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.