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.
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