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.
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