dark night, the dark night of the self, will show how unnecessary “the you doing the thinking” is.  Indeed, the stresses of life are left in place, and life’s joys emptied of value, so that you might become Christ, so that the Christ within might hand all things over to the father–but the Christ within is a nobody, not a somebody, and “Father within” ultimately jumps the fence between inside and outside, becomes a lovingly impersonal sentience in which we live and move.  And after all of that, your use of the senses is simply unimpeded by thought.  In other words: in life, as in Elijah’s cave, there will be earthquakes, strong winds and fires, you will get over your self-story, and it’ll enable you to return to hearing the still small voice of God in silence.

The Teacher became flesh.  Fully present in the moment, he was available to be the one who was sent.  Honest reflection will teach you the degree to which you have not yet done this. How often do you find yourself thinking of two things at once?  “The Word became flesh” has been distracted, in you, by your thoughts of the world.  “Here I am” has been distracted by your attachment to things of the spirit.  “Send me” has been distracted by a terribly inefficient and mentally abstracted facsimile of you.  In the tradition of “paralysis by analysis,” that fakery prevented you from getting out the door.  And so the words are for you: “Hear O Israel.”  Write them on your doorposts, and get on with it. 

 

Listening to Basic Human Needs, made holy in the sacraments

Even the wind says it: something had to transition you from listening to noise to listening for the Spirit, something had to internalize feeling so that it would grow ever subtler.  Jacob’s ladder isn’t elsewhere, and it isn’t a dream.  Ask your basic human needs, and they will tell you.  You feel the precariousness of incarnating–pain and bliss, exhaustion and rest, sickness and wellness–and they speak with the spirit of fear.  At best, that spirit tells you that “forming an ego is not necessary for survival.”  You feel the desire for safety and it speaks with a spirit of knowledge.  At best, that spirit tells you that “using the world for self-comfort is optional.”  You feel a need for love and belonging–and it speaks with a spirit of might.  At best, that spirit says “manipulating others into filling your needs is optional.”    You feel a need for self-esteem and it speaks with a spirit of counsel.  At best, it says “you who teach others, will you not teach yourself?”  You will begin to develop a higher self with which to care for yourself and for others.  And it will become your intuitive spirit of understanding, a voice behind you saying “this is the way, walk in it.”  You will feel a need to self-actualize, and it will become a spirit of wisdom.  At best, it says “Self adulation is optional.  Godliness is a responsibility, and unconditionality is a source of quiet and solitude.”  All of this was an expression of your need for God–and it will speak with the Spirit of the Lord, which says nothing at all.  Free to perceive all things as they are–with restful breath, open ears, eyes that see instead of crave, hands that feel instead of grasp–you will be like Elijah, finally attuned to the absence of sound, covering his face at the mouth of the cave.

Take a lesson from the Sacraments: Breathe, Listen, and Feel.  And when, through recollection, you come to yourself, taste and see God’s goodness.  The Son of David is standing right in front of you, always: you have only to ask to see.  The Teacher will touch your eyes as he has before, and this time I’m asking you to look intently, and see things as they are.  You can handle your hunger with gluttony, but it will make you anxious.  You can handle your desire for possessions and status with greed, but it will leave you a nervous wreck.  You can handle your workload with sloth and your grief with sorrow, but it will leave you lazily skittish and resentful.  You can handle your intimacy needs with lust and your anger with wrath, but the world will cooperate with your gross lack of subtlety only so far, and then you’ll have to face your attachment to remorse.  You can handle yourself with vanity and pride, but putting yourself above others will be exhausting and the sound of your own voice will terrify you.  You have been made for serenity and calm, and yet you act on thoughts that compromise them.  In every moment, stop it.  Please hear in my words both gentleness and, for Christ’s sake, insistence. Just as you have been everything, so have I–and I know how difficult all of this has been for you.

Keeping things simple requires conversion: the giving up of self and the quieting of judgment.  When you find a way to just be, (while existing in a climate of scarcity and competition), you will have learned the lesson of Baptism.  When you find a way simply to hunger, simply to grow, mature and find belonging, you will have learned the lessons of Eucharist and Confirmation.  When you find a way both to give and receive love and serve without conditions, you will have learned the lessons of marriage and holy orders.  When you stand in the wreckage that sin, aging and death leave in their wake, you will be open to the gift of reconciliation and annointing of the sick.  You can have the sacraments without learning the lesson, and you can learn the lesson without having the sacraments–but I would have you make “growing in humility” as easy on yourself as possible–and holiness is part of the everything to which you’re called. 

If our intimidating basic needs become the sacraments, then what today feels like a crisis will yield wisdom tomorrow.  You’ll be forgiven your aversion response if Christ’s teaching methods leave you uncomfortable, but naming them is important.  Jesus taught using overwhelm, scandal, condemnability and dissociation.  Jesus said “let down the nets” to fishermen who’d worked fruitlessly all night.  He said “eat my flesh and drink my blood” to a Jewish audience that knew cannibalism was, for Israel, a sign of desperation.  He ministered among those who’d render him unclean.  When he hung on the cross, it was for a crowd who thought that “cursed is anyone who hangs upon a tree.” And in his final moments, he gave up trying to inwardly manage himself, saying to God “into your hands I commend my spirit.”  Christ’s methodology itself was rough.  When you, his students have a predictably rough time, your lessons will be the dishonest wealth of crisis.  They’ll only make sense on the other side of giving up self, when through a conversion experience the Spirit “gives you what is your own.” 

Christ as True Nature, present in both attractions and aversions

Just as the Teacher hung between two thieves, you are suspended between contradictions.  This is where the self dies.  On the other side of a death of self: all places are here, all times are now, all people become Christ–who surrenders himself to the father leaving you at peace with yourself. 

At the foot of the cross it was plainly visible.  You were too used to “seeing as God” only what’s pleasant.  The Teacher took away sin and left its effects in place as part of becoming all things you’re attracted and averse to. The hardest part of that was the bits that’d ping an aversion response. But you were as unwilling to let go of your attractions as you were unwilling to endure your aversions in the first place.  If the Teacher is to be seen as he is, you will need either to muster a bit of fortitude–a necessary skill to sit the lessons of aversion–or you will need to develop the muscle of temperance–and the skills necessary for handling attraction, for “enjoying and letting go of impermanent things.”

When the teacher ascended, he became the true nature of all that is seen and unseen. The Teacher said “I in them and they in me, that they may be completely one.”  He saw himself in strangers, the hungry, the homeless, the naked, the sick and imprisoned–groups that spike aversion responses, whose need is overwhelming–so that later, when the scales of ego and judgment fell from their eyes, they would cease to see the least among them and instead see God’s Christ.  It taught them to obey the limits of their energy, to say no to what they must without judging it.  This served to directly sustain them when they were asked to give beyond their capacity.  Peter said “I don’t have silver or gold, but what I have, I give you.  In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene, get up and walk.”  Listen to Cephas acknowledging, first, his limits.  Listen to Peter naming the grace in which they stand.  Listen to the command that forms as the invalid accepts that Christ’s power and his own are not two.

The Teacher said he was bread and wine for the hungry, sheep gates for an audience of shepherds, light for the blind and “the way” for those who are lost.  So, later theologians will be forgiven when they say “God comes to meet you in every aspect of your daily responsibilities” and “abandon yourself to divine providence and everything that’s left will be God.”  Saints have understandably said, of the material world, “I look at God, he looks at me.”  For serenity’s sake alone, it’s rightly taught that “All that is, is Christ.”

Apostolic identification with Christ ran deeper than that.  The apostles even stopped using physical sensations to tell a “self” story.  Pain was the hardest to reframe–connected, as it was, to their capacity for self pity–but they’d eventually say all pain belonged to Jesus, and willingly, devotedly bear what they once judged and rejected.  We can only see compassionately on the other side of encountering our blindness, so we must look deeply at our capacities for sin.  This is the ‘suit of leaves’ that’s old as eden and our own emergence into consciousness–it’s the ego, the craving, the desire and attachment that once protected us and is now handing us over to satan for the destruction of our flesh.

Shadow work

Neither you, nor anyone else on earth, is exempt from encountering your shadow, from being sifted like wheat.  Your own divine echo has this to say: you are all people, everything, always, and half of that is unflattering.  You are Pharoah enslaving the israelites, king Nebuchadnezzar II throwing his own servants in the furnace.  You are a Satan.  The hardest part of praying a full psalter will always be realizing “I am a worm and not a man”--this will be among the many shades of dehumanizing emotions included in fulfilling the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms–and they’ll all be totally true of you. But do not despair, and do not crawl back into denial–everyone else feels all of this as well. When you have turned back, you must strengthen the others.  At least half of being everything is not fun in the least; it is also totally safe.

Incarnating into a situation of scarcity and competition was a great source of Trauma.  It’s almost fitting that, early on in life, the mind works in overdrive, the body stores trauma, the nervous system does its best to self-regulate.  Later in life it’s typical for these coping strategies to prove inadequate.

If Christ is, simultaneously, our true self and every other sentient being that has ever existed, we are connected in his body to every other being that has ever lived.  This means that the memory of having caused trauma is as alive in us as the memory of having alleviated it.  Imitation of Christ means waking up gradually to how systemic and historical sin are, all of them, stored in every human body.  It can beget more words than are useful: each disabled person is every disabled person, each sick person is every sick person, each rich person is every poor person.  To keep it simple, there are no others, only mirrors of yourself.  

To keep it sane, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not just different persons of a single divine nature, they’re the highest expression of your own ability to cope with, reframe and recapitulate suffering.  God’s personality is a skillset for recapitulation, at the core of which is sitting still, seeing yourself as more malleable than the way things are.  The Teacher said “blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”  The spiritual energies of grief are not different than those that underlie joy.  The ‘you’ experiencing the energy is what’s changed.

This is true of the moral life as well.  The “potential energy” in vice is quite the same as what fuels virtue.  To access that, we need to be still enough not to act on every thought, watchful enough to evaluate thoughts for the emotional signature they leave behind, quiet enough to hear that emotions are verbal expressions of stored physical sensation, equanimous enough to commit to giving up the judgments we place on energy.  When we have made a decision to accept all things as they are, we will have cared for the ailing tree of our own life from its roots.

I don’t need to tell you that this is an immense task.  I don’t need to tell you it’ll take your whole life.  You may even realize that you’ve lived myriad past lives, or that, in Christ, you are living all your possible lifetimes at once.  (Stop wasting energy asking whether unity or multiplicity, resurrection or reincarnation are correct.  Who is it that wants to be right?)  At some point, you will look at everything that’s required of you, and decide to become the kind of person who can, through a mix of grace and hustle, handle it.  You will lose nothing of what God has given you, but perhaps realize that the “self” that did the having is not as permanent as you thought.  The Teacher is, was and will be a living sign that all of this is totally safe.

The  Trinity Within

Your basic needs can sometimes seem a separate sentience, hyper-focused and “othered” within you.  Compulsive thinking has a “mind of its own” such that the desert fathers called that mental capacity “demons.” Fair enough, following the promptings of compulsive thinking too often forms habit, and addiction.  If the “othered sentience” of compulsive thought has a mind of its own, perhaps the “othered sentience” of your higher self has a mind of its own as well. 

The Trinity is not remote, it dwells in you.  How does your relationship with “the Christ within” begin, except with self care?  When your responses to life are not an attempt to avoid suffering or judgment, when they’re not an effort to gain the approval of others, you will know what it means that the teacher “set his face like flint.”  How does your relationship with the “Father within” begin, except with your own ability to meta-think, meta-emote and dispassionately self-observe?  When you judge with the right judgment of compassion, you embody a part of the trinity–the lack of which creates suffering.  How does your relationship with the Spirit within begin, except with the ability to sit in intense sensations until, in the stillness, a different range of options emerges for you?  When you refrain from choosing, rather than choose a path of self-induced suffering, the spirit will rest and remain on you powerfully.

Your higher self must learn to effectively re-focus your attention and intention.  Learn to question “created needs and dependencies.”  Give them up–forever, if they’re truly harmful, but at least honestly and temporarily, to see what lacking them does to your emotional life.  You have remained too long in the marketplace, and now your responses are mismatched.  They played the flute for you, and you did not dance, they sang a dirge and you did not mourn.  The willfulness with which you once accomplished tasks must be replaced with willingness to be a collaborative part of a whole.  If you can briefly deploy attention and intention toward what alleviates suffering, the payback in serenity will be immense.  And you will grow in empathy.  You will learn to rejoice with those who rejoice, and mourn with those who mourn, and gradually become all things to all people.  You are learning to be just as productive as before, but fueled by spirit and presence and grace instead of ego.

What you initially relate to as “other”--the dialogue becomes easier and faster.  As you descend from intellect to intuition, the insights of that inner conversation become a deployable skill.  Prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude are, all of them, psychological muscles, the lack of which will leave you quite anxious.  Inner habit formation proceeds until your higher self, in fully aware ministry to the rest of you, becomes a persona of its own.  Every muscle movement is a lifting of the cross or a shirking of a burden.  Every mental move is either an embrace of the way things are or a denial of it.  Eventually, the one who handles all this will simply be called “who you are.” For now,  what better name could there be for this than “the Christ within?”

A constant dialogue of self-care, meta-thinking and subtle feeling will become part of how you relate to yourself. But that will also be how you keep “relating to the Triune God” rooted in the body.  If you thank the Lord for bearing the pain of sin, you are also thanking your own ego, for handling the trauma of incarnating until you were ready to face it.  If you thank God for his mercy, you’re also thanking “the observer” for being the “someone” who helps you continue to function long after “thoughts of self” have ceased.  If you say “come holy spirit” you’re asking to be centered enough to feel the pressures associated with energy moving through the body–even as “breaking up tensions” is occasionally painful.  You’re asking to sit in unpleasant sensation until the “you” doing the judging ceases to label the sensation.  That will feel horrible, until the door of non-self opens.  If there were a ‘you’ left to label it, it might be called bliss, but you will be too busy breathing, listening and feeling to bother doing so.

Do not do what “spiritual people do” and get caught in theories.  Do not get caught in loops of theological thought whose pleasantness distracts you from trauma stored in the body.  Do not begin to think that God’s graces make you better than those around you.  Do not attribute the judgments you’ve been asked to cease making to Christ, so that your toxicity only continues, this time with spiritual sponsorship.  The high points in an embodied spiritual journey do not excuse you from everything, and the Trinity blinks back at you from all that is seen and unseen.  There isn’t a you to nurse attachments, or be better or worse than others.  If the divine clarifies itself in you, it is for mercy, acceptance, nonjudgement and equanimity.  Never for self-aggrandizement or rationalization. You will mishandle this a great deal, and when you have turned away from self-induced anguish, it will beget enormous gentleness.

“Christ as Self” is an Apostolic Teaching

You could continue to think that the self exists–that’s an option–but I would have you be free of all traces of remorse, resentment, and entitlement.  And those will continue to cling until you wiggle out of the garment of self and run away naked.  But if, instead you’d like to be capable of accepting all things, and free of all except the most temporary of fears, decide today that “all that is is Christ.” Decide to accept that unpleasant lessons must still be learned, that we must except how temporary our joys are too, and unclench every impulse to grasp.

At the beginning and the end, for St. Peter, there was a great catch of fish–only his questions and unwillingness, only the torn nets were absent from the second one. And whatever words were accepted as Christ’s Gospel in the first were accepted as such in the second even coming from the mouth of a stranger.  

Listen to what the Gospel and the epistles say.  The Teacher said “because I live, you also will live.” None of us lives to ourselves. We have died to ourselves and are alive to Christ.  St. Paul said “My true self is hidden with Christ in God.”  And “I live, but not I, Christ lives in me.”  For the apostles, death and life had become the same.  Paul said “for me, to live is Christ, to die is gain.”  And even the sensations of the body have transformed.  All sensation or emotions that we’re averse to have been transformed into the sufferings of Christ–and we work with them as sensations and emotions–as things that change and shift while we watch.  Now, though, we can be devoted to them because they are a sign of Christ’s life in us: we need only hold them with proper care and mindfulness.  The Teacher also said “The Father is always with me.” He went through a whirlwind of emotions “I am troubled now, but what should I say ‘father, save me from this hour?’ It was for this hour that I came into the world.”  And he also said “Father, why have you forsaken me.”  It isn’t just “proper” that students become like the teacher.  It is an inevitable part of an incarnation, happening to all whether they like it or not.

What the Church looks like, in light of this

Remember that others and institutions should be left to do what they wish.  However, if they assume their will and God’s are the same, and if they nurture a belief set that creates suffering, you’re well within your rights to declare them only as relevant as they are accepting, non-judgmental, and work for the reduction of suffering.  Fairness and rightness unfortunately, here, takes a real back seat to power dynamics.  In a world of egos, no action you could take would keep you safe from the possibility of judgment–though it may be false, you are liable to judgment by the mere fact that you’re alive.  This won’t be comfortable, and that’s ok, it’s not supposed to be.  When you forget, remind yourself: you are always both wrong and right at the same time.  Do not seek righteousness, because that would remove you from the fellowship of the crucified Christ.  Do what brings you peace if you can, make choices that minimize suffering, change what you can and do not worry about what you can’t. 

Do not fear if the one who called you rejected you.  You will be like the demoniac in the gospel who, healed by Jesus, is forbidden to get in the boat.  You’ll go home with Christ’s call ringing in you ears, to “tell your family and friends all that the Lord, in his mercy, has done for you.  This will beget the same grieving process that Maharajji, the Bhakti guru, initiated in his students.  He said “give up anger, and tell the truth” and it triggered, in his devotee, a needed catharsis.  Underneath anger, there will be sadness, and underneath sadness, acceptance.  When Christ’s mercy is spoken of, the one who opens his mouth will be quite different than the one who went home to his loved ones.

You are to take teachings from everywhere.  Monotheism was never rightly exclusive: it only became such because of the physical and cultural threat of the exile. Before the exile, Abraham not only gave the idolator Melchizedek a share with the people, but affirmed their common beliefs.  When the Word became flesh, the Teacher not only learned from the Jewish Elders, he asked questions of them–despite the fact that many of the younger men present could later have been among those calling for his crucifixion.  He affirmed the Canaanite woman, whose faith was part of what made healing possible.  Pluralism is meant as a mirror.  Do not avoid what you see there.

Do not assume that ideological or cultural differences are threatening, when they merely express different preferences than yours.  Egoic defensiveness feels similar to a fight or flight reaction, but one comes from the head, the other, from the nervous system.  It’s a mistake made often, and your serenity depends on avoiding it.  The Church was never rightly exclusive: it only became so when it became a church of martyrs.  Basic survival is the upper limit of judgment’s utility.  Judgment is not designed to regulate what we ourselves haven’t the ability to change–including the choices or beliefs of others.  Amen I say to you, for as long as “drive the evil from among you” and “judgment is excluded” can come mindlessly from the same mouth, the churches will be marred by spiritualized self-righteousness and its serenity will be threatened by the slightest differences.  Take the log from your own eye, then you will see clearly.  I say this to the shame of all people and to you, that all might be quiet and work on themselves.  It is ok to admit that this is hard.  If you fail to do it, at some point you must admit you prefer the comfort of being right to equanimity and your own serenity.  

Religious people, who falsely claim that their carefully curated religious ideology is orthodoxy, will caution you against living only the parts of the truth that you prefer.  They are correct: you are called to everything–but it will be the case that some of “everything” serves to humble you.  Hedonism, relativism and spiritualized narcissism all leave anxiety in their wake, and adhering to any of them will wreck your serenity.  You are to take teachings from everywhere, let go of pleasure, accept pain willingly, and convert no one but yourself.  Be quiet, be hospitable to the Truth as others understand it.  Sit with Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Atheists.  Ask them questions driven by childlike fascination, like the teacher did with his elders. 

Listen to Bishops and Cardinals, to homeless women and ice cream vendors. Take teachings from schismatic women priests, from corporate executives and from the dog excrement you step in on the way to meeting with them.  Listen to protestants and evangelicals and mormons–but call judgment judgment, and mercy, mercy.  If they have spoken wrongly, use it as energy to convert yourself.  But when they speak rightly, testify to the right.  Do not correct in others what you have left unconfronted in yourself. 

Humanists and Transcendentalists will speak truth, and Satanists will run soup kitchens better than Christians do, just to irk them.  The Eucharist was a scandal from beginning to end, and many abandoned Christ when he told the crowds consuming his body was a mandate.  Correct the scandal you find in yourself, and that alone: if you require mercy, extend it to others.  Do not discount what is beautiful, though it comes from an unfamiliar source.  Backsliding into judgment would be heaping hot coals of anxiety on your own head, and I would rather your life be more serene.  

I am trying to focus you on the parts of the Tradition that reduce ego–things that can serve as handholds when other people manifest their shadow.  Christ is before all else that is, the firstborn of the dead–do not be surprised if it is only in him that you’re able to hold it together, however barely.  But even the Teacher, led by the Spirit, emptied himself.  Even God’s Christ, faced with his suffering, surrendered his spirit to the Father.  Even Jesus accepted sadness and pain when “the way things are” dictated it.  In this way, by becoming sin, he fulfilled the call to everything.  Our serenity depends on doing the same, and if you find that difficult, that is ok.  Ego death is hard, and you are having an exactly right response to a difficult situation.

Give up self, do not judge.  If you’re thorough, what’s left will be the Trinity made manifest.  Imitate the teacher, intimately let him enter every thought, action, and choice you make.  When a nobler self arises in you, know that only by calling it what it is, “Christ within” will it remain healthy.  When you have internalized him, you will see him no longer, but you will see without craving, hear with your ears, feel with your hands–the knowledge of “who it is who is seeing” will be certain.  The wisdom teaching of the Church is not a secret knowledge.  The development of the higher self into Christ awakens capacities all people have: to meta-think and meta-emote, to reframe thinking.  And those open doors in two directions.  Your own being will echo the Father when you self observe with compassion.  Your own being will echo the Spirit when you experience the difference between the different layers of your embodied existence–and you will watch yourself treat our experience with increasingly speedy equanimity.  You will enjoy things you’re attracted to, and let them go.  You will prepare yourself to experience things you’re averse to–and though aversions can’t be expected to do much else than feel bad, we find that those, too, transform over time.

Taught by the sacraments, formed by meditation and contemplation, you will now learn from all of life.  You will remember it is always safe to honestly admit your faults–you’ll see that it limits the creation of habit, the proliferation of ego, resentment and remorse.  You are on the hook for the consequences of your actions, and every desire you act on willfully is fulfilled at a cost to your peace.  If you experience consolations in prayer, you will rely on life’s sufferings to balance them out, to assist you in letting go of even the ways psychological selves echo divinity.  Like the Teacher, you will empty yourself, making yourself a servant of the way things are.

With the higher self, as with the lower self, there are pitfalls.  After you have cared for your own wounded ego, avoiding resentment and remorse will depend on following Christ.  You’re physically, psychologically designed for this work. Do it so that you can minimize self-induced suffering.  When you see the ways your own being echoes the divine, avoiding entitlement, avoiding the assumption that your God’s judgments and your own are the same–these are the key to minimizing anxiety.  Do not imagine the pleasant parts of the spiritual life make you better than others.  Do not use the pleasant parts of the spiritual life to end-run around unfaced trauma.  The Christ you are becoming is a nobody, not a somebody.  Use the higher self to correct the lower self, use the non-self to correct the higher self, use the observer to let go of it all, then listen to the wind. 

Carry yourself in silence.  The events of the day will come, one after another.  Deal quickly with them and release them.  Sit in quiet for a small interval each day–morning and evening, if you can.  And if that initiates a tremendous and difficult surfacing of your own psychological hang ups, breathe, listen, and feel.  Read scripture with one eye on the page, and one on your reactions to it: remember, there are no “others” only mirrors of yourself.  All times are now, all people are you, all places are here, all opposites are relativized, and all potential is realized.  Read the psalter, find the lines that name what you’re feeling, and treat them like footsteps that bear you through the day.  If thoughts about self cease–even if it happens through dissociation, overwhelm, scandal, or condemnation, (fair or unfair) let those thoughts go.

Decide to know nothing but Christs crucified.  Decide to become the kind of person that can handle stress, rather than busying yourself trying to remove or reduce the stress.The mind of Christ begets unconditionality, and the ability to bear unequal or undeserved weight is the fruit of being suspended on the Cross.  Affirm others, without hoping to be affirmed. Give without grasping, desire God’s will alone–because only by wanting what God wants on his timeline and terms will your desire be free of clinging.   

Breathe, listen and feel, taste and see with focused attention and intention, using physical sensation to ground yourself in equanimity.  Note what you’re attracted to or averse to, realizing that Christ is manifest in all of it.  To prepare yourself for Christ’s presence in aversion, flex the muscles of virtue.  To prepare yourself for Christ’s presence in attraction, practice enjoying, indulging limitedly, and letting go.

Take a lesson from the beloved disciple, inquiring of Christ as to who would betray him: the part of you that is waiting for the other shoe to drop, that’s waiting for something to go wrong, will never cease.  The part of you that has the potential to mishandle grace may not be eliminated.  A great number of saints only grew in awareness of their sins as their lives progressed.  God’s grace wasn’t in sin’s elimination, but the ability to bear, with Christ, the deepening awareness of their intractability.  At the risk of eisegesis–for which we’re all “judgeable at most”-- Christ says to all of us “if it is my will that [the ego] remain until I return, what is that to you?  Come follow me.”  This, too, is part of fulfilling the scriptures.  

I will tell you a mystery: there are no others.  Where can heaven and hell be, if not here?  Who can be God or Satan except you?  There is no future and there is no past.  The Lord is not slow to act, as some think of slowness.  Instead, he is patient.  Your superego and the communal superego may transact shame and judgment, but that’s no reason to avoid healthy repentance as you understand it.  The second coming is not at the end of the world, either.  It happens when you realize that the world is a part of you, that your own consciousness is contained in the world.  No less than this happened with the Teacher.  Who are the only candidates for embodying him except those who make themselves students of everything, who say “here I am.”  When that is you, know that “here and now” is a place where you’re most welcome: grace, providence and the Spirit have made it that way, so that you can feel both truly empowered and as safely disempowered as the Teacher was.  Just as the apostles would be given everything they renounced plus persecutions, you, too, will cease to want some things for the sake of embracing everything.

Before the quiet mind of Christ, chop wood and carry water.  After the mind of Christ, chop wood and carry water. In moments of depression, the scriptures said “get up and eat, lest the journey be too much for you.”  Now I say to you, “on the mountain, they beheld God, and they ate and drank.”  If you’ve become able to hear the question, “is the one who chews the same as the one who is swallowed up,” then your victory is real.  What was said to Peter is said of you “when you have turned back, you must strengthen the others.”  For God’s sake, go find them!