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.
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