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.
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