The Humble Tenfold Way

I am Christ, and so are you, and so is everything the miles between us contains.  Christ is God, so are you, so am I.  All times are now, all places are here, all potential is realized, all actions and words are just "being" having a self-realization.  From the moment we're suspended with Christ on the Cross, (and the only moment that can be is now) the darkness and light are both alike to us: good and bad, attraction and aversion, pleasure and pain--all of these are one, just ego testing out its capacities and boundaries. 

The opening of the third eye chakra can lead to these kinds of epiphanies, but how we get there, and what to do with them, is an open question.

A mental framework that encourages self-emptying--and that points out the beauty and goodness of both what we lose, and the process of letting go--is important.  What follows is modeled after the Buddha's Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path.  But there are real differences between Buddhism and Christianity "[In Christianity] The goal isn't just emptiness" an old novice master said to me. "but emptiness for the sake of fullness."  The theological term for that is "recapitulation."  In other words, we sit with emptiness so everything can be remade.  The third humble truth is "The Vehicle of Recapitulation is the body of Christ." And the last of the Four Humble Truths is "The way of the body of Christ is the humble tenfold way."  These two truths deserve a deeper look: because the way they function in Christian Tantra is part of what makes it distinct, and those distinctions are important. [bxA]

I want to talk about the fourth humble truth first, not for organization's sake, but because it represents how most of us get at the truth.  In other words, just like we often flail around in error before finding the right way, the humble tenfold way is just a list of things that we need to straighten out in order to minimize our delusion, dial down the crazy on our self-imposed suffering.  

The Humble Tenfold way is "Humble Prayer, Humble Presence, Humble Intention, Humble Action, Humble Effort, Humble Speech, Humble Work, Humble Knowing, Humble Thinking and Humble Belief."  At bottom--and this, I suppose, is the most important mark of "whether you're successfully doing them"--they each eliminate the distinction between subject and object.  The work of the humble tenfold way is in "dis-identifying with the doer," allowing ego to diminish.

Humble Prayer:  When I was in the monastery, I used to expend a lot of words and effort to package what I wanted God to know about me.  I prayed like celebrities have their agents issue press kits.  Realizing this, I confessed it to a friend.  He said "I know that story, man...these days I try to minimize how much I do it.  Instead I try to just sit down and say to God 'this is what I've got.'"  Humble prayer doesn't manipulate the data.  It's an offering particularly of what you'd rather God not see.  So the tax collector who said "Have mercy on me" shows us more than the pharisee who listed his accomplishments.  Clinging to accomplishments is easy, and it can bring us further into illusion.  Admitting liabilities is hard, and it can usher us into the Truth.  Those who see both and let go of them are praying humbly.

Humble Presence:  Thich Nhat Hanh said something like "We don't usually eat our food or drink our beverage.  Instead we chew on our thoughts about the food, our concerns about the day, our anxieties and worries."  At the very least, humble presence acknowledges we have this capacity, and uses the blessings of the senses as tools to return to the moment, to eat bread when we eat bread.  Humble presence helps me let go, till there isn't as much of a distinction between me and the sunset I'm watching. Instead I just become the eating, become the seeing.

Humble Intention:  "A monk's job is to live in reality."  These were the words of Dom Timothy Kelly, longtime abbot and head of Gethsemani Abbey.  I think they're accurate for us all: plumbers, tantrikas, dog walkers-liars and seekers of all types.  Personally, I am so attached to remembering only the positive bits of life that I'll unconsciously cease to deal with suffering, pain and my own liabilities.  Everyone does what they must to remember the things that slip their minds: suffice to say, the goal of "grieving suffering" is part of the work.  Accepting reality means having an intention to face our shadow and minimize its chaotic hold on our life.

Humble Acting: To act humbly is to be willing, rather than willful.  It is to stand between acquiescing and running the show and allow intuition (and emotion, sensation and energy) to prompt my next move.  Humble acting means being subject to the creative tension between choices.  There is a way of proceeding that's respectful not just of craving and desire, but of the body and my karma--in other words, that's gentle to my incarnation as a whole, especially including my shadow.

Humble Effort: In today's technologically overstimulated climate, we've lost the ability to wield attention as a tool.  We've become an army of the distracted, led every which way by life's shiny objects.  We've become hooked on the immediate gratification of a button-pushing culture.  And so, when nothing's fun, we have trouble sitting still.  If asked to give sustained attention to a candle's flame, we'd have real trouble doing so. Humble effort does two things.  It retrains attention to focus on impulsion (on emotion, sensation and energy) instead of craving and it teaches us to evaluate how indulging in distractions has affected us.  When done gently, humble effort is a practice that heals attention, allowing it to stand aside from anxieties, to be intentional about focus, and to do so with its inner eye focused compassionately on the woundedness concealed by craving and distraction.

Humble Speech: Students who process information verbally use a great many words as they first encounter information, increasingly fewer as they integrate it.  Economy of words shows mastery.  Economy of words also shows that a person has first gone from thinking of something to doing it, then from doing it to being it completely.  They have become one with themselves, and one with the object of their study all at once.

Humble Work: The jobs we choose to accept, the hobbies we engage in--these aren't free.  They take a toll on us.  Highly evaluative jobs--like being a food critic, train the people who work in them to be subtle in judgement, and that's not always good.  Judgement can take a dark turn very quickly, turning to cynicism to conceal our insecurities.  It's also important to ask whether the way I spend my time cultivates empathy for others, or uses them as a tool of my denial.  If I remember that people like me have a tendency to drink away our problems, and that other people are just as sensitive to stress as I am, I will be less apt to open a liquor store.  And it's not a rejection of the bad, but a choice between goods: I want to take a job that, in myself and others, supports self-knowledge more than it encourages denial.

Humble Knowing: Slightly enigmatically, Ram Dass once said something like "You don't know until you know you don't know."  With most non-informational questions, until my immediate response is "I don't know," I haven't taken the question seriously.  Serenity comes from adaptability, and self concept leads to inflexibility and anxiety. So until queries cause the inquisitor to self-question to the point of realizing that impermanence is the truth, "knowing" hasn't taken place.

Humble Thinking: As a brain function, thinking can easily take on too much of the burden of being.  The mind was meant to perceive.  And in perception, all is one, and the name of God comes out of our mouth as naturally as breath.  Instead, though, we "othered" everything around us, first by labelling everything, then by theorizing about how they're related.  We were Adam, naming animals, devising lengthier descriptions of others, poetic though they were.  Innocent enough at first, in light of sin, it became an expression of egotism and clinging. Eve began as "flesh of [Adam's] flesh," and ended up a target for his blame.

Humble Belief: Ram Dass said "Faith is what is left when all your beliefs have been blown to hell." There is a difference, then, between beliefs (the intellectual statements I hold as true) and Belief (trusting that the One behind the process is intelligent and loving.)  We show the strength of our Belief by the pliability of our beliefs.

A great many of these practices involve diminishing ego and consciously closing the distance between self and other.  But the question looms: why does that matter?  That speaks to the third humble truth, "The vehicle of recapitulation is the body of Christ."  I need to say it clearly.  The body of Christ is your body, and it's my body, fully and right now.  The body of Christ is the true nature of everything in existence.  It's the Christian answer to the Taoist concept of "pu." Christ is the "uncharted block," he is "things as they are" in the Christian story.  Though certainly a truth we are "reading in" to the gospel, this identification of Christ with the "natural state" is clearly echoed when Jesus says "I am the gate for the sheep."  What Paul pushed into the future as his "true self hidden with Christ in God" St. Theresa proclaimed as immanent.  "Christ," she said, "has no body but yours."  The Humble Tenfold Way is designed to help you and me remember this.  Along the way, everybody and everything has become part of us: in the emptiness of Christ's sacred heart, (which is our own,) self love and service are one.

To close, just a small reminder, both to you and to myself: chill out.  Don't let your neuroses turn insights into marching orders.  It's totally safe to relax.  We have things to listen to, learn, and look at in this incarnation.  It's enough to let that break your heart.  These concepts are the frame around which we're building the house, but there's grace in the bricks, and divine presence.  Another began the work, and he will complete it.  

Spirits and Chakras: Making some distinctions

While Catholics know a good deal about how the Spirit has acted in the Church, they've left the spirit of God that's in each of us largely unexamined.  And so a great many Westerners have been uncomfortable in their own skin.  If God's spirit can be treated as an anthropological reality, for a moment, and not something on which one faith corners the market, a great deal more can be said--in a manner, (if you'll permit me to sound a bit nuts,) that's biblical and traditional.  My questions, of course, are about manageable living, coming to acceptance and being humble, but they're just as rooted in becoming intimate with my own incarnation.  What follows is just a roadmap to self acceptance--which will be different for each of us, surely, but worth talking about nonetheless.

I'm convinced: there's no such thing as light or dark energy, only energy to which we're attached or non-attached.  The energy that animates all life is the Spirit of God, and that energy is sentient.  Egoically, the basic human needs manifest as "darker" desires--hyper-focused and possessing their own personalties.  These were the "demons" that the desert fathers fought.  In a similar way, psychologically, the Spirit of God manifests as lighter desires, and appears to come from outside us--as angels, for instance.  It moves through the body and gets a different name for each place it typically comes to rest.  But it's important to note: just like God called himself "I AM," sentient divine energy is just wearing the language of ego and psychology to make itself knowable.  The whole time, it's been within. [bxA]

"Deep calls upon deep, in the roar of waters."  In the chaos of life, energy resonates sympathetically.  It's trying to unite--the world with us and us with each other.  I don't want to talk about that energy, I want to address it.  And I don't want to talk to that energy, I want to be totally united with it.  It's you I'm talking to.

I could say this to my fiancee or to the bodega owner as much as to God's spirit: I don't know that I see you as much as I should or as clearly as I should.  My inattentiveness causes me a great deal of both guilt (which I can change by making amends) and remorse (which my ego won't let go of until I assist "healing and letting go" at doing more of their work.)   A great number of people--from Catholics, to Hindus, to Amazonian Shamans--have been hollering at me for years: there's a need, says their united voice, for purification.  

I'm being called to actively listen, whether sound is present or not.  It's a practice made more difficult by the assault on the senses that modern daily life can be.  Tuning out counts as a survival tactic, but pretty soon someone's got to sing a song about the "sound of silence" in a central park crowd of thousands before I can hear it. I'm being called to take my time, to taste and be grateful for subtler flavors than my salty, fatty, sugar rich diet has, the one I crave to mask stress with.  I feel for the slices of the human family who are so starved for safe affection that they pounce on any touch, (or, hell, any depiction of touch,) like it's bread in the wilderness.  Fasting and consciousness are well nigh impossible in a situation of scarcity.  Despite that, I have to recognize that I'm a being of infinite longings in a world of finite satisfaction.  The Logos is speaking clearly: go within, bear the cross. Take responsibility, be honest.  Otherwise don't be surprised when life is hard--my pervasive escapism, and society's, is always (in some measure) voluntarily chosen.

There are analogues for spiritual energy, and little more.  Spiritual energy is Eden's fourth, secret river, searched for uselessly on land, till at wits end it wells up within.  It is the Christ, faltering up the via dolorosa to the "place of the skull" where the Spirit of the Lord and the voice of honest grief are one, love hangs between worried thieves, and Christ and his devotee are not two.  

However, if we want to be absolutely clear, the energy that is the Spirit of God, (apparent to those who have prayed and purified,) is addressed in the prophet Isaiah.  In what I ultimately think is a description of every human being, it says "The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,  the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might,  the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord."

First, this fabulous piece of lectio divina isn't my own: it comes from a woman named Bonnie Breniser.  It's her contention, and mine, that these seven "spirits" are accurate analogues for Hinduism's 7 Chakras.  The truth of it was shockingly clear, and deserving some examination. 

There's a chakra at the base of the spine, where blocked energy causes feelings of neurotic insecurity.  The "spirit" that our reading of Isaiah would place here is the spirit of fear of the Lord.  Let the reader understand, this is more like awe than terror, and it brings to mind biblical voices like the author of of Proverbs.  "Fear of the Lord," says God's Word "is the beginning of Wisdom."

Creativity and healthy sexuality flourish when the chakra just below the belly button is unblocked.  At this chakra, the spirit of knowledge descends and rests.  Therefore, it became a saying that a man would leave his mother, cleave to his wife, and "know her"--so deeply as to become one flesh.

The chakra just above the belly button regulates ego.  In negotiations with this spirit, we work out our relationship--for good or ill--with power.  So the spirit that hovers over this chakra is the "spirit of might."

At the breastbone, at the heart chakra, we're emptied of all of our resentments and willful angling when we're present to the spirit residing there.  Indeed, just as the conquerors of the temple, expecting riches, were surprised to find the Holy of holies completely empty--just as Jesus's sacred heart was emptied by grief and pierced with a lance--in that same way, we will not find real compassion until our hearts are empty as well.  Only then can the spirit of counsel balance listening and speaking with gentleness.  Only then can I find kindness for others, because I've found that their dark corners and mine are the same.

"I thirst!" To me, this is Jesus at his most basic and honest: stripped, as he is, of all theologies and trappings of a teacher. Speaking personal truths is the throat chakra's job. And that's appropriate, because it's the spirit of understanding that rests at the throat chakra. It's a paradox: he who understands speaks his truth plainly, in few words. So it wasn't "I hunger and thirst for this or that Holy Thing as part of this or that spiritual objective." Jesus said "I thirst," and went back to the business of embracing life's paradoxical nature. Jesus was less and less able to avoid, I think, knowing that every bit of living is also a dying, every bit of vitality and rejoicing calls for a measure of grief as well.

At some point, the beloved either internalizes the lover, or dies tormented by longing for him.  Before disciples become masters, students die, teachers perish, and wisdom passes away.  The Hindu teacher Ram Dass said his teacher maharaj-ji vanished after death "because [guruji] had gone inside."  Jesus says Father, why have you forsaken me!--and it was a sign of the third eye chakra opening to the spirit of wisdom that lives there. Jesus' theological worldview had to die--just as much as he himself did. And the sense that "[the Father] who sent [him] is with [him]" had to die too.

In the end, the whole thing becomes positively eloquent. Crucified at "the place of the skull, Jesus gives up his spirit and cries "It is finished." The Spirit of the Lord descends and remains at the crown chakra, atop a brow encircled with thorns. Scores of Hindu teachers say spiritual energy, when it ascends to the crown chakra, yields an experience that can't be accurately described in words. Thomas Merton's words showed this to be true across religious world views: "sometimes no explanation is sufficient to account for suffering. The only decent thing is silence."

So the truth of it is this: those in whom spiritual energy can move freely will move serenely on the earth: their self knowledge will overflow in compassion for others. To paraphrase Ram Dass, when ordinary people attain wisdom, they become sages. When sages attain wisdom, they become ordinary people. 

Like blood or breath, God's spirit animates from the background. That divine intelligence is the most significant thing ever to consent to living in obscurity. In short, it's no big deal. Neither am I. And when it finishes its work in me, I'll see it plainly.

             

    

        

         

Notes in Winter: Self-Emptying, Surrender and Grief as a Path to Embodiment.

Joni Mitchell wrote "Maybe it's just the time of year, maybe it's the time of man."  It's winter, and I spend less and less time with the news these days.  It's a rare movie that I can sit through from beginning to end.  Romcoms feel too syrupy, dramas too jarring, and in action movies, far too much explodes.  The mantra-like sounds of hindu kirtan or medieval polyphony are the most I can handle musically.  I feel like my senses went off, fought a war, then came back shell-shocked and screaming at each other.

I am at an impasse with myself.  [bxA]I hear the words "search for God," and then attempt it.  I look for God everywhere, and he is nowhere.  I know personally why saints of the past have been driven to the brink of madness by the search, why monks of old needed careful guidance to avoid getting stuck in depression, anxiety and suicidal thinking.  To search for God outside myself is ultimately to allow that search to be compelled by my own insanity, and to see that writ large in the chaos of the world.

Allowing myself to be compelled by chaos--my own or the world's--is the only source of anxiety.  My first forty years have been a carnival of errors here.  All of the wisdom about closing my eyes to withdraw my attachment to the world has been important.  All of the truths about giving up all thought of self, even until I realize the infinite depths of my impermanence--this isn't a spiritual maneuver, it's a way to avoid constant battle with the flow of the universe.  It's the only route that ends in rest.

An old hermit I knew quoted Abraham Joshua Heschel to me once.  I've never been able to vouch for its accuracy, but it stuck with me: "We do not take the Word of God into our mouths," he said. "Rather, we step into the Word, because the Word is bigger than we are."  Evidently, the Logos has a work that it's doing--a work that, once begun, needs to be respected, given space and listened to--and I ignore it only at the cost of my serenity.  The Word is communicating God's intelligence through absolutely everything in the universe.  It forms a single, unified message: that I'm not in charge, that it's safe to give up control, that I have to be gentle to myself and others, walk through life a bit more quietly and reflectively. 

If I want to be free of anxiety, then the only path left for me is introspection, feeling and honesty.  The stream is within, and I've got to follow it to its source.  I don't just think, I have an emotional response to thought.  I'm having one now, about the thought processes involved in writing (it's early, and I'm still crawling inside the secondhand clothes of the new day.)  I don't just have emotions, they point to sensations in the body.  And further, I don't just experience physical sensation: that sensation vibrates and tingles, it's the energy and the sound of simply being.  And I can either listen to that or not, stand outside and examine it or step into its flow.

If I speak to attempt to persuade others, I need something from them: a sense of my own righteousness, a sense of my own appeal--whatever.  It doesn't matter.  The fact remains: if whatever I'm seeking isn't forthcoming, I'm overcome by all kinds of sadness; strong or weak in proportion to my attachment.  Initially, I may run around, saying "I need to be less selfish." But that, too, is an error.  I need to simply be, to notice selfishness causes suffering, to let it "break my heart" and loosen my ego's white-knuckled grasp on its own permanence.  When I am not propping up my ego with affirmation from others, I can encounter them serenely.

At the same time, I can't use "avoiding being a burden" to justify hiding what I'm feeling from people I trust.  The dictum of AA holds true: "You alone can do it, but you cannot do it alone." I have to do my inner work: but I can neither hide from those I trust nor expect them to solve my problems for me.  It's a delicate balance.  I go through long stretches of fouling it up more than I succeed.

It is one thing to talk about these things.  It's another thing to become them.  Only Western cultures recognize a distinction between doing and being.  But "just existing" is an action--it's up to me to do it actively and consciously.  And acting is just a series of "ways of being," a succession of present moments.  This is a truth so infinitesimal and gargantuan and delicate that I can't step into it by willpower.

Surrender is the only destination here, and acceptance the only journey.  But I have to remember that acceptance is the end of a grieving process, and not skip steps, however noble my reasons for doing so are.  The instantaneous breakthroughs that taught me surrender was necessary must yield to a process of being kinder to the parts of my emotional life I'd rather ignore or reject.  Bargaining, Anger, Depression have their day, and they must, if I'm to be thorough.  

I want to mourn more actively: I want to withdraw some of my attention from the constant, chaotic stream of distractions that usually fill each day.  Anger and sadness and depression are more spacious emotions than I would have originally thought, but I have to face how afraid they make me feel, to sit down in them and learn to reclaim my breathing from anxiety.  It's terrible work, but no one's doing it for me and the soul-numbing consequences of neglect are too great.

The fact, in the end, is that I can't complete the process.  But gravity is a wonderful teacher.  If all I can do is throw a snowball off a snowcapped mountain peak, God can turn it into an avalanche.  All Jesus had to do was lay down his life.  Others were responsible for the tomb and the rising.  I don't know the mechanics of this in my own life--not intimately enough to spare me apprehension.  But the beginning and the end are one, as life and death are.  I didn't begin the work--I don't know, maybe I just live in it. And maybe the one who will carry it through to completion is within me, and knowing is a luxury I'm supposed to live without. 

So, what of it? Joni Mitchell would say "I don't know who I am, but life is for learning."  I've long since declared myself a disciple of the logos, but I think I'm just realizing the extent to which that means consciously fasting from stimuli that serve as quick fixes for uncomfortable emotional processes.  Grief is one of those processes, and I've not adequately faced my distaste for the fear that keeps me from making a beginning.  I don't like free fall, and that's precisely how trusting the invisible hits me. 

Ultimately it's about surrendering to the intelligent otherness of a loving deconstruction.  In an attempt to talk about this, I briefly read through some important Zen Koans.  But Torah has plenty of examples for this.  Job most likely ached at the silence, till the whirlwind spoke.  Abraham's son, nearly sacrificed as a boy, spent a good bit of his life afraid--until he faced it and "the fear of Isaac" became a name for God.  I want to ante up to my own, to look straight at it.

When Zechariah heard God's prediction of John's birth, because of his doubt he couldn't speak until they were fulfilled.  I don't know who's supposed to break the silence first.  Maybe God is, maybe I am.  If it's the latter, then these words are a fulfillment.  Let it be so, please God.  Let it be!