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. ...

More »

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. ...

More »

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. ...

More »

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. ...

More »

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. ...

More »

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 ...

More »

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. ...

More »