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. ...

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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.  ...

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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. ...

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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.  ...

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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.  ...

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