My name is Legion: Introductions on Returning to School

I have been leaving parts of myself out of the spiritual journey.  It represents bits of the curriculum that I've got to go back and spend more time with.  If my life lacks peace, it's because there's some small instance of neglect in my own formation.  Each chakra has a toxic "persona" that it creates and stores inside me.  At times, I've identified, totally and haphazardly, with every one. The Chakras have vulnerable personas, and often I've bypassed those entirely for lack of knowing how to defend them.  Any self that ignores those different bits of masquerade etiquette will, at best, see through a darkened lens. [bxA]

The root chakra, where the spirit of fear of the Lord lives, is also where my wounded inner child is constantly screaming, and where my healthy inner child looks on the world with fascination.  My dysfunctional background means that, for years, I've been able to focus only on the wounded inner child.  It helps me see where my own impairment comes from.  Fear and defensiveness are often the emotions I have easiest access to, but feelings of humor and serenity are possible too--if I would only allow for a softening of heart.

The sacral chakra, where the spirit of knowledge is, is also where my growing inner child either stifled his potential, or allowed it to flourish.  The cynicism I've looked at the world with--the part of me that thinks playing is "dumb"--makes me think I've payed more attention to the stifling than the flourishing.  This has wounded my ability to be basically intuitive.  Creativity is about waiting for the answer to occur to me, and waiting for realization is something I really struggle with.  I'd rather supply a series of my own answers, so that getting by happens by process of elimination.  I need to learn to wait.

The solar plexus, where the spirit of might descends and remains, is where I've either learned or neglected the gentle and focused use of power.  Of course, I can see the dysfunction more than the healing.  I feel deficient in my ability to call forth positive intentions, to rouse gentle attention.  I feel impaired in my ability to work for the sake of working, without ego supplying a really drastic narrative that makes the whole thing seem more risky than it is.  It's never just "go to work."  It's always "go to work, try not to get fired, or else you'll be homeless and that'll be terrible."  It's never "feel all your feelings, and let them go."  It's always, "feel the feelings that don't threaten high functioning.  Neglect the rest, you don't have time for them."  Developing the ability to more carefully use intention and attention is part of the class I was mentally absent for.

The heart chakra, where the spirit of counsel is--this is where I negotiate taking responsibility. The spirit of counsel assumes I've already taken that responsibility, that I've so completely crawled into problematic and uncomfortable situations that I've learned to see them as spacious and inhabitable, learned to sit still at their center.  A "problem" is just an echo chamber, off of whose walls my own voice eventually echoes until I hear myself talking.  When Jesus said things like "Father, why have you forsaken me" and "I thirst", when he said "forgive them, they know not what they're doing" and "today you'll be with me in paradise" he was reflecting this process: first, taking responsibility to feel his own pain and naming his own vulnerabilities instead of running from them.  Second, reaching out to those similarly afflicted with compassion.  

The two thieves crucified with Jesus give voice to degrees of "not taking responsibility."  The one cynically questioned Jesus' status as the messiah and wanted to be saved from the cross entirely, the other accepted Jesus as the messiah, but thought he'd be saved later.  Jesus corrected both by saying "Today you will be with me in paradise."  It's as if he was saying "when your eyes shift from someone else's cross to your own, the cross transforms.  You're not a few moments away from the kingdom, you are a few degrees of responsibility away from it."

This is a long way of saying that I can give voice, and I have given voice to the different degrees of shirking responsibility.  The more I dodged, the more anxious I became.  Those liabilities took on, in a metaphorical but very real sense, lives of their own.  Calmly learning to take responsibility is a part of the curriculum that I missed, and serenity's to be found only in relearning the lesson.

The throat chakra, where the spirit of understanding works, is the spiritual muscle of straight talk.  Wisdom faces us with problems like sin, suffering, death, and moral choices--all of which we negotiate in a solitude so drastic God seems absent from it.  Ego layers blame and resentment and shame over those problems, and it keeps us from naming the problem, or working with it. Remember that, in a spirit of understanding, Jesus said "I thirst."  Not "I thirst for affection or acceptance, this or that spiritual goal."  Our difficulty isn't an inability to configure the world as we wish it to be, or in a way that would make us less vulnerable.  The trouble is we can't even be honest about our vulnerability in the first place.  The problem is within, not out in the world.

Every human alive, including myself, has missed the boat in terms of being honest.  We've all seen others and situations as problems when our own habits escape our notice.  I have blamed others, God, fate and the weather for my lack of ability to sit with discomfort and take responsibility.  Maneuvers like those aren't free.  They come at a cost we don't know we're paying.  Learning to straight talk is important: the voice is the first indicator of the serenity, or lack thereof, that fills the heart.  And the "person that I am" when I speak dishonestly is part of the whole crowd inside me--exuberant one minute, calling for blood another--and always needing redemption.

The part of me that stands distant as I write this has a real problem with the third eye chakra.  This is where the spirit of wisdom lives.   But the question I have is "what's the wisdom for?"  Know this for certain: when I am flashing spiritual insight around like it's cash that I won in some high stakes spiritual lottery, that's ego and it's toxic.  Ennobling such a display of spiritual wealth by saying things like "this will help others" only makes it more problematic.  And I need to admit that I am the guy who has done all that.  I may be doing it as type right now.  Grief: a mourning as deep as my broken heart can manage, is the only solution here.  Only grief is rooted in the truth: wisdom is impermanent, and the world is passing away, and all that I know of myself is dying.  Accepting this is the only route to peace.

In the crown chakra, where the spirit of the Lord is, everything that is my "self" has the opportunity to finally dive into restful silence.  If the toxic self creates a persona, claims to have spent lifetimes as a god or a devil, claims to be living all possible incarnations at once (in invisible dimensions, of course), then the flow of divine energy gets obstructed.  (Full disclosure, the examples in the last sentence are all things I've wondered, and sometimes voiced aloud, about myself.)  The fact is, whether our "selves" are many or they're one, they're impermanent.  Impermanence is the truth of divine revelation, the greatest gift of God's Word.  

Life's learning is in coaching the masks we wear to accept impermanence.  Dorothy Day, quoting Charles Peguy, said that when we get to heaven, God will ask us "where are the others."  It certainly applies to heaven and social existence, but it also applies to the movement of the holy spirit up the body's central channel.  In other words, it's true of the voices in our psyche as well. The infant showing fascination, the toddler learning to play, the young person learning to do things for their own sake, they all have a place in the beatific vision.  The young adult learning to take total responsibility for his own burdens, the sufferer learning to access non-defensive emotions,  they all have a role to play in moving gently on the earth.  Both the honest man and the old seer will die.  But God's divinity is eternal.  And eternality is a stillness from which you and I never depart. 

Tantra and the Anatomy of Recollection

What I have to say, ultimately, is this: Tantra, as a philosophy and a discipline, is just Catholicism that has centralized the discipline of recollection.  It was a conversation with Hanuman Dass, my brother and guru, that helped the words emerge.  He'd been asking "What's your way in?"  He meant "what's your way into the interior life?"  [bxA]

I did what I always do: I fumbled through an answer, then thought about it and spoke further about it later.  At the time, I talked about the senses as a mantra to get rid of ego.  When I am seeing without being "an ego doing the seeing", when I am hearing without being the hearer, touching without being the one treating my body like the ego boundary between me and the world--that, I said, is the beginning of internalizing Christ.

In the following days, Hanuman Dass had talked about how he, in prayer, could have at one point given himself goosebumps at will.  I brought up a host of tiny, insignificant, sensory things that happened when I attended the sacraments: tears in the confessional, a burning feeling in my legs when going to communion.  We both called them "consolations from God" and made too much of them.  Then, I said "Maybe we got too puffed up about those feelings, but it certainly seems like they were a vital part of 'coming to ourselves' like the prodigal son did, a vital part of getting recollected."

"Wow."  Hanuman Dass interrupted me. "I haven't heard or thought about that term in years.  But you're right.  That's what it is.  Recollection."  I first heard the term, as I suspect Hanuman Dass did as well, when we were serving in the monastery together.  It was popular among the Post WWII generation of "Merton Converts," people drawn to the monastic life by Seven Storey Mountain and other writings by the Gethsemani monk Thomas Merton.  Recollection meant "gathering your faculties together."  Such a "circling of the wagons" around attention and focus and senses was a vital step in having an undistracted prayer experience.  Merton converts would have said it was vital in seeking God.  And that's true.  But back then, I would have seen recollection as an effort to muster my ability to focus.  Back then, I'd have missed the notes of self-emptying. 

What I began to realize, and what Tantra fundamentally believes, is that recollection is also vital in seeking an embodied encounter with the God who lives within me.  In recollection, because it's part of a large giving up of self, focus is found, then lost, then found again.  In other words, "God" can easily remain a concept, bandied about in our heads.  Part of recollection is letting that go, so as to intuit a deeper connection to the whole body.  Ultimately the powers of concentration return to us, but only once we've  become familiar with breath, attention, emotion, sensation and energy.  And we've known this from the beginning--as scripture says "so shall my word be that comes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it." 

My ultimate point, to Hanuman Dass, was this:  the "recollection" to which the monastery's old men referred was, to say the least, underwhelmingly robust.  Given the amount of anxiety I suffered from, I needed the term desperately.  But I had to go to Buddhism and learn about Vipassana meditation, to psychology and learn about the limbic system: ultimately. the body remembers all the trauma a person has ever suffered--even, perhaps, that of multiple incarnations--and "recollection" was a matter of facing, feeling and releasing that pain.  

I had to go to Hinduism and learn about Pranayama (breath meditation) and kundalini (energy meditation):  there was a great deal that mindful breathing, deliberate breathing and especially a held breath could do to limit anxiety.  There are days where I walk around feeling like one of those touch sensitive energy globes--days when anything that touches me draws little lightning bolts of overstimulation.  I know for certain that energy underlies all physical sensation; I'm still learning how to healthily interact with it.  

Lastly, I had to go to Adult Children of Alcoholics, to learn that my psyche was just a collection of dysfunctional family voices.  I had to go to Tantra and learn about deity meditation.  I had to work with both, watch them change, until I could identify at will with the loving Father, the compassionate Son.  And then I had to do all the things a compassionate father and a loving son do: like face the darkness until it feels kind again, like find the lost bits of myself, like shoulder my own crosses and bear my own pains.

The Logos has shown me: its possible for the senses to be a teacher.  The senses can certainly do as the scripture says, they can "go into their room and shut the door, and pray to their Father who is in secret."   But there has to be a figure-ground reversal, where touch ceases to shore up ego and craving and attachment, and begins to lead to non-self, humility and impermanence.  And it takes many, many forms of real presence to accomplish this: the Eucharist, where he stands eyelash to eyelash with us, the throes of terrible grief from which he seems absent, the subtle stirrings of the soul that are the tombs within us opening.

What of it?  Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.  Like the teacher, go into your room and shut the door.  If your hands are God's, he'll do all the things that need doing.  It'll feel a bit confining at first, like a prison at times.  But adjusting to the tensions is inevitable.  Pray, sing hymns, eat all the crappy prison food.  The day of the Son of Man will come like a lightening flash of realization.  Then the chains will fall off on their own.  And the doors will open. 

 

Grief: Soliloquies and Sequels

Some time ago, I wrote a post saying "broken heartedness is the bride of the logos."  It's been a while: I don't even know what I said and I'm unmotivated to reread it.  But I've become more convinced that it's true, so I need to give it some time.

A little while ago, a question formed itself in my head. "How do emotions transform when the logos is active?"  My heart chakra's been a dance floor lately, and all my emotions have shown up wearing polyester leisure suits.  I'm a sucky dancer, so sitting with all of it hasn't been comfortable or fun.  But here, for what it's worth, is what it's yielded: [bxA]

When people become students of the Logos, when contradiction yields to paradox, we students are suspended on the Cross with Christ.  Suspended on the Cross, we don't know if the choices we've made will lead to health or insanity.  We don't know if what we're doing is the right thing or not.  Morally (and in all other ways that involve the judgement of others) we are on the hook for all of the wrong things we've done, and we are not free from the consequences of our actions.

Initially, when a student is working with the Logos, emotions become large enough to include their opposite.  Both becoming happy and avoiding sadness cease to be important goals.  At the same time, happiness isn't seriously threatened by sadness, nor are the two emotions mutually exclusive. When Abraham's servant found the Matriarch Rebekkah, he asked her parents for permission to initiate courting proceedings.  Her parents responded "We cannot say one thing to you, bad or good.  The thing comes from the Lord."  When the rebuilt temple was dedicated, the multigenerational gathering included both returned exiles, who remembered the first temple's destruction, and the young who knew nothing of it.  Scripture describes the noise of the gathering by saying "the sound of the laughter was indistinguishable from the sound of the weeping."  So it is with each of us, crucified with Christ.

But it's deeper than that.  Remember, suspended students are as condemnable as they are praiseworthy.  And letting go of ego--to say nothing of physically dying--these involve both a careful handling and a grieving process.  If students can sit in unresolvable tensions, the first temptation is to resort to blame, rage, remorse and resentment: the shallow comforts of those three afflictive emotions is sometimes the only consolation to those who can't change their situation.  Adam blamed Eve for his sinfulness.  On the cross, the wicked thief taunted Jesus, asking him to prove he was the messiah by resolving their situation.

Remaining on the cross without, blame, rage, remorse or resentment invites us to broken-heartedness.  Living and dying are rough on their own, and even rougher when we begin to discover that each is in the other.  The ego competes for its share of whatever's around to satisfy.  It's difficult to realize that, in this life, there's simply not enough "stuff" around for everybody to eat their fill of the proverbial pie.  Life's "thin times" when they're done angering me, generally just make me feel sad: sad that I'm as clingy a bloke as I am, regretful that I have enthusiasm for things I find attractive, and sorrowful that other people get coopted into my prideful, hedonistic agendas.

Scarcity is just one spot that life pinches.  Suffering, sin, and the basic human needs of affection and security are a few more.  And the news isn't good.  It's a real challenge, not just to recognize these needs at all, but then to go about getting them even partially satisfied.  The fact is, life isn't just hard because of deliberate selfishness.  Finitude is a real suffering.  Suffering leads to grief, and grief to a broken heart.  And that's if grace, luck and openness collude to allow us to see it.

Logos and broken-heartedness, order and chaos, are often represented as masculine and feminine.  To be balanced humans, we need to go about playing with those energies.  Spiritual methods by the score attempt to balance the active and the contemplative, the intellectual and the intuitive.  The impulse is no less important for rabbouni's students.  There's no right or wrong way to do it.  It simply matters that it gets done.

What of it?  What's it worth?  

Students of Rabbouni can expect that miracles won't happen TO them, they'll occur WITHIN them.  On the day water was turned to wine, the purification jars were not as important as each heart in which denial that was turned to acceptance.  Saints by the score have reported struggles with anger that made them kind and gentle.  As a Tantrika myself, I can say that all of the flowery theological language in the world is less useful than a single moment of genuine practice.  No amount of "meaning" can compete with a silence in which attention and intention coalesce.

Rabbouni, the Logos made flesh, is the true nature of all people, of all that is seen and unseen.  As we let go of ego and attachment, of aversion and and attraction and craving, we become him.  In the "deep calling on deep," the empty heart of Jesus calls on the emptiness of all things.  By letting go, we return to who we  are.  It's for a kind of living that's also a dying that Jesus came into the world.  There was never a time when Jesus was not: never a time when he wasn't part of the triune dance that sustains your pet parakeet, your Jesus statue, the pile of smelly garbage behind your garage.  Either sacredness comes from things being what they are or sacredness is a hoax.

I'm the most scatterbrained, most chatty bloke ever to give this advice: but it's important to find silences--little moments in which we can recollect attention and intention from the distracted corners they've been scattered to.  Its important to ask whether we're being gentle enough about the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives.  It's not that the present moment is too short to be wasted.  It's that our attention and intention are too flighty to stay with it.

But if we can allow a bit of dynamism in our stillness, we are already experiencing it.  If we can see that the logos speaks in riddles, and do the transformative work it takes to understand, then each moment preaches the gospel.  Prophets and poets are not irrelevant, here.  "Find the others" they say. "Stay together.  Learn the flowers.  Go light."  

If, together, we can muster the strength of intention, fumble through an important task with me: pay attention, so each breath will be a deep bow.  And listen.