Grief: the Prayer of Impermanence.

Because of the Logos, when Rabbouni lives within us: our bodies are the only place infinite divinity dies.  We turned our eyes to the mountains in hope of help.  It turned out that the mountains were inside us. Waiting for the redeemer made us prudent, taught us how to help ourselves until we realized the redeemer had moved inside as well.  Eventually, as Job did, we see God in our own flesh: we have a whole body worth of trauma to face, an entire psychological maze full of dark turns to befriend.  Open ears reveal that silence has a message: the stones preach in the absence of gospel-loosened tongues.  Science says that the limbic system has a message: as trauma surfaces and heals, the body preaches.  The story of salvation, and the story of your own deep healing are One.  [bxA]

Because of the Logos, when Rabbouni dies within us: grieving the ego is prayer, and prayer is grieving the ego.  The ego is a self-protective device, wielded compulsively at first, and we will learn to use it deliberately before the end.  But non-self is the seamless wedding garment.  That means confronting ego's limitations, and then giving it up.  We become like Christ: not in his miracles, but in his compassion.  Not in his mountaintop transfigurations, but in his valleys of self-emptying.  Like it or not, we are similar to each other in our grief, not our ecstasies.  This means we find Christ in the tables we flip, the tears we cry alone, the crosses we shut up and carry.  Like Christ, we hand all things, even our own divinization, over to the Father.  This isn't to eschew celebration, either.  Unmet basic human needs are rough.  Love, hunger, sin and death are all places of deep solitude. To find others in that space is an immensely quiet, completely palpable joy.  When the character of joy broadens to include our life's sorrowful elements, we find others, and what was once difficult becomes celebration.

Because of the Logos, when Rabbouni rises within us: we let go of the defensive emotions of rage and resentment and blame, with all their feigned pomp and permanence and we embrace the humble and impermanent emotions of anger, sadness, depression.  Life and death are one: and each incarnation is one dark night after another.  For me, so far, the weird reality of my own incarnation has been, as scripture calls it "a prison not made of iron."  But I'm taking pages from Joseph's book, trying to turn my confinement into an opportunity.  And eventually, like the apostles, we are so occupied with singing hymns to God that our chains fall off and every cell in our bodies opens to grant our release.

Because of the Logos, when Rabbouni ascends within us: we have enough distance on our own chaos to choose which voices we speak with.  With practice, I can be the equanimous father, watching as all that's still childish in me faces what it's afraid of.  I can turn my spirit's attention to listen to my own repressed anguish instead of ignoring it.  I can become the compassionate Son who find the bits of myself that I've marginalized or lost.  Becoming reacquainted with bits of ourselves is inevitable.  Doing shadow-work to face our own capacity--sometimes our craving--for chaos is absolutely pivotal.  Rage and evil and the demonic are out there, they're possibilities, as problematic if I am averse to them as if I'm drawn to them. So the point is just to pay conscious attention to them.  The spirit within will guide my interaction with them.  As long as I don't cling to the spiritual or material phenomenon I'm experiencing, as long as I remember that I'm not my ego, impermanence itself will keep me safe.  

Because of the Logos, everything hidden will come to light, and everything revealed will pass away.  And so will I.  St. Paul said "love never ends" and I believe he's right.  We're here to let all the clinging, all the attachment and attraction and aversion wear off of the way we love.  We're here to turn our wounded attention away from what's morbid or shiny, to be impelled by the Spirit to attend to reality.  And why?  I suppose because we're wired to find calm, and whatever doesn't produce serenity rightly produces anxiety.  Handled rightly, the twists and turns of our anxious little egos become the route of return.  There is light at the end of the tunnel, and in its light the Cross, the Tomb, and Hell itself will prove to have been heaven the whole time.

Seeking the Still Point

I've talked about the theonoias--units of mental activity, where the goal is the first theonoia, or mental stillness--and I've talked about the "layers"--the fact that every thought has an emotion, every emotion has a physical sensation, and every physical sensation has an energy (and our job is to witness the interconnectedness of it all.)   I've also talked about suspension--the way we are most at the disposal of the spirit within when we are beholden to two opposite sides of a paradox, without resolving the tension.

The fact is, the first theonoia isn't just mental. It has an emotional corollary, a parallel in physical sensation, an energetic equivalent.  And knowing what these are is an important part of cultivating curiosity and playfulness with all the many layers of our experience. To that end: a bit of an "umbrella concept."  I call it "the still-point." [bxA]

Theologically, this is the same as suspension, remaining with Christ.  The still-point is a ptsd sufferer's hyper-vigilance recapitulated.  The still-point is like a non-mental locus of the first theonoia.  It necessarily suspends ego--because it can only be done with the attention, energy, and presence of the whole self. (It's not the still point if, mentally, you're elsewhere.)  This can happen between opposites: when you have so united yourself to an action you're doing that you cease to be able to tell whether it's bad or good.  The still-point can happen between layers: there are points where you can't tell whether "what you're feeling" is a thought, emotion or sensation--because perhaps it's all three. The still-point can exist between powerful drive systems--when I am suspended at that place where breath, energy, sensation and attention meet, sometimes breath stops.  Then I can focus on sustained attention, feeling the subtleties of sensation, watching how they transform.  I can find the still-point in a situation: if I sit back, be present and cease judging.  Lastly, the still-point can be present in the body.  Particularly, if I am facing trauma stored in a part of the body, the still-point can be found by overcoming my aversion-reaction.  When I sit in the trauma, treating it with compassion and curiosity instead of judgment and rejection, I cultivate the resources that eventually lead to letting it go.

When a thought is present at the still-point, it dissolves.  God "scatters the proud in the thoughts of their hearts."  Pride is a thought.  When it is exposed to emotion, it begins to confront its own impermanence.  When an emotion is present at the still-point, it includes its opposite.  In the book of Ezra, when the second temple was being blessed, there were old people in the crowd, weeping at the remembrance of the first temple.  There were young people, with no such memory, rejoicing.  Scripture reports that the reaction was mixed.  Many "wept aloud when they saw this house, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people's weeping."  When a sensation is present at the still point, it is both pleasurable and painful, and it is neither of those.  Pleasure and pain are ego-categories.  As Fr. Tom Keating of Spencer says "There is a level on which pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain, because we are grounded in divine love."  When an energy is present at the still point, it burns away all words and concepts, making us totally one with ourselves and our experience.  The Spirit within is a wind that blows where it chooses, and a consuming fire.

So what of it?  I use the still-point as a litmus test.  If I am still judging people or situations, I'm not standing in the center of the paradox.  If I am still thinking that pain and joy are entirely opposite, I am not, emotionally, standing at the first theonoia.  If I am still labelling energy "dark or light" or good or bad, I am not suspended with Christ on the Cross. If I am still mentally standing at a distance from my own experience, I am not at the intersection of my most powerful drives.

And the entire invitation here is egoic malleability: on the one hand, to learn to defend yourself from other-people's unfaced and compulsively-flung-about darkness, and on the other to learn to let down your guard entirely, as prudence allows.  It's both a cultivation of intuition and a surrender into the living presence at the creatively tense center of revelation and mystery.  Some of it is your work, some of it is God's, some of it is allowing your sense of separateness from God to dissolve.

But I am saying too much, and living too little...thank God for the messy apartment, and the sink of dirty dishes calling my name.

The Program of Christian Tantra: Objectives, Ways and Means.

Words and logic may reveal a great deal about God and Christ, but if these were silent, so would the stones.  It is possible to get obsessed with our egotistical plans for spirituality, (and at some stages of the spiritual life it's more likely to happen than not,) so a practitioner should be silent and listen.  The words I am writing were straw before I wrote them.  Don't get caught up in saying silence or words are better or more necessary.  Every incarnation is a grieving process within a paradox, and the task of an incarnation is to learn to use both words and silence (indeed, all that's seen and unseen) for the acceptance of reality. [bxA]

Particularly the fact that they capitalize on our senses, the sacraments are designed to wake us up to the truth of embodied existence: Jesus made himself really present in all physical matter equally.  He who said "I am the bread of life" also said "I am the gate for the sheep" and neither of those were metaphors.  Jesus life and your life are the same, then they're different, then they're the same.  His body is your body, then it isn't, then it is.  

As a method of dealing practically with this deepening experience, I give you: Christian Tantra.  

It's a theistic monist vision, that focuses on the internalization of the Trinity to break down ego, and the equal potential of all things to reveal that the God we seek is already fully present. Its method centers on the predicament and the gift of embodied existence: behind every thought is an emotion, behind every emotion is a physical sensation, behind every physical sensation is an energy. Becoming one with that energy is a temporary dissolution of ego, and a brief experience of the Holy Spirit within.  

God is equally manifested by revelation and mystery: both at once.  His name (so he said to Moses) is I AM, but he also said to the prophets "I am not your God and you are not my people."  The tension is creative, and it's easy to get obsessed with what is being created, to pursue it, and thereby to exempt ourselves from the tension.  But exempting ourselves from the creative tension of the Spirit is ego, and it causes us suffering.  So we stay on the cross, stay at the empty tomb, until we hear it speak our names.  When we are completely present, we won't need to say "Here I AM," because the words will come from our silences.

Abstraction, interacting with our thoughts about things instead of the things themselves, is the main psychological obstacle emanating from original sin.  Egotism, attraction and aversion are all of them fairly easy--the way we bypass reality, are drawn to some things and fly from others comes fairly naturally.  But being open to less than the entirety of life is too psychologically and energetically costly to allow to continue unexamined.

Bernard's "steps of humility and pride" attempted to name what a prideful person does.  Christian Tantra acknowledges the need to describe cognitively what is happening when a prideful person substitutes his "self" for his personhood.  It does so by way of the "theonoias."  The theonoias are units of mental energy, energy we come to exert unconsciously.  The first theonoia is mental rest.  The second theonoia is naming and labeling reality, so as to separate things into "this and that."  The third theonoia uses those separations to theorize about a reality that didn't need examining in the first place.

The first theonoia is the core of the serenity that Christian Tantra promises. It is "remaining with Jesus" of the gospel of John.  Contemplation is a brief experience of that rest, obedience is that rest sustained in action.  Humility is the permanent resting at the first theonoia, a handling of all things with equanimity, without clinging or craving.  Conscious of our ability to abstract, the theonoias shift from a liability to a roadmap.  The destination, and the journey of Christian Tantra are one: to be still, listen, and watch.  If we can do that, we see that the energies of our life have been shifting the whole time, and will shift in the direction of rest on their own if we let them.

Tantra forms, in its practitioners, a skill set that isn't present as clearly in other forms of Christianity.  Attention, drawn everywhere by a million shiny objects, acquires focus.  Practitioners become "agents of recapitulation," working with energies as they change and nuance. Tantrikas learn how their own psychology echoes  their families of origin, and this becomes a springboard into a Trinitarian deity meditation rooted in the very tissue of their bodies.  Tantrikas steep themselves in the four humble truths, the four gospel seals, and the humble tenfold way, so as to become deeply rooted in their own impermanence.  Tantrikas may occasionally use entheogens--plants that modify consciousness, and that have a history of sacred use.  This is done ceremonially, to render the ego malleable, and it's always done with a goal concretizing sobriety and manageable living.  

For tantrikas, putting up and taking down ego boundaries--at will, instead of compulsively or defensively--become the foundation of "becoming Christ" and growing in humility.  Christian tantrikas become witnesses to "the layers": the emotions behind thoughts, the sensations behind emotions, the energies behind sensations.  Working with, and facing these dimensions of embodied existence is an important part of deconstructing compulsion and acting deliberately.  We come to be suspended with Christ: claiming the things of heaven only as far as our humility has made us "innocent as doves", desiring the things of earth only as "becoming wise as serpents" requires. Grieving transitions, for us who practice, becomes as consistent a discipline as prayer.  In the end, those who grieve Christ's death face their own, and those who witness his resurrection see it in their own flesh.  We tantrikas are deeply blessed and deeply impermanent. We let go of the world, and give up self, because we've learned to use and value the blessings it holds.

The promise of Christian tantra is this: that our liabilities will become our strengths,  our vices will be re-formed as virtues.  The "happy fault" will become our route of return.  The negative psychological messages driving our conduct will show themselves to be the promptings of the Trinity within.  We will deal with and release the traumas stored deep in our bodies, leaving us free to act spontaneously as the Spirit prompts us to. We who once fled from bearing our various crosses will become willing to shoulder them, to be suspended on them, to live and to die on them.  As for life and aging, birth and death, we'll discover that each was in the other the whole time: it's just that the scales had not fallen from our eyes yet, we'd not yet realized that the promptings of the spirit were as present in our liabilities as they were in life's graces.  The contradictions, under whose sway all creation groaned, will reveal themselves to have been paradoxes, tensions making all creation new.  And we'll die as we came to live: willingly, with deep rooted acceptance and equanimity.  God and the world, God and I, God and you are not two.  God is one, he will be all things, and in all things.  As we live and move,  and have our being, our part is to watch.