Elephants in the room: Sex, Magic, Entheogens and Transmuting Vices in Christian Tantra

Today I’d like to address four topics in what I see as Christian Tantra, and how they might differ from buddhist and hindu tantra. Those four topics are sex, magic, use of entheogens (aka consciousness modifying chemicals) and Transmutation of flaws. In addition to following Jesus, the Christian’s tantric Guru, these are core concerns in whatever a well oriented Christian Tantra would become. But because of the history of Christianity, they paint a slightly different picture than the same concerns do in Buddhist and Hindu Tantra. I’d like to deal with them one at a time. [bxA]

Sex: Western dependence on logic, along with its ignorance of emotional layering and the subconscious, gives sex a bad name from the start—it’s a legacy which, though difficult, any Christian Tantric practitioner will have to deal, and one which will inevitably locate us on the Cross with our teacher.

Despite my personal admiration for the Saint, I take exception to Pope St. John Paul II’s theology of the Body. Its thoroughgoing essentialist gender theory is too simplistic. In other words, the claim that that men are masculine because they have penises, women are feminine because they have vaginas—this is too simple a reading of the book of Genesis. To be more specific, I believe it’s a false claim that there are enforceable gender roles and ironclad gender rules. I also believe Aquinas’ claim—the claim that sex is only good when it lives up to its telos of procreativity—to be a harmfully limiting claim. The many different reasons married people have sex, the many challenges involved in their times of abstention, are not addressed in such a vision.

While someone who is biologically male is complementary to someone who is biologically female—and that complementarity plays a huge part in Christian Tantra’s capacity to awaken us-- in the working out of gender identity I would go further back. Just as Adam and Eve were originally one, we all have in us energies that, on one level, can accurately be labeled masculine and feminine. But it needs to be said that, given western society’s inability to examine the cognitive and emotional content underlying the terms we use, I don’t find these labels optimal. I would prefer to say we all have willful energies and willing energies. Willful energies are classically more forceful, willing ones more receptive, but they’re all “us.”

In my view, a well-articulated view of Christian Tantric sex would start with these two assertions: first, use of sexuality that’s not unitive, procreative and monogamous, can, when consciously engaged in, lead to spiritual awakening and ever diminishing suffering for others. Second, how gender and sexuality align is up to the individual to figure out—sexuality is the stuff of wisdom par excellence, not something others can figure out for us— and no Church edict is right in judging individuals whose efforts express a conscious and informed conscience.  In other words, while not denying the Christian moral model its validity in the sphere of the ego, Christian tantra acknowledges a psychological model that's also active in pursuit of non-self, and the two models are often, for reasons we'll see when we talk about "transmuting the flaw," very much in conflict.

The church would benefit much, I think, by a practical view of sexuality, and by a temporary ability to suspend moral judgments.  Were we able to suspend moral judgments, we could see that sensation can serve as a mantra.  It's possible for sensation to usher an initiate into an experience of egolessness.  In my years of studying the Cistercian literature I remember two stories.  One monk was struggling with his desire for drink--being the cellarer, he had access to the monastery's wine.  As he passed through church, he realized he was doing so mindlessly, and he stopped to reverence the altar more consciously.  At that moment a demon appeared-presumably a symbol of alcoholism--saying to him that, had he not stopped to more consciously reverence the altar, he would have been plagued by desire to drink--alcoholism--for years to come.  Another story tells of a preoccupied monk who, every time his hand touched the church door, would abandon his concerns to the father, to resume dealing with them when he left church.

The conscious use of devotion and sensation is imbued with principals that can apply to sexuality as well.  Why can the touch of a lover's hand not be as self-abandoning as touching a church door?  Why can satisfying love-making not be as consciousness inducing as a bow to the altar?  I suppose the reason is "we haven't been taught to practice that way."  If nothing else, let this suffice to clearly voice the need.

What follows that dovetails on the things said about “Spirit” in the post “Disciplines and Layers of Christian Tantra.” In short, the Spirit is one, and it, in part, ascends and descends the spine through the chakras. In Christian Tantra, just as prayer can raise the energy of the Holy Spirit within (Kundalini energy) Sex has the capacity to do the same, and thereby open us to the highest levels of spiritual awakening. In order to do that, though, sex has to be freely engaged in, sex has to be free of underlying resentment and anger, sex has to be engaged in without objectifying our partners and without the “going somewhere else in our heads” maneuver that is characteristic of lust. Sensations can free us from ego if we stop attaching our preferences to sensations and simply be with them. Another person can help us give up resentment if we commonly name it as a problem. And all forms of entitlement have to go—even the “right” to sex we commonly conflate with whatever “sexual availability” each partner promises the other in marriage. It’s all a gift, and we are not in charge of whether, or how, the gift will be given.

Magic: I will confess to not having read much about the tantric practices around Magic. Christians have had an uncomfortable relationship with magic since Simon Magus tried to buy the power of the apostles in the book of Acts. Theoretically, though, those who maintain a stance of willingness can experience the threefold opening to the spirit, within themselves (kundalini), in transmission to others, (giving shakti) and in renewing the Church (as it did at pentecost.) And without forsaking humility, this can be done with the individual Saint quite conscious of being the “doer of the act.” In other words, the Saint may, by all appearances, have "made something magical happen."  However, I hope Christian Tantra, as it develops, will always claim that such an individual maintained a stance of passive volition and willingness—openness to grace, in other words—that allowed God to act in them.

Entheogens: Let’s not call them what history has called them, “drugs" or “psychedelics." Let’s call them what they have the capacity to be: “entheogens.” In other words, substances that have a known capacity, used correctly, to open the mind and soul and body to God.

Let’s also call out some of the mistakes of history: The Catholic Church demonized teonanacatl, mexican psychedelic mushrooms, at the time of the Spanish conquest. This uncovers two negative assumptions: first, a prejudice about “primitive cultures” and second the tendency to demonize what we ourselves have not experienced. Much of that underlying prejudice has been repudiated by modern anthropology and the second vatican council. Anthropology is starting to grapple with the experiential knowledge that’s lost in the objectifying gaze of the scientific method. The Church now assumes that it can’t demonize indigenous cultures, and that an indigenous culture has as much right as the Church to have its search for the divine taken seriously on its own terms.  The use of plant-medicines for healing spiritual ills has undergone no such rehabilitation.

Christian Tantra would do well to take as Gospel the stance of Bill W., whose own experiences with LSD hearkened back to the religious experience that founded Alcoholics Anonymous. Though the group ultimately and righty said spiritual awakenings come from the lived experience of a mutually vulnerable community, its founder went on record as saying entheogens could temporarily downscale the ego and enable one to experience what selfless spirituality feels like in the first place.  In the drive for chemical-free existence, and in the societal tendency to see no middle ground between abstention and abuse, Bill W.'s response is largely lost to history to say nothing of as yet undeveloped into a working model of middle-ground use of healthy chemicals.

The brand of Christian tantra to which I personally ascribe does not believe entheogens are God, the sacraments, or the height of charity.  Nor does it believe entheogens are the devil, or an easy route to addiction.  As Maharajii told Ram Dass, entheogens will help you “come into the presence of Christ, but you can’t stay.” In other words, the temporary break from egotism is a beginning, not an end, and should make you more capable of living sober.

That said, much work remains if the Church is going to have a healthy relationship to entheogens. Bad trips will abound if a tantric practitioner’s first look at his shadow is occasioned by chemicals. A better idea would be to spend years in meditation, willingly and consciously seeing what terrors lurk in the subconscious. The Church has yet to democratize her teaching on prayer, though organizations like Thomas Keating’s Contemplative Outreach have begun the work. The church has yet to democratize the knowledge that diocesan exorcists face--that some energies are sentient and malevolent, and those energies are no more to be clung to than any other.  The church even has yet to teach that attraction and aversion, desire and attachment are important, and in some ways more important in overall spiritual development than the moral teaching.

Ideally, priests trained in working with entheogens would initiate middle aged meditation students into entheogen use as a sort of mystagogical experience, specifically designed to bring initiates into the deeper mysteries they’ve received. But the many layers of work that must be done: the years of meditation on the part of the individual, believing indigenous cultures when they speak about the benefits of

Transmuting the Flaw: For me, this is the most personal piece of this article. Incarnations are dualist, and it’s natural for all of us, not only to label inner phenomenon and feelings as “negative” and “positive,” but to avoid the negative and crave the positive. I’ve spent years doing just that. But I’ve come to realize that the example of Christ is specifically to encounterthe negative, to know it completely and to be the presence of God in a situation we’re apt to think God is absent from. Long experience of the futility of avoidance has me, lately, consciously nudging myself in the direction of encountering inner experiences I see as negative. Slowly, anxiety, sadness, depression, loss, suffering—and all other things that go bump in my own inner night—they’re losing their power to freak me out.

My first real experience with this was at a home for the disabled in North Carolina. I was a monk then, and went, in the habit, to a care facility run by sisters of charity. While there, I was confronted with my own aversion to the disabled. I, myself, am slightly disabled. My own self-aversion stood out in sharp relief that day. The isolation of the home’s residents—evident even though they were well cared for—came to the fore that day, and the extent to which my own mild disability had been a cause for lifelong isolation welled up too. By and by, I had an encounter with one of the home’s residents. I simply reached out and touched her cheek. I bowed to something I’d been ignoring that day, and touched something in myself that I’d been drawing away from.

The girl’s name was Jennie. Thinking about it now, she was my first tantric upa-guru. Though, in many ways, it spelled the beginning of the end of my Trappist vocation, it began a deeper pattern. Jennie was the hinge, that taught me that negative exterior experiences and negative interior ones are connected—when I encountered her, the worth in a consistent practice of encounter solidified. Since then and slowly, discordant experiences are becoming the ones I learn the most from. And though I was 40 years old before I saw that pattern as a clear lesson divinely intended in the life and example of Jesus, I’m much more confident in the midst of hardship because of it.

There’s certainly more to be said. “The Guru” is central to tantra, and the specifics of following Jesus—the specifics of what that means for us who have never experienced his historical form-- deserve a more detailed look. But what I’ve written, I’ve written because it’s founded in the unity of God’s mystery as opposed to the dualism of incarnations and revelations. That unity is the starting point of Christian Tantra, and it's our own.

Disciplines and Layers of Christian Tantra

Tantra is the doctrine of the Cross. Christ is Rabbouni, the one who, in the process of fully accepting crucifixion, in his suffering, dying and rising, was the ultimate tantric guru.

Christian Tantra is not a set of doctrines. Nor is it a method. Doctrines rely overmuch on the mind, and tantra is a a way of moving through the layers of reality. If nothing else, it’s certain of this: that failure to observe, and learn to work with those layers—this is a classic source of unhealthy negative emotion. Our minds are made to be here, now, and at rest. If a person’s interior situation becomes dependent on worry as a means of control, it makes the past a thing of remorse and the future a source of anxiety.  [bxA]

In that way, pain, spiritual consolations, and the differences between ourselves and others, they are all medicine for the ego. These aren’t the only ones, as a later post will address. By and by, though, pain, consolations and individual differences are trying to tell us that there’s a voice in our head that chatters with “I like this, I dislike that. I want this, I don’t want that. This or that is good, better or best, and I should spend my life trying to maximize satisfaction.” Pain, consolations, and individual differences throw enough curve balls at us that by and by we realize: the voice in our heads that wears “I, me and my” isn’t us at all.

The body is a storehouse of pain and attachment as well as—and we’ll address this later—spiritual energy. Christian Tantra is a sacramental path, but it understands the physicality of both the body and the world the way Vipassana Meditation methods do. In other words, the body is the unconscious, and it remembers all the trauma you’ve suffered and it either encourages or lets go of the clinginess that’ll cause suffering till it’s encountered and transmuted. The world, to say nothing of other people, are mirrors of projection and foils of ego.

At best, the sacraments use the senses to to train attention. The sense-data of the sacraments—the candles we see, the incense we smell, the bread and wine we taste—when we give it our unforced attention, it gradually draws our focus away from our minds, and towards reality. And just as the post resurrection experiences teach us, the great realization of the early church is that grief fully accepted in the present moment reveals the Christ behind normal realities like strangers, locked upper rooms and gardeners.

Transubstantiation (the consecration of the Sacraments in general) and Interbeing are two works, one by the priest and the other by the people. Transubstantiation reaches into the realm of mystery, makes bread the body of Christ when the priest lifts bread and says “this is my body.” This is done ex opere operato, it’s a work of God, done regardless of the sins of the priest. Interbeing is the people's gentle work of mindfulness. This very much does depend on the people giving non-forceful attention to the breath, to sensation, to emotion and to each other. If we're to realize that we, ourselves, are Christ, we’ve got to empty themselves as Christ did and have the mind of Christ, which is non-self and total humility. It shows us the connectedness of all things: whatever’s going on in terms of reality manifesting Christ will be unintelligible to me if I refuse to seek interior quiet. But entering into that moment with the mind of Christ, I see the with unforced presence and total acceptance, they themselves become the body of Christ they receive.

What, though, does it mean to quiet myself? What are the disciplines of Christian Tantra, and what kinds of meditation are most helpful in finding serenity? Here are a few important disciplines:

Putting up, and taking down, the boundaries of self. Being protected and vulnerable as needed is an important prelude to gradually and gently transmuting our selfishness, avoidance, and sinful compulsive thought.

Gently reclaiming attention from distraction.

Giving attention to sensation and senses, together with deep breathing, to draw the focus away from preoccupying thought. Slowly, it will shift towards sensation, with a corresponding increase in calm. 

 
Facing the pain-body. Directly facing negative emotion, as well as trauma stored in the body.

Observing our breath, without controlling it.

Watching without craving

Waiting without expectations

Feeling without manipulating.

Observing the effects of our thoughts, and acting on calm deliberation, not on impulse.

Grief: allowing ourselves to move from thought to emotion, from emotion to sensation, from sensation to energy, and from energy to reality.

Deity Meditation is central to Christian Tantra, as it is to Buddhist or Hindu Tantra. On one level, as we grieve Christ’s death, we become other Christs, first by active thought about (and mimicking the actions of) Christ, then by totally internalizing him until our thoughts are his thoughts, our bodies are his body. On another level, we are allowing our psyche’s constitutive voices to talk to one another: our inner, healthy adult is re-parenting our wounded inner child.

Christian Tantra peels back the layers. First, practitioners of Christian Tantra give up thought for the sake of emotion and sensation. We learn that avoidance adds anxiety to pain, turning it into suffering. With pain of all sorts, fully encountering it on an energetic level makes it more bearable. Logic and words are fabulous tools, but like all egoic tools, they can take us only so far. We eventually have to deal with the body’s capacity to store trauma. It’s possible that this might be attached to specific memories, but possible, too, that it won’t be. If it’s not we can just deal with the pain as pain. Cancer patients who are resistant to pain medication are taught transformative ways to encounter their pain deeply. Students of Rabbouni do that with all things that are painful.

Next, the Student of Rabbouni gives up emotion and sensation to deal with life on the level of energy. On an energetic level, that involves making a distinction. In the first place, I can perceive my spirit...My spirit is “that in me that pays attention to spiritual energy." I was 38 years old before I was quiet enough to perceive that followers of Jesus, too, feel an energy that’s analogous to kundalini energy in Hinduism. Indeed, those who perceive their spirit know that their own spine is the Cross that’s been given them to ascend. Secondly, there are those in Christianity who have the ability to do what, in Hinduism, is called “giving shakti.” In other words, they can, by cultivating that unwillful presence that is “cooperation with grace,” temporarily raise consciousness of spiritual energy in others. Thirdly there’s the Holy Spirit—which is the things that guides the Church, which is the thing that manifests gifts of the Spirit, which is the thing that sustains all creation. But let’s underline something fairly darkly. Please understand that there’s only one Spirit. The energy that moves up and down the spine is the same as that great saints have transmitted in healings or awakenings, which is the same as what guards the Church from straying from Christ’s teaching.

When students of Rabbouni peel back the layers of the present moment, they obey that dictum that goes: "if it works, do it.” If thinking about the morality of an action just fills the head with noise, then maybe we need to abandon the moral narrative and deal with it on the level of emotion. If that only succeeds in upsetting us, then abandon the emotional narrative and deal with it on the level of energy.

Of course the final step is, if I get too caught up in being a practitioner and having experiences, I need to abandon self. At the center layer, I am crucified with Christ and I become Christ crucified (but when I’m humble I won’t know it.) And there’s no descending the cross or ascending to heaven, no up or down. The crucified don’t have that luxury, true, but at the still point between ascending and descending, between left and right, I’m hoping I’ll find I don’t need it.

Beginning to lay out the Christian Tantric Vision

The normal devotional Catholic model, which has its past and its future, its sacred and profane, is insufficient.  Please understand, I'm not calling it false, nor am I denying any of the valid theological truth it has uncovered.  What I'm certainly saying is this: every psychological phenomena, before it's a narrative and a moral system, is an energy.  The moment that energy gets labelled good or bad, we have either the attraction response or the aversion response that's typical of egos.

The ancient monks I spent my monastic life reading about, well they all would have spoken about the eight demons.  They assume that the energy they were feeling was "not them" and malevolent.  At best, they then claimed the mercy of God in Christ, which enabled them to fess up to cooperating with that malevolent, sentient energy.  Fear of God became a way to humbly admit what they were powerless over.  The system, used rightly, is beautiful and effective.

Devotional paths are dualist, though, just as any particular revelation and any particular incarnation is.  My problem is the great many disempowering difficulties I ignore for the sake of devotion to the "other."  I ask the messiah for many things, I say "our help is in the name of the Lord" but then I lift my eyes to the mountains and say "from whence shall come my help?"  Life with others, which would normally be a self-emptying sadhana, becomes, for me, a tangle of overgrown desire.  In my family of origin, interdependence became co-dependence.  In my family of choice, the airy freedom of romance becomes the enormous drag of lust.  And in my work life, healthy boundaries become egotistical defense mechanisms.

On the other hand, it's important to remember--tantra is a non-dual path. [bxA] This means some of the pitfalls of today's devotional Catholicism don't occur.  There isn't, for instance, a "hierarchy of the sacred." From the perspective of Christian Tantra, the rosary is here to be used, the Mass is now and ongoing, and dog-vomit is an event, right in the middle of your kitchen.  If one is seen as holier than the other, that difference is in the believer, not his beliefs.  But beyond proclaiming that all things are morally neutral: if I take the "interbeing" that Christ taught for the "poor man's transubstantiation" that it is, I see plainly that reality is Christ himself, attempting to remind us of who we already are.

What the humble, tenfold path calls "humble presence" (what Ram Dass called "the witness") is a halfway point between "othering or labelling energy" and letting it rule my conscious choices.  That halfway point is the playground of Christian Tantra.  I know that, in my own life, it's been possible to think myself holy while I avoided energy I thought was "evil."  This gave avoidance, as a general spiritual strategy, too much play in my interior life and relationships.

The essential oneness and wholeness of the truth is the starting point of Tantra.  For Tantra, the past and the future don't have independent reality.  The only time that actually exists is now.  (For a quick reference of things that Christian tantra takes as basic beliefs, see the page  "A non-creed: the Teachings of Under the Influence.")

In Christian Tantra, all phenomena are the body of Christ.  Chief among these are what we've previously called "The 5 Sense Organs of the Body of Christ:" Time, Desire, Reality, Thought and Paradox.  But in a larger sense, because all phenomena are composite, they, too are the body of Christ.  The reality of being multi-layered people is that non-constructive thought, and any pockets of my emotional garbage hide in between the layers.  My job is to look at and accept any energy that may be hiding there: Christian tantra knows that acceptance is one of the 4 Gospel seals with which all Christian teaching must agree, and it further knows that serenity hinges on acceptance, as well.

Transmutation of energies is central to Tantra.  The people of Israel felt the force of the deuteronomic cycle: They were faithful, then their hearts strayed from God, then they called out to him, and God sent a messiah to lead them back to the law.  Christ was born, lived, suffered died and rose.  The apostles were first fascinated, then scandalized: in their confusion they fled, and Christ relocated them.  As much as anything in buddhism, this cyclicality testifies to the need to transmute energies.  Christ, as the person who encountered the "curses" of his world and deprived them of their power, as the one who fully accepted the dying in all life and the new life in dying, is the ultimate transmuting vehicle.

Central to tantra as well is "Deity Meditation."  When I first found out about this, I was hesitant about it.  I have a tendency to use thought to end-run around emotion and sensation.  But the deity meditation of Buddhist tantra, and the deity meditation of Christian Tantra, is a "naming of something we already are" rather than the "verbalizing a future aspiration" characteristic of Christian devotion.  It occurred to me that the priority, in Christian tantra's deity meditation, was to anchor it in the real.

Enter the psyche.  This is the door we're knocking at when we hear Koan tradition say "What was your face before your mother and father were born?"  We all have psyches composed of many different "voices:" they're either the product of many years with the loved ones who formed us, or the gift of loved ones who failed to form us as we needed them to.  Starting with our own psyches, we gradually transmute their voices.  I may be using the "rational adult" voice in my head, to "re-parent" my inner child, but Christian Tantra says something else.  When I am engaged in an effort to know, accept and nurture the different parts of my psyche--as opposed to fleeing from them--Christian Tantra says it's Christ speaking in me, reminding me of the Christ I already am.

The point, though, is to know every single part of ourselves--every physical reality, every emotion, every energy--first as it is, and then begin to work with it.  Narrative and labels can often hamper this work, saddling different energies with labels like good and evil, positive or negative.  It's to be remembered that the selfish and clingy parts of ourselves will use this narrative and these labels to rationalize selfishness, so temporarily letting go of the narrative, simply dealing with it on the level of sensation.

Only upon abandoning this narrative was I able to begin to know my shadow.  Only on abandoning this narrative was I able to wrest things like desire from the grip of ego.  Slowly, the healthiest voices in my psyche are reclaiming a sense of empowerment from a dualistic vision in which the help I needed was perpetually distant.

It turns out that one of life's primary liabilities is mindless desire and fulfillment.  Augustine called it "concupiscence:" the deeper truth that attraction, aversion, craving and ego --though morally neutral-- are problems as big as sin itself.  Letting go of the narrative building self deprives the grave its power and death of its sting.   This is the message of Tantra: minus attraction, sensation and perception become a tool of mindfulness.  Minus aversion, the hurtful defensiveness I wielded in my family of origin becomes healthy, adult boundary setting.  Minus craving and ego, the flowers I once bought out of fear of abandonment are now messengers of the Gospel.  Their message is clear, before a word is on our tongues:  Spouse, Savior and Self are one.  Nothing is broken but brokenness, and before I was conscious of needing or wanting to give love, I AM.

Life, Death and Resurrection: The Place of a Tantric Path in Christ's Recapitulation

Wisdom comes from the Logos: in suffering, unwillingness, finitude.  In Christ’s life, the agony in Gethsemani, the temptation in the wilderness, and death on a Cross have a message.  If they are saying anything, it is this: “When given a choice between A and B, choose C.”  When given a choice between hunger and power, choose God’s Word.  When given a choice between fighting the Egyptians and despairing of life, remember to “Stand firm and you will see the Lord’s salvation…the Lord will fight for you, you have only to keep still.”  When given a choice between life and death, choose consciousness.  

Studying Christianity and Zen side by side has highlighted two problems with Christianity: Firstly, many of the characters that Jesus used in his own teaching would fall short of the “demands of righteousness” currently set forth by the Catholic Church.  Jesus himself, usually hidden in the unwashed masses, is periodically offered as a foil for the ecclesial ideal of righteousness. The Church seems at odds with itself: on the one hand, it insists on righteousness from its congregants and grants its clerics the ability to condemn.  On the other hand, albeit faultlessly, Jesus eschewed the righteousness of his day.  The popular Catholic mindset eventually relegated "following Christ’s example" to monks, nuns and mystics, instead of evolving an ecclesial model that makes the recapitulation of Jesus available to all.

Additionally, the Church never seemed to resolve the problem of eschatology that St. Paul felt so viscerally.  The Gospels are a study in the how Jesus fulfilled pastscriptures, but they lead directly to St. Paul assuming too much visibility and physicality in the “coming of Christ.” The Church still groans and waits, hoping for a vision of God that, perhaps, the shortcomings of our own paradigm keep us from realizing.

The point is to offer a model of Church whose route to righteousness accords with Christ’s example, and whose ideals of time render not only the past, but the future immanent as well.  In short, what I’m proposing is Christian Tantra.  [bxA] Followers of Jesus have given too little attention to the way Jesus, (who was a revealed God enfleshed, whose incarnation was inherently dualist, who was born under the laws of existence,) identified with all that was cursed and outcast.  He encountered everything to which the holiness of his day would have sanctioned an aversion.  He destroyed death by encountering it. Taken more seriously, his example would fit more cleanly in a Tantric model than the current devotional one.

Let me briefly describe Tantra’s place in religious architecture:  Both hinayana and mayahana buddhism are “sutrayana” paths.  In both paths, there’s an ethic, and whatever the goal is, it's found in the adherence to the ethic.  Intoxicants, sex and sometimes meat are taboo—I suppose they go against the buddhist idea of “diminishing suffering for all sentient beings.”  Vajrayanis, practitioners of Tantra, call sutrayana’s bluff.  Noticing that dualistic ideas of “right and wrong” still caused them to avoid what their own tradition calls taboo, they came up with the idea of “transmutation of energies.”  Working with taboos intentionally, calling no energy negative or positive, they created a truly non-dual account of how egolessness puts access to all things in the hands of all people.  After sufficient work with “negative energy,” Vajrayanis perceive that the label of “negativity” seems self applied.  When they let the ego go, out the door as well goes labels like negative or positive.  Bereft of labels for reality, they’re nonetheless left with mastery of it.

To sum up the basic differences between Tantric Paths and Devotional ones:  Tantra begins with a totally realized, totally immanent ideal.  Now is the only time that isn’t a mental construct.  The Buddha, (or in hinduism, the Deity) we’re meant to become—this is something we already are.  It then posits self-consciousness as the preoccupation keeping us from realizing it.  It may take us several lifetimes to get there, but eventually there will be no self-consciousness getting in the way between us and consciousness—we’ll be exempt from the cycle of rebirths in brahman’s nirvana. In devotional paths, the ideal can logically be delayed—sometimes till after death, sometimes till the end of time.  Past and future are thought to be real times, and preoccupation with either is seen as a normal part of human life.  The Christian vision tells us we have one shot at gaining heaven and avoiding hell, suggesting purgatory (at most) as the way we clean up any incomplete work from our physical existences. 

And allow me to clear up a popular misconception: Tantra has been associated, in the American mindset, almost exclusively with its sexual practices.  Even if they could be found, authentic Tantric consorts are well beyond the pale for Christian marriages, and the likelihood is slim as well of two married people being equally willing to practice tantra in all aspects of life. As a discipline, Tantra deals with a wider array of energies than simply sexual ones.  In fact, all things—emotions, physical matter, the personal history we bring to our practice, the expectations of practice taking root in our ego—they may be easier to deal with on the level of energy than on the level of narrative.  If my narrative says “I” have a problem, in the end I might imagine that “I” have to solve it.  Or that “God” will solve it.  Meanwhile, narratives can conceal resentments and facilitate denial of negativity.  Deprive an energy of its narrative, and it may well be easier to deal with.  This is all, of course, in the service of a proper theism: belief that can deal, here in duality and there in non-duality, as the reality of our lives demands.  

Tantra asks practitioners to bring consciousness to bear on the attraction and aversion that underlies sin and virtue. Eve saw the fruit was “pleasing to the eye, and to be desired to make one wise.”  Adam gave everything a name.  While neither desiring nor naming things is inherently bad, it easy to see how attraction and desire and naming things could become problematic in light of original sin’s fundamental abstraction of creation.  For those of us who aren’t the world’s paradigmatic first parents, it doesn’t really matter whether original sin or attraction and aversion came first.  I’d put honest money on the claim that no modern hen finds the "chicken or the egg” problem adequate answer for any riddle of its existence.  The answer is only available when the questioner unflinchingly accepts the reality of paradox, and finds the fidgeting of his own abstracted existence stilled in its light.

All of the things Under the Influence previously said about the need to internalize the messiah are important here.  Guru Kripa, the process of being devoted to, then becoming the teacher—this discipline is important in Tantra, and lacking in Christianity.  All of the evidence seems to indicate that the very-fine devotional practices that have driven Christian sanctity till now do not fully facilitate the assimilation of Christ’s life. 

Consciousness deconstructs self-conscious narratives: as such, it helps its practitioners slip the trap of spiritual materialism.  That’s a good way of saying “being who I am involves questioning the accuracy of who I think I am, and not giving those thoughts undue importance.”  Without careful attention to training, even Sutrayana Buddhism can become dualistic, and allow the taboos of buddhism to become the next object of attraction and aversion.  If Sutrayana buddhism, which makes claims to be non-dualistic, needs Tantra to give that non-duality legs, then the need is more important, still, for the highly dualistic Christianity.  

Christ is reality.  In Christian Tantra, the only problem is the self.  If I am a follower of Christ, then both the permanence of my self and the Christian over dependence on logic must not compete with that, no matter how sacred or real they may seem. At least since the enlightenment and the scientific revolution, Christian modes of proving that reality have been way too cozy with logic.   

By all accounts, though, Christ’s example bucks logic.  If death is a problem, and dying willingly is the solution, Christ himself must be saying that "labelling of things as a problem” is the first thing that’s got to change.  Tantric Christianity, all the more, solves problems by changing the degree of identification with the “self" that’s perceiving the difficulty.  In Christian Tantra especially, to arrive at a zero sum when one starts with two, sometimes "adding negative two” isn’t the answer.  Sometimes shutting down the mind of the one doing math is equally important: a sort of “two minus self equals zero.” 

At least in terms of its way of Knowing, Christian Tantra is a vehicle that allows Christ to be its exemplar, not its foil.  Tantra’s model of “dealing with suffering by consciously encountering it” is more in accord with Christian theology than most, more logical Christian theologies, and it allows the characters in Christ’s stories to be exemplars of his theology, rather than outcasts he brought up for convenience's sake.  A Christian Tantric path would exalt the weak and the humble this by acknowledging that opposites are egotistical and dualist distinctions, by noting that egotism isn’t the only human option.  By centralizing paradox, Christian Tantra allows for opposites like “sacred and profane” to coexist and brings "giving up self" to the fore.  Christian Tantra is a way of radical acceptance, and it comes directly from Christ’s Cross.

So consider this an experiment.  Keep in mind, it is a practice, and includes many different types of meditation.  Breaking down what some of those are will be part of the work.  Stay tuned.

Doing Group Work: Meditations on Recovery

Over the past few months, I’ve not been posting.  Part of it, as I said in “An Open letter on the Holiday season” is that holidays are hard for me.  Yes, they bring memories of many past holidays to the surface, but that’s not the most basic problem.  I’ve always been a person who has needed to grieve over the fact that things aren’t as they should be.  Others are happy at Christmas, and I’m a depressed, nervous wreck.  Life is an opportunity, and I often find it a burden.  These differences between reality and the ideal are mere intellectual curiosities when it’s sunny out and my time’s my own.  But when it’s raining, cold, and the middle of the work week, the gap between me and the ideal moves inside me and festers.

So I’ve needed to go back to basics.  [bxA] And since dysfunction can color even my relationship with my higher power, “basics” for me isn’t faith—“basics” will always be my status as an Adult Child.  I find faith’s ideals—forgiveness particularly— hard: so as I go through my life, I listen when poets say “Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past.”  I listen when Rabbis talk about the importance of “Forgiving God, even as God forgives us” even though my inner theologian takes issue with a need to forgive the creator.  My difficulty with faith is nothing more than a symptom of the problem we adult children share. As many intellectual curiosities as I nurture, I can get distracted: I have to come back to step one.

For “adult children of alcoholics and dysfunctional families” step one says: I admitted I was powerless over the effects of my dysfunctional upbringing.  But if I’m to do a full job, I need to go deeper than that.  I’m powerless over resentment, powerless to please people, powerless to control others' behavior.  I’m powerless over whatever, in each moment, is compromising my serenity—even if “effort to name what I’m powerless over” is what’s temporarily preoccupying me.

Powerlessness is the foundation of emotional sobriety.  To grow emotional sobriety, I have to cultivate the witness—a stance of simply observing, as opposed to trying to manipulate.  I’ve known all of that for a while.  But in the last few months, something else has become clear.  I have to question the qualityof that witness.  If anyone’s parents ever communicated displeasure by silently glaring, if anyone’s parents ever gave each other the silent treatment, you get it.  How we look affects how we see the problem.  How we see the problem affects what steps we take, and how, to solve it.  

I’ve spoken about this before.  In the slightly rambling post “The Original Child, my first and Greatest Teacher,” I identified the child inside me who looks on the world with utter fascination and excitement.  My original child doesn’t talk much.  He’s pretty stoked just to lay there and be excited.  As many layers of dysfunctional psychobabble as were laid over top this presence, it took me 37 years to see that he was there in the first place.  The point here is, if the original child doesn’t do the seeing, if the healthy adult doesn’t do the thinking and the acting, everything—my home life, my recovery, and my faith—will get derailed by my own dysfunction.

The Big Book (page 451 of the 3rd edition) says “I can [do the work of shifting my focus] with an AA meeting.  The more I focus on its defects…the worse the meeting becomes.  But when I try to see what I can add to the meeting…the meeting keeps getting better and better.”  What I’ve realized is that, (in a way that, thankfully, hasn’t hardened into disassociating completely,) I have a group of recovering people inside me.  My inner, wounded child looks on situations with paralysis, hyper-vigilance and fear, my unhealthy adult with rage.  A balance between limits and compassion with those voices is important, and it’s prior to impartially witnessing.  In one sense, my healthy adult has to affirm the voices in the room so that spiritual bypassing, or ignoring uncomfortable emotion in the name of piety, doesn’t occur.  When all the voices are heard and affirmed, my focus is real, genuine openness.  If they’re not, I’m usually impaired in my ability to accept things as they are

If I don’t go to that group meeting, the ones I attend with other adult children are useless.  At those meetings, it’s the ‘healthy adult’s’ job to moderate, to validate all the voices so they can be united in seeing my situation in the first place.  So when the wounded child brings his inarticulate mix of panic, the healthy adult needs to listen first, then provide the kind of nurture that allows the wounded child to relax.  When the wounded adult wants to rage and indulge addictive behaviors, the healthy adult needs to listen first, then remind the wounded adult that it doesn’t need to rage to be heard.  This is all part of allowing the Healthy adult and the Original Child to unite the group in doing the same thing: seeing my life healthily.

This is a lot.  I need to remind myself that there are times when being the healthy adult suffices to do the Healthy Adult’s needed work.  When simply being the Original Child is possible, seeing the world with fascination and excitement happens on its own. The post “Trust God: New thoughts on Steps 1-3 of ACA”  is one of a series that attempts to troubleshoot why my higher power was throwing up roadblocks to my “working the program": why no one would pick up the 1000 pound phone when I dailed it, for instance.  Now I know that those roadblocks were happening because I wasn’t attending the group meeting that I needed to: the one inside me with the cranky fuckers who make up my psyche.  Finding the right group is an integral part of the solution.  But codependents like me need to be careful not to expect the group to compensate for work we’re neglecting.

And examining family’s contribution to the problem—whether my family of origin or my life with my Jackie— is part of the solution, but not all of it.  For one thing, the Big Book says “don’t seek to understand the reasons why you drink.”  For codependents, “drinking” is an analogue for “avoiding insecurity through manipulation”.  The point, for us, is that “understanding” is a last ditch effort at manipulation; it’s just clothed in sage’s garb.   

It’s too easy to say “I see the problem” and mean “I’m hung up on where it started.”  Blaming your family of origin, then, for their very real bullshit: this can masquerade as wisdom.  But blame remains a bad move, however enticing.  It’s too easy to say “I see the problem” and mean “I’m hung up on what grates on me when I’m not doing my own recovery work.”  Resenting my Jackie for her responses to life—she likes to get vocally angry with inanimate objects in her way, for instance, and my inner child is afraid of angry people—this can masquerade as constructive.  But the only way to troubleshoot what makes my problem worse is to address the wounded voices inside me that make me sensitive in the first place.  

The big book says  “The hardest place to work this program has been my own home…with my wife.”  It suggests working the steps specifically around home life, then says “‘the courage to change’ in the serenity prayer meant, not that I should change my marriage, but that I should change myself and accept my spouse as she was.”  That extends, I’d argue, to the group of voices I hear at the group meeting inside myself.  They are what they are.  Hearing them, and choosing to be my original child: this is important if I’m to lay hold of any serenity.  Validating them, and allowing my inner adult to focus me on seeing my life healthily: I’ve got to do it if I’m going to see things as they are.

The acronym is KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.  Keeping it simple, for AA, has always been, “Don’t drink, and go to meetings.”  For me this means “Don’t use substances, behaviors, or your home life as a solution to your problem, attend to the different voices that contribute to your ego, and allow the best of them to determine your perspective and behavior.”  Honestly, that’s still more complicated than I’d prefer.  But seeing it in the first place means doing it is easier than I think.  I begin the new year, not with resolutions—i can’t afford the force they involve—but with the Original Child’s fascination to witness what comes.