God, the Shadow, and the Four Humble Truths

I need to answer the "why I have skin in the Tantric game" question.  I'm fascinated with Tantra because it helps me answer existential questions, ones that seem perilous to neglect.   Call it a midlife crisis if you must, but my entire life seems like one ego trip after another.  My spare hours are a procession of one shiny object after another.  The working world, seeing my discontent at the procession of 40 hour weeks, suggests more 40 hour weeks will calm things, if I'd only add evenings of internet (and weekends of alcohol when it all gets too much.)  And it seems to me that the answer is not simply to spiritualize the ego trip and call the shiny objects holy. [bxA]

Catholic theology is absolutely beautiful, but for me it isn't enough.  Awaiting the bridegroom, I've never had the foresight to bring lamp oil, and can only hope that learning to sit down and count the stars is sufficient alternative to a neurotic grab for what's lacking.  Perhaps the bridegroom has shut the door so I'll finally sit in the otherwise kind outer darkness and ask how much of the wailing and gnashing of teeth comes from my own mouth.  If I'd have known, in the beginning, what I know now, I'd have asked "what's the cost involved" sooner.  What's the cost of success in a professional world driven by ego?  What's the cost of satisfying desire when the reward is a discount for your next purchase?  And most importantly, what corners of my own awareness have I left obscured and messy by denial's benign neglect?  One thing is certain: our theology casts a shadow, and it is psychology.

It's one thing to say that I'm sinful and need God's grace.  Catholic theology has answered that question.  What it hasn't adequately done is unpack the pandora's box of concupiscence, to ask why my ego gets so clingy, why desire is so intolerable that I'll give it the worst of what it wants so it'll go the hell away, and why satisfaction is so terrible that I'll layer blame upon blame to forget it.  I needed to deal more thoroughly with theology's psychological underpinnings, if only in pursuit of a kinder relationship to my own mind.  That, in short, is the purpose of this post.

This next little section is going to borrow its structure from the Dharma--because Buddhists have, since their inception, been more than competently dealing with mind.  I have summed up the primary psychological effect of original sin in something I call the "Four Humble Truths."

The First Humble Truth is "All life is abstraction."  Original sin did a number of harmful things.  One of them was taking the set of ideas we'd begun to form about everything, granting it permanence and substituting it for the thing itself.  For the rest of human history, we've been interacting with our ideas about creation instead of creation itself.  We do this with God, with self and others, with mini-mart hot dogs and porches: nothing is exempt from abstraction.  And the biggest consequence of Abstraction is "othering."  In the beginning, we were part of God.  And God is one.  I suppose it wasn't too terrible when we were brought to the animals and began to call them things like "wildebeest" and "hippopotamus;" when we encountered Eve and said "flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone."  In other words, we "othered" everything.  At least at first, I'd bet this was innocent enough.  But I wouldn't fault HaShem if he was taken aback that we didn't just say "God, God, God" over and over.

The Second Humble Truth is "All is in need of recapitulation."  In other words, we share in Christ's work of "remaking" all things.  This involves facing the way we're at fault for perpetuating sin, facing the brokenness of all things, and gradually witnessing and cooperating with the ways grace and the energy of the spirit conspires to change them.  Absolutely everything is in need of recapitulation: our religious ideas, our relationship to our emotions, the way we get stuck in our head when we could be facing the reality.  Reality is tastier.  It has peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Idealized PBJ's fill no stomachs.

The Third Humble Truth is "The vehicle of recapitulation is the Body of Christ."  Christ incarnated in the "fullness of time."  That means he's a paradigm, and we project onto Christ what we think of ourselves.  In a sense Christ was history's first mirror.  And when Christ taught his disciples that he was in each and every person and thing (by appearing as a stranger and saying plainly "I am the gate for the sheep") he turned all of our othering into a mirror as well.  In Christ, all you ever see is yourself, until you live your own reality fully.  When Christ "ascended" he was hidden from their view.  Another way to say that is that he so deeply identified with us that we only find him by finding ourselves.  So finding him feels like we've lost him, because he is us.

The Fourth Humble Truth is "The way of the Body of Christ is the Humble Tenfold Way."  It should be noted that "humble" in this case doesn't mean "self-deprecating."  Instead it means "totally accepting."  We've been taught that we're good. Becoming humble means eventually accepting that we're also evil.  The Humble Tenfold Way is humble prayer, humble practice, humble intention, humble action, humble effort, humble speech, humble work, humble knowing, humble thinking and humble belief.  All of these things involve either accepting something we'd rather reject, or refusing to kowtow to ego.  So followers of the way pray "have mercy on me, a sinner" because accepting that is rough.  They work without thinking their work makes them better than others.  They speak plainly, knowing that all forms of judgment create suffering.  I've gone into detail about the Four Humble Truths elsewhere.  That's the gist of it: growth in the humble tenfold way invites Christ into deeper and more intimate levels of daily life.  Eventually the distinction between us and Christ disappears entirely.

To be humble is to do shadow work.  It means remembering we can get ideas about ourselves that distort reality.   It's a device so simple we almost thought it novel when alcoholics, by the hundreds, admitted they'd made their lives unmanageable, and were powerless. It seems, for me, that the way to protect or reclaim Eden's innocence is to remember that I'm also its serpent.  The way for God's people to be who they are is to remember that they can conduct themselves in a way that makes God call them "not my people." The way to become a rock on which Christ can build his Church is to remember that I am also a satan.

But the law told me that plainly.  Deuteronomy said "You shall not add to, or subtract from what I command you."  Glorifying myself, or forgetting my liabilities--I'm on the hook to avoid both, and now that I know, my actions are willful.  And to whatever degree that's universal: maybe, now, when the law says "Hear O Israel," we know the cost of covering our ears.

 

The Four Gospel Seals

His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, my upa-guru
and the14th Dalai Lama

In the monastery, I had a dried leaf on my desk for years.  It was blessed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.  To make a long story short, I'd been sent to a monastic conference, where I met a buddhist monk named Tsering.  He was on a speaking tour, in hopes of raising money for a building project at his monastery.  I gave him a bit of the travel money my monastery had given me, and he fished the leaf from his backpack.  But our interactions stuck with me for reasons unconnected to foliage. During a Q&A with a group of simply professed monks--monks in training, of whom I was one--someone asked Tsering to give them a piece of advice, to help them live as better monks. [bxA]

Counting on his fingers, Tsering had outlined the central tenets of Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Four Dharma Seals.  I've always remembered that.  The way Tsering encapsulated his tradition was crisp, clean and efficient--a method for which Catholicism had no equal.  We had a catechism. But even that concise statement of Catholic belief was a 500 page book.

Later, when I got into teaching Catholic High School students the finer points of theology and religious history, they'd often ask "what's the bare minimum Jesus taught" or "what's the least we have to do in order to be Catholic."  It took me about 4 years, but I began developing answers for those questions that fit a high school attention span.  Some of it was difficult to do--the Catholic Church had spent hundreds of years coming up with its first creed--but even that fell short of "a short version of what Jesus taught." Instead it was a short version of "what the church taught about Jesus."

So I found myself remembering Tsering.  I needed, in short, an equivalent to the four dharma seals, teachings I could count on my fingers.  As I understand it, the dharma seals are teachings with which all teaching must agree in order to be buddhist.  I needed teachings so central to Jesus' message that whatever was contrary to that ceased to be Christian. 

Eventually, between my reminders to stop drawing on desks and my students' requests that I solve their boredom with restroom passes, this is what I passed on:  in order to be Christian, a teaching had to agree with these four central principles of Jesus teaching.

Jesus, my sat-guru, rendered a bit differently 
than history remembers him.

The first is impermanence.  The point to make about this one is that impermanence goes side by side with dignity.  Jesus said "Consider the lilies, how they grow.  They do not toil or spin...even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these."  In saying this, Jesus was taking his place in a tradition that believed "All people are grass, and their constancy is like the flower of the field."  Jesus knows "that he'd come from God, and was going back to God." But that's a  reason for compassion--the quote just mentioned preceded the mandatum, the washing of the feet that, in John's Gospel, takes the place of "this is my body"--the famous words instituting the Eucharist.  In the end, early Christians understood even even heaven and the entirety of Jesus ministry is impermanent.  Corinthians said "then comes the end, when [Jesus] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every authority and power."  We are all, in the end, consciousnesses merging back into divine consciousness.

The second teaching all Christian doctrine has to agree with is non-self.  Jesus says "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow."  A great deal of how non-self is talked about is overshadowed by the importance of bearing the cross's difficulties.  The point remains: "self" is malleable, and Jesus asks for its renunciation.  Early Christianity doesn't quite figure out what substantive thing is left after self renunciation.  St. Paul comes closest.  He says his "true self is hidden with Christ in God."  He says "I live, but no longer I--Christ lives in me."  I suppose the larger point is to be made here is that Christ has totally accepted his own impermanence, so whatever non-self consists of, it is comfortable letting go of all that is.  In the larger  atmosphere of Christian mysticism, where unknowing is used as a tool to return all we know to God's mystery, I'd be comfortable saying that, ultimately, what I am is the "nada" John of the Cross found on the mountain.  Life doesn't always have to be about self: and our life can only be about diving to God's mystery and serving others to the degree that we've given it up.

The third teaching all Christian doctrine has to agree with is acceptance.  Jesus freely accepted the limits of an incarnation.  He accepted people fully, and healed those with the willingness to be healed.  He fully took the sins of the world on himself, accepting the role of the suffering servant.  He carried the cross.  He may have displayed some of the emotions common to a grieving process--anger that the temple was being used as a marketplace, sadness at the death of Lazarus.  But ultimately, in Gethsemani, the emotional turmoil of finding willingness ended in acceptance of a violent death.  And that acceptance was the foundation of a work in which the Father and the Spirit were much, much more active.

The fourth teaching all Christian doctrine has to agree with is interbeing.  This is a buddhist term, but it's very much something Jesus taught.  It means "everything is in everything else."  Jesus said "whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me."  In prayer to the Father, he said "I [am] in them and you [are] in me...so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.  Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, where he was a stranger till he was suddenly familiar were designed to teach that whomever we come in contact with is Jesus, though they don't resemble him in the least.  Given all of this, it's even reasonable to assume that when Jesus said "I am the sheep gate" he wasn't speaking metaphorically.  It seems he meant to make himself literally present in physical objects other than bread.  It's on the basis of things like this that folks as reputable as Richard Rohr name their conferences "The Universal Christ: Another Name for Every Thing."  After Christ, when the scales fall from our eyes, God is all things, and is in all things.  Full stop.

Impermanence, Non-Self, Acceptance, Interbeing.  It seems as if playing fast and loose with these teachings renders the gospel hollow and rotting from the inside. Not only that, backing down from some of the positive affirmations attached to these causes a great deal of suffering.  Impermanence and dignity must live together.  Non-Self and the safety of total surrender must go hand in hand.  Acceptance and the importance of death are rarely separate.  Interbeing actually quotes the Baltimore catechism when it asks "Where is God?" Nothing less than a full throated Everywhere will suffice.

Theologians will argue.  But I am a theologian who says these four things are the most important teachings of Jesus.  In my theological training, we were taught the centrality of the "elevator pitch."  If you can't sum something up, it says, in the time it takes to ride an elevator, you haven't assimilated your subject matter.

I love a great elevator pitch.  But to me, a dry leaf does the same thing.  When I departed from the monastery, I returned the Dalai Lama's blessed leaf to the earth.  Something about forever preserving an object blessed by a man who has, himself, taught impermanence for 13 previous lifetimes--it just didn't sit right with me.  Something about clinging to a leaf when my teacher didn't cling to his own life seemed blasphemous.  I was clingy and I still am.  It's a huge frustration.  But the frustration diminishes when I leave the "I" who is frustrated behind.  After all, bearing the cross is impossible for one whose hands are full of, well, anything.

So: breathe, feel, let go.  Nothing could be safer, friends.

Keeping Skin in the Game: What I've Got (To Lose)

This is a more personal post than I'm used to writing.  Only rarely would I presume to make my own, big dumb face the artwork for a post.  Scrutiny might reveal my art choices to be a steaming pile of my own narcissism.  Be that as it may: the post needed to be written--as a way of keeping on top of my emotional health--because it seems to me that spiritual work has involved consistent loss, and losses too-long-ungrieved have a history of catching up with me.  It seems, too, that I might have focused too exclusively on shedding ego, not enough on using it as a tool for positive change. [bxA]

The gospel figures who are important to me don't have that status because they make me feel good.  The folks I figure I'd hang out with are often the darker ones.  I hear a lot of myself in the healed demoniac, whose desire to accompany Jesus is refused and redirected.  Jesus says "Go home to your family and friends, and tell them all that the Lord, in his mercy, has done for you." Vocations that are mandates from (instead of accompaniment of) Jesus--they were always a bit uncomfortable to me.  But I might just be living in one of them, so I've got to claim that discomfort gently.  I hear a lot of myself in Bartimaeus, who is blind as he tells Jesus he wants to see.  There's a tension in having the mercy of God right in front of me, and being unable to see it...my history with long term, low grade depression has ensured this hits me palpably.  I empathize with the blind fellow whom Jesus has to touch twice--because when Jesus touches him once, he can see people, but they look like trees.  Accurate seeing, and not seeing people as potential crosses to bear-- has always been a challenge for me.

More than the rest, though, I empathize with the bloke who said "I believe, help my unbelief," because faith isn't the hard part for me.  The hard part is the way faith is limited by wisdom.  I'm the only one who can do my round of living and dying, sinning and repenting, suffering and coming to acceptance. Whether I like it or not--and let me assure you, I don't--taking responsibility is a sharing in Christ's cross, a total consent to the ways life energy and death energy are the same.  Unwillingness can sneak in all over the place.  I might take responsibility but then be resentful, as Gesmas (the "wicked thief") was.  I might take responsibility, but look for a future time that's better than this one, again seeking to abdicate my responsibilities, as Dismas (the good thief) did.  The point is to become the Christ who takes those voices as they are, and treats both of them compassionately--either with loving quiet or with consolation.  And to realize that none of the voices--of unwillingness or hope or acceptance--are coming from outside me: they're just mirrors of what happening within.  That kind of "expanded agency in adversity" is common only to those who've exhausted their questioning of the whirlwind.  When the Romans conquered the temple, the holy of holies--the temple's inner sanctum they thought would be full of treasure--it lay utterly empty.  And the brokenness of an open heart chakra is empty as well.  The paradox of mercy is: that void is a ministry and a healing, one that witnesses to the Spirit's energy.

I thought it would be easy to be a good human.  Sources like Aquinas say "just do it, it gets easier."  Blokes like Aquinas never met addicts, or abuse victims, or anyone whose unconfronted subconscious defensiveness short circuits conscious choosing.  It also turns out that the ability to be a good human is proportionate to one's willingness to admit they're a bad one.  In other words, attachment to "not being bad" can't solve your issues.  But it will always be true that virtue produces substantially less of the anxiety, remorse and blame that makes life unmanageable.

I didn't know what I expected from the Church, when I consciously chose to remain a part of it.  I know that, over time, parish life seemed hollow.  Charity isn't reducible to volunteerism, what you put in the poor box, or the number of parish committees in which you hold down a chair.  In other words, an initial experience of Jesus doesn't imply an ongoing program of transformation.  Care of others doesn't imply self care.  Intimacy with Jesus doesn't imply "feeling at home" in a parish full of people who may be simply spiritualizing their flaws rather than confronting them.  I have had to formulate my own program of transformation, out of bits and pieces pulled from various snap shots of Catholic thought throughout history (as well as from other religions that, quite frankly, have more fully developed programs of transformation than Catholicism.)  I've had to give myself permission to avoid those parts of parish life that aren't life giving, surrounding myself, instead, with a  group of like minded people who love me enough to gently call shenanigans on my bullshit.  Whoever can mutually refrain from bolting while honesty grows, those are my people.

After 7 years in a monastery, I thought something as simple as paying attention would come naturally to me.  Turns out I come from a long line of creative folks, who spend a great deal of time in their heads.  Any shiny object, in my psyche or in the world, can get in the way of what's right in front of me.  And we're living in an age of shiny objects--the internet, and advertisements exploit what we find pleasurable.  Our work obligations play on fear of sitting still, fear of "failure," fear of poverty. The dopamine fasts en vogue for the last few years aren't a terrible place to start--taking breaks from internet and other such pleasures.  The bottom line is, at some point I had to stop willfully forcing myself to "pay attention" and be conservative and mindful about where I willingly pointed my focus.

I don't know God's will.  Some days I'm just too exhausted to care.  Neurotic overwork taints my spirituality more than I'd like it to.  The three part Zen dictum "Quit trying, quit trying not to try, quit quitting" is gospel to me because of it.  I only know that, no matter how much I spiritualize it--and I've done so, with gross abandon-- my way hasn't worked.  So I'm suspicious of all strains of the spiritual life that boil down to "I've got to do something about this."  Because I don't know how to avoid being hoodwinked by the blinding light of my own angelic egotism.  My record isn't stellar.  Much as I might dislike it, though, pointing out to the world that religion isn't about sick misuses of spiritualized self-will might just be my corner of the Dharma.  Because I've tried to stop talking about it, and it never seems to work.    

Self-emptying comes for everything on earth, and makes paupers of us all.  Before students become teachers, all students die, all teachers die, all teachings lose meaning.  I didn't know this in the fascination phase, when the whole spiritual life was a devotional trip and no internalization of mystery or self-discovery had yet begun.  The "death" bit got snuck in towards the end, when I was already hooked.  In the end my only consolation is, as Ram Dass put it, the fact that "those who die before they die do not die when they die."  But to those of us who were surprised and incredulous: the reality of death was there the whole time.  The fact is, I had eyes but couldn't see.  I had ears, but couldn't hear.  Not till I descended with the mind to the heart.  The heart, see--the heart hears everything.  And it remembers: followers of the Way are no greater than their teacher.

Redemption isn't what I thought it would be.  Whenever I went looking for it to come from others, it hid inside me.  And it involved work and responsibility.  When I was not looking for it, it revealed itself in others.  And it was totally effortless.  How it manifests, and where--it defies both description and my efforts at control.

In any case, most egos are little shits.  Getting any particular ego to do constructive work is a dance, and my feet are coordination-poor.  All of the theological rules end up getting broken when dealing with the psychological demands of surrender and rebirth.  Hitting bottom is easy only for those whose face has never hit concrete because they found the bottom of a bottle first.  Suffice to say, surrender earns one zero gold stars, and it only happens once trying has become too much of a trial.  The reward is relief--which is no small potatoes--though relief is under no obligation to be exciting.

To be clear: the "I" that I'm working with--I'm learning that it's more elastic than I once thought.  There's more room to part with my defensive mental default mode than I'd anticipated.  There's more room to balance my nervous system.  But my mental pathways are ingrained enough that doing so takes substantial hustle.  I had to learn about Kundalini Yoga, and apply it. In other words, I had to mind my own energies.  I had to learn about Pranayam, and apply it.  Anxiety had literally changed my ability to breathe, and I had to make a decision to turn that around.  I had to learn about reframing, and make peace with all of the continuous-play mental-messages my family of origin left me with.

It's difficult, because however true it is that we'll need to forsake ego in the end, there are lessons to be learned in the meantime. However loud my sanctimonious cries of "how long, O Lord--" maybe God hasn't permitted me to shed my selfishness because I've thus far refused to learn its lessons.  Maybe the work of "accepting the things I can't change" is more ongoing than I anticipated.  And maybe getting comfy with spirituality's limits is more important work than mining its depths for insight.

Thea Bowman, that powerhouse of an African American nun who died of cancer in 1990, said "I've always asked God for the grace to live until I die."  Ram Dass put it just as simply.  Referring to life as a school, he said "take the curriculum!"  My willingness has never been that enduring, nor my words that concise.  Being a student of wisdom, if it allows me words at all, certainly proves me much less eloquent. But further denial is fruitless.  I am here.  And if I am here, then I'll work with willingness till I'm open, and here to learn.

All that's Lost and Found: a Diary of Drowning

Anthony de Mello passed on a nice little poem, that's become a bit of a spiritual fairy tale.  It may have been originally by Sadhguru--as with any fairy tale, the attribution's insignificant.  The story talked about a salt doll, who went to the sea to measure its depth.  As the salt doll waded into the sea, he called out to the sea "who are you," and the sea responded "come and see."  With each call and response, he gets deeper in.  First up to his waist, then up to his chest, then his neck, and each time the question: who are you? Come and see.  And because he's made of salt, each time he asks the question, a bit of him dissolves.  When he wades in up to his neck, just as he's about to drown, just as he's almost totally dissolved, he exclaims "Now I know who I am!"

As I said, it's a nice little poem. [bxA]  It conveys a truth: that mapping out who we are leads to an immersion in the truth. And the deepest level might look something like this: we've always been here, but we can't remember our other forms.  All of our other forms are here and now, but we can't access them.  We amnesiacs took this form before learning how to use it skillfully.  That's traumatic.  We created an ego in a last ditch effort to figure out existence before befouling it entirely.  Subject/Object distancing is actually a symptom of that egoic abstraction.  In other words, it's a symptom of the flaw, but the flaw is the route of return.   In other words, there's a way to map out that movement, but it's most important that we frame it correctly.

Because if you're like me, your attraction to the destination will lead to skipped steps.  Even if we can manage to face ourselves completely, only those who cease to exist from comfortable, objective, philosophical remove will truly be united to Christ.  Whatever part of life we're talking about--traumatic memories, the pain of deferred  the Kundalini energy of whose existence most Westerners are still uncertain--we can't unite with Christ until we fully accept and unite with all that our own incarnation consists of.  It seems like a tall order.  

I hope to lay it out in a bit of a different roadmap: its neither a map of who we are, nor a map of where we're going.  Instead, it just names the bits that I've discovered to be an illusion, but also the ways the illusion is important.  If I can map out my illusory thinking, what's real will take care of itself.  If I can just take honest steps, I'll arrive when I'm meant to arrive.  And, inshallah, a good bit of it might prove true for you, too.

Though I've talked about these before: allow me to re-introduce the theonoias.  The theonoias are units of mental energy.  The first theonoia is actually mental stillness.  St. Paul called it "the mind of Christ" and john's gospel calls it "Remaining with Jesus"  Contemplation is a temporary taste of the first theonoia.  Obedience is the first theonoia acted out. (It's what allows us to take the kids to soccer, change jobs and convincingly pretend jello salads aren't atrocious.)  Humility is a permanent, voluntary abiding in the first theonoia.

The second theonoia gives a name and a label to everything.  The trouble with the second theonoia is that we end up creating a version of ourselves that's removed from reality.  It's here that humanity gets its sense that opposites and distinctions are relevant. Good isn't bad, rest isn't work, one of those things is better than the other.  All ego needs is to be granted the kind of permanence that comes from choosing to act, and we have a problem that becomes unhealthy indeed.

The third theonoia takes the separate names and labels and weaves them into theories of how the world works.  Thomas Merton, in one of his most enduring moments, said "suffer without imposing on others a theory of suffering, without weaving a new philosophy of life from your own material pain, without proclaiming yourself a martyr, without counting out the price of your courage, without disdaining sympathy and without seeking too much of it."  All of these are mistakes of the third theonoia.  A Christian Tantrika should actively engage with identifying and abandoning the different narratives that rule egoic life.  

The theonoias don't just apply to thought.  They apply to many other areas of life as well. Remember: "I think therefore I am," Descartes's famous phrase with serious problems.  More accurately, thinking is part of mapping who you're not, a persona you first need to care for and then desperately need to let go of.  We are, all of us, like nested Russian dolls: we're impermanent beings, wearing multiple permanence costumes.

Thoughts, at the first theonoia, open us to emotions, but before we get there, our thoughts shift from what others can change to what we, ourselves can change.  There's a movement of the energy up the chakras. Compulsive thought, if it arises, can be more quickly accepted, nurtured and let go of. 

Emotions, at the first theonoia, open us to sensation, but before we get there, our emotions have shifted from egoic emotions like resentment and blame, rage and gluttony and lust and pride--they've become the basic emotions of a grieving process--anger sadness depression and acceptance--and we've come in contact with the brokenheartedness that Characterizes an encounter with the Word.

Sensations, at the first theonoia, open us to energy.  But before we get there, we have to see the stored pain of our history.  The body, as the psychologist Tian Dayton said, is the unconscious.  So trauma, and all of our inadequate habitual responses to it--all of that tension gets stored in the body.  This can accumulate from many lifetimes.  (Some day we'll have a conversation about reincarnation vs. 

Energy, at the first theonoia, is something to be experienced, not seen from an objective distance or analyzed.  It is present in everything and drives all life.  The point is to visit al the chakras and make sure its paths are unblocked.  A lot of westerners are unable to feel it because they only feel things that touch them.  Clothes, other people, etc.  Feeling kundalini certainly involves seeing the hollowness of all forms of acquisition. It may also involve simplifying diet, and making sure our sex lives don't cause harm.  It may involve developing a prayer practice.   Feeling kundalini involves becoming quiet enough to stop listening to noise and begin listening for it.  It involves not just feeling what's touching us, but being mindful enough of the body to realize that, when nothing is touching us, and we aren't touching anything, having a body comes with definite sensations.  In other words, being feels like something--without the external stimuli that we usually use to convince ourselves we're here.

Some key principles to remember: though the theonoias apply to thought, emotion, sensation  and energy, they're ultimately talking about things that you and I are not.  If you're thinking about existing, you're a step removed from doing so.  If you think you've achieved the ideal, you haven't.  The greater point to remember is that the theonoias are morally neutral.  They sketch out the path that flaws like abstraction, ego and sin follow as they develop, but they also show the way by which we can return to God.  The problem becomes the solution.

See, there's one thing the salt doll poem doesn't convey.  An experience of the Trinity coaxes us into stepwise renunciation.  Those who carry the cross hold no toys.  In the end, all theories are false.  In the end, no concept are is reality.   Union with Kundalini produces non-self, and lasts as long as our karma permits.  So ultimately "who and where we are" will entirely cease to matter. And that might be scary, but the fear will be okay...because we'll have been learning to work with the medicine of fear all along.  Suspended between being and non-being, and having developed both, we'll become part of what Jesus hands over to the Father.  And in the whole, warm and safe and great and terrible mystery, God will be all, and in all.

Revelation and Mystery: plumbing the depths

Bottom Line: from the beginning—and the beginning is now—what one is one, what’s many is many.  Also, what’s one is many, what’s many is one.  There is one consciousness, one manifestation, one energy, one breath.  There’s even "one sensation."  The rock doesn’t feel rougher or smoother to anyone else.  It feels like exactly what it feels like. God sees us with a single gaze.  

We see him with many. [bxA] Mystery would overload the mind. And anyway, we need people to tell us we have spinach stuck in our teeth.  God’s transcendence is totally intimate. Our intimacy flails about attempting to approximate it: it proves noses are, and at least one out of every four arms is, completely superfluous.  Reality is what it is.  Equanimity and suffering color our view of it. Everything is one, y’all, and the fault is ours.  

Originally, ego was the result of not knowing how to navigate desire, fulfillment, and attachment: but the good news is, the sickness is also the remedy.  Ego splits the world into this and that, divides the cosmos into different “realms.”  I touched on the two realms in the last post: we called them the realm of mystery and the realm of revelation.  Ultimately they’re just tools with which to shed the ego, but they’re worth knowing about, so we can use them more skillfully.

Revelation opens to mystery by intuition.  Wisdom is the result.  If we want to dodge the mundane blasphemies of mystery, we have to face revelation.  The goal, in the realm of revelation, is seeking out the things that challenge our ego, and doing them.  Its allowing life’s illogicality to break up our superficial existence.  It’s to seek out the holdouts of trauma in our psyche, and face them. We feel the pull of both grief and gravity. And in the end, any energy we encounter is “our energy.” If demons appear and we get scared, if angels appear and we are fascinated—that all points to attachments we haven’t faced.  And make no mistake, attachments aren’t easy to see—they’re buried under thought, a “level of existence” that it’s possible to spend whole lifetimes fooling with.  They’re even buried under the deeper stuff: emotion, psychological history, sensation and energy. From Buddha to Christ, each teacher has a story of descending into hell only to find mercy: if “accept and let go” is your rallying cry, you’ll do as they did, with equal compassion.     

Mystery consents to revelation through acceptance. Equanimity is the result. If we want to dodge the miniscule hells of revelation, mystery must become a tool.  Those espousing one religion’s truths have got to remember that the concrete sidewalk, all of the world’s religions, every human being and every rotting corpse—they all contain a part of the truth, constantly available to those who listen without ego.  Those of us who have an incarnation to navigate have got to find a way to remember, sans the neurotic self-deprecation, that we don’t know everything, we struggle more than we admit and that we absolutely aren’t the bees knees.  

Of course, every illumination casts a shadow. People who grant their thoughts about mystery too much importance can easily start thinking their godliness is unlimited.  People who get too excited about their own shrewdness are, in fact, living on the borrowed time of liars and thieves. Enlightenment may well consist of realizing that we may well have lived that way before—in some previous lifetime that’s long since forgotten—and that we could be there again with equal chance of missing the opportunities for awakening.  On another level, living with our eyes open may mean admitting the possibility that we are, in a way that’s free of time, living all of our lifetimes in the present moment—and that the point, in every single one of them, is to minimize suffering.  If you will become a buddha, perhaps you were once in hell: so stand up to the demon persecuting others.  If you were a thief, perhaps you defended the innocent crucified beside you.  Whatever the case, don't get too caught up: when it is now, you'll surely be both at once.

There's something that needs to be said about morality and ego as well.  No one is ever free from the moral law.  But there are times that "doing the right thing" becomes less important than "distancing from ego."  There are, in the end, some problems whose resolution goes hand in hand with egoic distancing--they're mostly the problems that arise in an attempt to get basic human needs met.  Affection and validation, power, control and security, food, clothing and shelter--habits we've developed in an attempt to get these particular needs met--can often be so compulsive as to be unresolvable.  This is part of the reason the moral law ends in mercy.

But it's also why the moral law ends in non-self as well.  It's certainly true that we will spend most of our lives trying to improved the way we use our egos.  In the end, to truly act, to truly be--this is a process of making ourselves available to the energy flowing through the cosmos.  And that means removing the impediment of ego altogether.  A few great saints have bent physical laws in the process of becoming open to that energy.  The point is twofold.  Firstly, it's a process of willingly laying down the self, not of willfully setting a goal of enlightenment.  Secondly, sometimes high and low, bad and good, right and wrong are not as important as the status of the self that's doing the observing and the acting and the being.  All the laws apply still, while we are here in the body.  But they diminish in importance.

These are big questions, and getting caught in the mind games of answering them doesn’t substantially help me practice.  I suppose the point is to remember, like Adam, that being like God can have serious negative consequences, can make us miss out on the important things of earth.  The point is to maintain, from the highest heavens to the depths of earth, an equanimous compassion that springs from self-acceptance.  If we can do that, then perhaps we’ll find the teachers words—IT IS FINISHED—forming in our mouths in each quiet moment.  And when we say it, God willing, perhaps it will be so.

The Two Realms

My life story is like a crappy book, getting published by a dysfunctional press.  Even if the author can get his act together and tell the tale, the editors rip it to shreds until nothing remains, and the publicity folks pitch it in all the wrong markets.

Writing, for me, is a sadhana.  Sadhana is a hindu term that means "daily spiritual work"--working with words is mine.  This can be a bit weird, because I exhaust myself trying to find the most concise ways to express ultimate truth.  It can be a bit funky wondering if anyone else will find the tale useful.  The effort is frequently an enormous drag.  But I've tried to stop, and it doesn't work.  To paraphrase Ram Dass, writing is my sadhana whether I like it or not.

If there's a single word that boils down what brought me to Christian Tantra, it's "Suspension."  It comes from St. Guerric of Igny, a monk who was trained in the same lineage as myself.  To him, it meant being crucified with Christ.  It meant being immobilized between heaven and earth, so that one couldn't, for all the desire in the world, lay hold of the things of heaven.  It also meant hanging just high enough so that one couldn't reach the things of earth.  Guerric talks about suspension the way sick people do who've lost their appetite: put them at the most sumptuous feast they've ever been at, and they may eat, but they don't particularly enjoy it.  They handle the world the way we do smelly garbage or a hot potato.  You get the picture. 

I think about suspension in a lot of the same ways Guerric did.  But it's also morphed [bxA], and the ways that it morphed are important, because they produced Christian Tantra.  To me, suspension isn't just a concept.  It's a lived reality.

When I was in college, I sat in the back of Gethsemani Abbey's enormous stone church.  The whole place was dark, and I was alone.  At one point, I looked up and saw a monk pass in the back of the church.  He was replacing the sanctuary light, the one that burns perpetually when the Eucharist is reserved in the tabernacle.  He silently lit the new wick, then moved off into the dark with equal quiet.

I was left alone again.  But now my focus was on the sanctuary.  And in a moment I felt the emptiness of the distance between me and the light.  Later, a monk named brother hugh would concisely say his vocation began in a moment of feeling "the presence of absence." In that moment, that's what I felt.  It would take me years to realize that the "shunyata" or emptiness that is the essence of all hearts, was sympathetically resonating with the emptiness of the room.  

I became a monk because I tried to wrap that emptiness in an ethos, the black and white robes of a prescribed role.  I took the name Br. M. Dismas Warner OCSO.  (All trappists once took "Mary" as a first name to honor Jesus' mommy, a practice that's common these days only to offensively pious postulants like myself.)  I chose the name of the good thief because I wanted to love Jesus by sharing the experience of his loneliest moment.  I had a deep attraction to the words from the Wisdom of Solomon.  Chapter 17 talks about the "prison not made of iron"--a prison, the text says, that's ultimately forged of our own futile thinking.  When I left the monastery, I saw my error: the prison wasn't made of iron, nor was the liberation to be found in a monastic cell.

I continued to feel "pulled."  Back then I would have said "anxious."  I used to dread it, until I realized that the nervous energy and the sadhana are two sides of a coin.  Back before I wrote a second-rate blog, the more manic voices of my inner monologue produced tomes and tomes of second-rate poems.  Early one winter morning, walking through the dark to the teaching job I had after leaving the monastery, I was feeling my round of daily angst and remember being stopped in my tracks with the thought "The anxiety is ok.  It's just infant poems."  Ever after, only at my most stressed did I call what I felt "anxiety."  More often I'd call it "creative tension."  Suspension may be just a concept to some.  In its "creative tension" though, I found a reason to view jittery legs and chewed fingernails kindly.

If creative tension is floating around in life's stormiest moments, the body is a lightning rod.  I gave that strain a name many years after I left the monastery, but I began to learn how to manage it while I was still there.  During a run-in with Yoga Magazine in the basement of the monastery library, I learned a breathing technique that cleared my head immensely.  Some of the technique had to do with posture.  Later on, while standing in church, chanting the psalms with the community, I brought my shoulders and chin back a little and breathed from my diaphragm.  My shoulders twitched, and suddenly I felt heat from the top of my head to the middle of each thigh.  Before that day, I could feel my chest, my back, my arms and legs.  After that day, I could feel every muscle in my chest, back, arms and legs.  I could even, if I was gentle enough, coax a stressed muscle into relaxing.  In India they call these experiences "Kundalini Awakenings"--where breath, energy and attention begin to work together, making whatever your sadhana is an embodied reality.  I made too much of it, at first.  In India it's not a big deal.  The street sweeper, your octogenarian grandmother and the bloke who refills your chai tea all deal with kundalini however their Karma determines they should.

I bring all of this up because breath, attention and energy became, in my own practice of Christian Tantra, the primary tools of spiritual practice.  There are others: when we're not grounded, the sounds involved in mantra practice can lead us back to energy through the door of physical sensation.  Sound, vibrating in the body, can shift our focus to something other than the skittish energies of anxiety.  Thought about the Trinity, when we're also asking where we feel tension, can let us know whether the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit is active in us.  But too much attention to minutiae can fill us with self-importance.  Suspension is to bring the attention to breath and energy, without writing blogposts about it later.

With nowhere else to go, suspension interiorizes spiritual work, and fragments the ego.  There's a part of ego that's always evaluating things: this becomes, with practice, a patient observer.  There's a part of ego that has equal trouble with pain and pleasure.  This becomes, with a little attention, the impulse to experience something fully without judging.  There's a part of the ego that's wounded and judges everything in a fruitless bid for control of its situation.  Once this part of the ego can distinguish what it can change from what it can't, it becomes the discerner of skillful ways to deal with things.

In suspension, we learn to live in two "realms" simultaneously.  One is the realm of mystery.  As we live, more and more, in the realm of mystery, we gain more and more distance from our identification with ego.  "There is an ego." we say, in impersonal monotone, "It rattles around in my body."  I can work with the ego and try to limit its self-destructiveness. But there's a limit to how much I can do, because, like a man nailed to the cross, I can't leave this body.  The other realm is the realm of revelation.  In the realm of revelation, we learn to use the ego as it was meant to be used--as a self protective tool.  Jesus said "be wise as serpents and innocent as doves."  This means learning how to protect ourselves (as much as we can) from other people's manipulation, even as we admit that we're never free of it.  It means being able to feel the difference between Satan, who prowls about the world seeking the ruin of souls, and the Spirit, who blows where it wills.  It means cultivating the tools to actively live life, without the defensiveness of clinging to it.  More than a "separate hell and heaven" we begin to see two different ways of wielding our "selves:" one that leads to non-attachment, the other too suffering.

Living a life free of tension doesn't seem to be my Karma.  But I can be mindful of it, change how I relate to it, watch its subtle and constant shifts.  Falling too cleanly into any one category doesn't seem to be my vocation.  I feel pulled between heaven and earth, mostly unable to move until I realize Jesus was right: if I call my brother a fool, I'm liable to judgement. If I live by the sword, I'll die by it. It's not so much about what others do to me, but rather about what I invite into my life by my choices.  So the curtain in the temple, and the seamless garment teach a lesson.  Being torn between heaven and hell might just be what anchors us to earth.  Accepting how pulled apart we are might just be the way to find wholeness.  

Ok.  Enough from me.  Breathe.  Pay Attention.  Feel.  Our egos are old wineskins, each day is new wine.  But make no mistake about it, whatever the years have poured into us, what we're bursting with is life itself.

What is Christian Tantra; Why is it Necessary?

 

It's been more than a year since I last wrote.  I realize that the Vienna Cricket Choir might easily drown out those left to read this.  But because writing helps me clarify what I believe, here I am.   I've spent the last year boiling down and poking at what I'm about to explain in detail, because it feels important both to speak accurately--and to obey the impulse not to speak-- in those increasingly frequent moments when silence and intuition need the floor.

I've come to realize that Christian Tantra is extremely important; the whole world has been told to go to its room and shut the door.  The number of Church congregations who have endangered their members' health by continuing to gather makes me realize that something of the Wisdom teaching at the core of Christianity has been lost.   In a way, Christian Tantra is an account of the "prayer to the father who sees in secret."  The upshot is, Tantra is also the reward--because, put quite simply, since I began meditating and practicing this way, my life is better.  I'd guess that others' lives would be improved by a similar set of tools. [bxA]

On a personal level, I've needed to focus on the basics.  Part of my own need for Christian Tantra is something I share with my former theology students: there are so many useless things vying for my attention--shiny objects to which I've gladly conceded my focus--that my ability to be present to things is seriously impaired.  Combined with a worldwide pandemic, the narrative careens toward the catastrophic.  Luckily, this is part of what the practices of Christian Tantra have begun to heal.  There is a balm in Gilead indeed, and Gilead is precisely where each of us is sitting, right now.

It's hard to say why I think Christian Tantra is necessary without presenting a caricature of "Popular Catholicism."  I call it "Christian Tantra" (as opposed to "Catholic Tantra") because, while I believe the things I'll speak about to be consistent with the example of Jesus, modern Catholics, particularly American ones, may feel that Christian Tantra lacks historical roots.  Fair enough.  Further than that, I'll claim, in some cases, to be accurately distilling the silences of Jesus--to accurately read what he is not saying in a way my college theology professors would claim is isogesis--reading into the gospel-- and in a way critics of the monastic scriptural tradition have claimed is psychologizing the gospel.  I am guilty on all counts. When I claim to read Jesus' silences correctly, I don't do so lightly.  I can only testify that doing so has made the burden of my own ego and attachments lighter.

I've talked before about the overblown sense of egoic permanence in Western Christianity.  It's a permanence driven by the mind, and the mind, seeing only illogicality and contradiction, seeks to argue its way out of its self-made prison.  While there are exceptions to this--more people than we know wade into the mystical end of the ecclesial pool--I do believe that the popular Catholic mind is shackled to mind, and to concepts.  The Enlightenment battle cry was "I think therefore I am." Mixed haphazardly with the scientific revolution's empiricism, Darwin's Origin of the species, and the industrial revolution's way of making workers a cog in so many machines--what that battle cry leaves us with is a populace that thinks at the expense of feeling emotion and sensation, and then is eaten up by remorse, guilt, blame--and addiction upon addiction for those in denial.  It's as a tool of this kind of spiritual bypassing--clinging to faith's positivity as a way of ignoring the rot beneath the surface--that religion becomes precisely the opiate of the people that Marx said it was. Either that, or our faith inflates our egos--in other words, we're guilty of the spiritual materialism that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche talked about, where faith's different "experiences" become things we treat as credentials and lord over others.  Either way, the prognosis for religion in modern culture is not terrific at all.

In the hands of one's ego, religious devotion gets abused.  We wait in joyful hope for the coming of the Lord, but in the hands of Ego, it seems as if he'll never come.  As often as we've prayed the Lord's prayer, we've asked for his kingdom to come, but ego's a drain on our waiting.  This is all, too often, invisible to us--so, while ego holds the things of God at arms length, we wonder what we're doing wrong.  If it's anything, Christian Tantra is a radical reminder that the solution was never far from us.  God is "I AM--" he's closer to us than we are to ourselves.  His kingdom is already here: he's not slow as some think of slowness.  Instead, when humanity loses its glasses, God waits for us to realize they're already on our face. 

By way of Rinzai Zen's koan tradition, I came to something different than illogicality and contradiction.  Best case scenario, and always from the other side of confusion, paradox would blink back at me.  I would question along with Master Joshu--about whether dogs have a buddha nature--and feel that paradox viscerally until my ego loosened its grip a bit.  What  was happening was precisely what the pilgrim--the bloke who prayed the Jesus Prayer--talked about.  I was descending "with the mind, into the heart."  I was embarrassed to feel like I was returning to my own house to find it ransacked.  I have more anxiety, more sadness and anger than I care to talk about, and a million little ways I've tried to use those things to manipulate situations.  In the humdrum light of claiming my part of universal human schmuckery, I saw I had some house cleaning to do. But I felt, as well, like a new path had opened for me.  The suspicion that my problems are universal made me want to talk about the solutions.

Christian Tantra is, in fact, a Wisdom tradition.  Life, Death, Sin, Suffering, and bridging the gap between reality and ideal--these are all jobs we can't farm out.  They are our crosses to bear.  And just as Jesus became sin: too often, they're jobs we can't do without morally getting our hands dirty. Our best attempts reveal thorns in our flesh: relief, at the best, that we've all fallen short, and pleas, at the worst to be freed from this body of death.  The point is, our speech is often warped by an inflated sense of its own usefulness.  Much of Christianity rests on a weird entitlement some have felt to instruct or exhort others--Paul speaks, for instance, of his right to correct the communities he founded.  Even leaving our hypocrisy aside and assuming the best of intentions--unless compelled by angst or impelled by admiration and desire, no one will change who still has an excuse not to.

Christian Tantra is non-transcendental. (I'm indebted, here, to the Tantra scholar Christopher Wallace, for naming the inter-religious tantric commonality I'd been babbling about for years.)  When I say it's non-transcendental, I mean things like "Heaven will take care of itself if we face the ways we make our reality a hell.  Being "Good" will take care of itself so long as we don't ignore the ways we cooperate with evil.  Ego and attachment and desire will take care of themselves so long as we acknowledge they're there, and admit, as Psalm 6 says, that our bodies and souls are racked with pain because of it.  In other words, Christian Tantra starts with the parts of reality we'd prefer to ignore, the center of which is our own bodies.  The Flesh remembers all things.  Jesus descended into hell.  He ascended into heaven.  The body is the entire stage on which we make his journey.

Christian Tantra--distinct from the dualistic nature of Christianity's classic formulations--is a "theistic monist" religious outlook.  That means that the Godhead somehow is creation.  A few cautions: God isn't confined to his creation, as in pantheism or animism.  Though there are bits of truth in traditions that say otherwise, for Christian Tantrikas, no tree or spirit, no finite thing at all has the creds to sell itself as divine.  But we have a God who named himself "I AM" and then incarnated in the fullness of time.  We have a redeemer who lived a whole incarnation to recapitulate all things, who made himself present in bread; who said he was sheep gates and shepherds, and vines and a light for the way, if those who had eyes would just see it.  Paul hints that his true self is hidden with God--in a place that St. Therese of Lisieux later found, calling the Christian an other-Christ.  

To begin, Christian Tantra makes bold to admit Christ is the name for "things as they are." In the end, God is, but isn't confined to all things. It's a reality to which the sacraments have pride of place as a wake-up call.  Ultimately, though, Christian Tantrikas--those who practice Christian Tantra-- find the source and the summit wherever they are along the way...egos may say that some things give more grace than others, that some vocations are holier than others.  Christian Tantrikas wait for that clanging gong to stop ringing.  The toll on their serenity is too costly to get caught in those traps.  And anyway, an old monk once said wisdom means admitting everyone's right and everyone's wrong.  Everything else will drive you nuts.

More than anything, Christian Tantra is a practice that penetrates deeply through the many layers of embodied reality.  I can talk about "theistic monism" all day, but if I am ignoring any aspect of my reality, claiming the role of a teacher will just gain me suffering.  Thought doesn't exist in a vacuum, there are emotions attached to it.  Those emotions aren't just ethereal things, they come attached to particular sensations in the body.  Until that whole incarnate chain reaction is witness, accepted and nurtured, the body will be a prison.

Christian Tantra is a non-dual philosophy that incorporates all of a Tantrika's faculties.  It's a system of practice undergirded by some very specific foundational principles.  I'll talk about those things in great detail.  For now, to suffice the "why does it matter" question: I talked about spiritual bypassing and spiritual materialism as errors to which society is prone.  The fact is, I know both because I've had my hands in both, up to my elbows and for years.  I noticed myself misreading my own spiritual data and skipping important steps, because there was a change in my serenity.  I became more anxious.  I was having to do more work to keep up the façade--that I was fabulous and everything was going swimmingly.  I became increasingly exhausted.

To admit the errors in my faith life was scary...I'd invested 14 years in an image built on how exclusively graced I felt my life was.  I'd said all the prayers, I'd gone to the wilderness, I'd punished my body with fasting and I'd kept silence. But to shed it was a relief.  And I suppose that's why I'm writing: to talk about the new practice that finally has me able, in the silence, to sit still.  I'm hoping--no, I'm betting-- that those who can empathize are more numerous as my worries were legion.