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.
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