XIV. Layers, Listening, and Life

When we decided we were powerless over ego, the paradox of the Word formed irreversible skills  in us.  We knew our actions were driven by thought, knew that thought was motivated by emotion, that emotion was caused by sensation, and sensation by the energies of the body.  But we routinely lost sight of many layers of healing we needed, distracted as we were by thoughts of the divine.  After great struggle, we came to this: if we could actively engage our shadow, cultivate awareness of what we would otherwise relegate to the unconscious--perhaps then the Spirit would make the Trinity arise within us of its own accord.  So it became a saying among us: "pay attention to the shadows, and the light will do as it wishes."  At first, consciously allowing taboos to cancel ego kicked the feet out from under our sense of self-righteousness.  Allowing tensions to remain unresolved was difficult at best, and keeping our failed track record in front of us caused a massive aversion response.  But as we learned to peer into our inner darkness with curiosity and non-judgment, we realized we had work to do in healing attention and intention, and that we were watching for nothing short of divine revelation. [bxA]

We remembered our habit of abstraction and othering, and our denial was suffused with discernment. We brought consciousness to our actions.  Some of them brought us serenity, some of them brought us anxiety.  Some of them made our lives more workable, some of them made our lives unmanageable. We ourselves were the tree of which the teacher said "a tree is known by its fruit" and again "produce fruits worthy of repentance."  We wanted to live more mindfully, but found ourselves full of hidden motivations that stunted our growth.  Rather than cut the tree down, we dug around and under it.  In other words, to correct action, we brought gentle attention and intentionality to all that contributed to it.  In this way, we hoped that action might be restored to health.

We recalled our tendencies to blame and shame, and became increasingly able to peaceably shoulder more than our share of systemic sin.  We could tell the difference between compulsive and deliberate thought because each had a different emotional signature.  The roots of our own behavior were visible in generational trauma, and pain our parents failed to face became our inherited karma.  We increasingly saw the communal effects of denial, and changed it in ourselves, the only spot where we actually had any control over it.  We came to see our psyches as a compilation of snapshots: all creation groaned, and it showed us the part of our mind that communicates in grunts. We related to Adam and Eve, hiding behind a garment of leaves: after all, we hid behind ego in the same way.  And in the pharisees' divinely-countenanced judgment, we saw our own judgement clearly.  The illusions of all humanity were no less than our own illusions--reality was just mirroring ourselves back to us.  

We kept it constantly before us, the way desire and craving have coopted our very muscle memory. In the mirror of the scriptures, we saw our misuse of emotion plainly.  In a tight spot, Adam blamed Eve--and we met it with understanding, because we knew the situations in which we deflected responsibility for our own choices onto others.  God let Cain live physically, but his ego died daily in the light of his choice. Our guilt is as objective as his, but we have the ease of our breath in jars of clay--we live in Christ and die to self daily.  The Pharisees inappropriately endowed their own judgements with divine authority: just so, we believed ourselves transcendently righteous when the conditions were right.  The powerful in Roman society murdered an innocent man without dirtying their hands, and they called it justice.  And, inside of us, we saw ego killing humility daily, so we were unsurprised when communal egotism took advantage of our weakness.  We asked to grow in the grace of the teacher, who walked in the steps of our sinfulness so that we'd know it'd be safe to do so ourselves.  Our purgatorial predicament was this: we began seeing ourselves in the worst of others.  The body stored the stress of prolonged illusion, and when the fullness of time came, we looked straight at the self-imposed physical pain we'd caused ourselves, and stored trauma we'd been carrying.  We endeavored to stop making pain worse for ourselves.

We remember our responses to attraction and aversion, and we learned to meet both with non-attachment.  We realized that physical sensations are the body's attempt to help us find the quiet center of both trauma and bliss, if only we would encounter them consciously.  We learned that intention is just the guts-form of resolve, and that keeping intention trained on willingness was more possible than we'd previously admitted.  Fulfilled desires contain a whole merry-go-round of stimulus and response, a merry go round we wanted, more and more, to get off of.  The two thieves with whom Jesus was crucified show that it's possible to feel pain and still have an agenda: but we knew, as well, that we could act and feel sensations without the flood of egoic chatter.  On the Cross, the Teacher recapitulated suffering, made its unsatisfied desires for control a means of giving up self, facing vulnerabilities, admitting needs honestly.  Reality became a Cross, and Jesus embraced it.  As the nails bit into his flesh, the teacher simply said "I thirst."  It's risky (at best) to conjecture about Jesus' psychological life, but we would like to think that, when he prayed the words "Father forgive them" over the crowds, Jesus was also forgiving himself for ever wanting to dodge pain's hidden lessons.  We keep our intention, as much as we could, trained on physical sensation, hoping for the day that it lays bare the thoughts of our hearts.  In our own way, we share Jesus' task of redeeming all that the flesh remembers.

Finally, we fessed up to our capacities to resentment remorse,  and we gained the ability to adjust attention. This taught us not to label or objectify what, at base, was just an energy we had the option to be one with.  An incarnation is an inherently tense situation: its a situation of scarcity that, on the surface, seems illogical, unresolvable, and on the face of it, fairly bleak.  Not to mention how obvious it increasingly becomes that the tool--ego--with which we tend to handle our own poverty is the wrong tool for the job.  But an ego, seeing its own ineffectiveness, doubles down on the chatter.  To silence it, we chased shiny objects and coping mechanisms till the comfort they generated stopped aiding our forgetfulness.  It turns out rehearsing our pain and mentally workshopping our choices affords only the illusion of control.  Some relief, somewhere, needed to emerge.  So we turned within.  We listened so intently that we, like Elijah, heard the sound of sheer silence.  We listened so intently that sound and sensation became one and everything vibrated with the energy of paradox.  And it was this--to be lifted up on the Cross of paradox without any attempt to control--this was the place where our life and the Teacher's became one, where all of our choices were pure because our actions and choices and thoughts weren't driven by desire, but by the Spirit.  

This was the place where the paradox of the logos broke the yoke of permanence that our falsely prophetic mind took as a sign.  Being totally one with energy through the marriage of sound and sensation gave us rest from ourselves.  This kind of prayer made the rest of our lives easier--created more space between stimulus and response, kindled a fire of the Spirit between inhalation and exhalation, consoled the suffering Son within as he cried "Abba, Father."  We are both the cries of anguish and the compassionate Father.  We are both the open ear and the broken heart.  We had no idea how to proceed in the absence of instruction, and it led us to immeasurable prodigality.  But coming to ourselves was the return we needed.  Living and dying are the same, and good work of wisdom leads all paths to oneness.  And, though we trip over our own feet in the dark, oneness is where we students of the Logos will walk.  On the way, God willing, we will never cease to learn. 

XI. The Seven Sense Organs of the body of Christ

Remember, when Christ ascended into heaven, he went within all things: recall that he said "the Kingdom of Heaven is within you."  Ultimately, the seven Sense Organs of the Body of Christ--the tantric name for those spots where the veil between heaven and earth wears thin--are places where the ego is crucified.  Our utter lack of equanimity comes to the surface. We flee from our aversions and are drawn to our attractions, and can't seem to treat them both the same. We come to realize that we are full of craving and desire and resentments of all types.  These are also places of becoming--where ego becomes Christ before surrendering itself and all things to the Father.  But before that, the dualism between divinity and humanity must begin to break down. [bxA]

St. John Vianney used to sit for hours, staring at the exposed sacrament in Eucharistic adoration.  Once, a parishioner asked him "what do you do, just sitting there for all those hours each day?"  Knowing the parishioner's belief that the exposed Eucharist was the real presence of Christ, he said "I look at him, he looks at me."  Similarly, in the realm of revelation, where dualism and ego reign, there are places where God beholds us, and we behold God.  

These are places where involuntary conversion experiences become voluntary  perspective shifts, where involuntary humiliations become voluntary humility.  But the saying holds true: "before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.  After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water."  Virtue and vice use the same material.  The lustful and the chaste both have to contend with sexuality.  What's different is the "I" doing the choosing.  The choice-makers know a bit more about attachment, a little more about desire and egotism.  They can act--or not act--with a bit more sober self-knowledge.  At the Seven Sense Organs of the Body of Christ, nothing in the world or in any particular stressor has changed. Instead we, Rabbouni's students, have changed.  And the change is just this: we've seen through the false self that we project to the world, and we learn to relax that muscle and just be who we are.  We learn that all fulfillment comes at a cost, and to forego fulfillment when the cost is too steep.

So, with the balance of this chapter, we'll answer three questions.  What are the seven sense organs of the body of Christ, how do they manifest before egoic relaxation, and how do they appear after?  

The first sense organ is illusion.  We had to fess up to the likelihood that we were viewing the world in a way that causes suffering.  This couldn't be false: our perspective was too full of our own attachments and cravings--and a hidden assumption that "things as we wished them to be" could be permanent.  Our happiness rested too closely on obtaining what we longed for. Anything less sent us into an emotional tailspin.  We saw all of this as a real character flaw.  For students who've learned to interrogate ego, the corrective for illusion, we saw, was reality itself--specifically the impermanent and changing nature of reality.  We started checking in with others to confirm if our perspective was correct.  We found we had a tendency to filter reality through a host of unfair assumptions.  As we gradually let go of those assumptions, as we nursed fewer unmet expectations, our demeanor improved. 

The second place where our lies get exposed is desire.  We were so lost in a network of "things we wanted" that we could not identify the basic need in the midst of it.  We also saw ourselves getting caught in loops of desire and fulfillment.  When we obtained what we desired, often that desire would be replaced by a new one more tyrannical than the first.  Still more often, the reality of fulfillment included a great deal more suffering than we anticipated.  The humble student sees non-manipulative statements of need as a corrective for desire.  From the Cross, the teacher simply said "I thirst."  We learned to be honest about the legitimate needs our desires pointed to. Over time, we simply became less attached to fulfillment.  We also learned to live in a climate of fasting.  We allowed more time between stimulus and response.

The third sense organ is blame.  Ever since Eden, we've known the tendency to turn to the flesh of our flesh and the bone of our bone and burden them with the responsibility for our actions.  Generallly, at first, we see ourselves looking to everyone and everything other than ourselves to explain our own conduct.  When the scales of ego fall from our eyes, though, we simply realize the amount of hurt our own choices cause.  Admitting that we caused that much hurt to ourselves and others is hard--acknowledging that we're vulnerable enough to be hurt by the poverty of our situation or other people's choices, that we didn't possess the limits to stand apart or take responsibility for our own actions--this is a deeper dive into the suffering of existence than most of us are capable of.  But the more we see the futility of blame, the more we become conscious of our hurt, the general climate of vulnerability we live in and our horrendous lack of appropriate egoic limits.

The fourth place where we shout into the whirlwind and come out chastened is contradiction. We are made in the image of an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God, and yet we are vulnerable, limited and ignorant.  At first blush, Christianity itself would appear to be selling its adherents a bill of goods.  But we have to remember that we're seeing the issue through the lens of ego.  We're seeing the issue through our addiction to logic, our preoccupation with "being right," and our entitlements.  When we relax ego, contradiction begins to look like paradox.  Two opposites can be true at the same time.  In the places where truth pinches, sometimes it's the one being pinched that needs to change.  And particularly with regard to the Christian mystery--imbued as it is with living and dying and rising again--students of Rabbouni are well served to cultivate an alive sense that the movements of faith exist, each of them, within the other.  Eventually paradox simply begins to look like truth: every moment of life is also a dying.  The question is, can we sit in the sackcloth and ashes of paradox, allowing its tensions to reduce our falsehood?  

The fifth place where we come to ourselves and return to the Father is in our use of words.   Given the complex of abstraction that's the psychological cost of original sin, our mouth's first stop tends to be opining about other people and situations over which we've no control.  Only after that has proved fruitless do we examine our core vulnerabilities and powerlessnesses, beginning to be honest with ourselves about the suffering involved in living in humility, as well as the suffering involved in ignoring the need to do so.  Gradually but increasingly, the wisdom of the ages seems  as if it was addressed to us.  Having discovered the emotional spaces out of which wisdom comes, gradually and increasingly we find the scripture coming spontaneously out of our mouths.

The sixth place where we rend our garments and sit in ashes is thought.  The way we think, it turns out, is little more than a bid for control.  Making sense of the senseless, in the end, is an emotional maneuver with diminishing returns.  Holding the whole world at a distance so we can examine it--indeed, even the dualism inherent in incarnations--none of it is enduringly worth what it costs us energetically.  When we name and label everything, it leaves us clingy.  When we spend hours theorizing about how it was all connected, it makes us anxious.  More and more, racing thoughts, instead of conveying accurate information, became an indicator of the need for self care. So we breathe, we listen and we become grounded in our bodies.  First, thoughts stop racing.  And then we lose track of the "I" who's doing the thinking altogether.  Most likely, it'll all come back, and that's ok.  We've learned, in this moment and if only for a moment, that breathing, listening and grounding can loosen the hold compulsive thought has on our lives and behavior.  There is such thing as restful perception.  There is such thing as responding intuitively to events of the day.  And if we just let go, it'll all happen as it needs to.  

The seventh sense organ (where we rend the veil between divinity and humanity) is time itself.  We spent more time than we were comfortable with thinking our best days were behind us, longing for something better to come.  All the while we missed out on what was right in front of us, in the present moment.  We had to face facts: mental habits of projecting into the past and the future were costing us more than they were benefitting us--and were costing us in places like "trust in God" where the price was steeper than we wished to pay.  We heard St. Peter with opened ears "The Lord is not slow as some think of slowness."  Instead, says the first Pope, "he is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentence."  In another place, St. Paul says "now is the acceptable time."  For all the fortitude, all of the conversion, all of the willingness we need to believe, we searched the present moment and reality itself.  As we searched, so did we find.

It is certainly true that God is more accessible to us who have used the seven sense organs of Christ's body to see the Father--indeed, when egoic striving ceases, Christ is literally present, no less than in the Eucharist--but this isn't true in the way we'd anticipated.  We hoped for rest, and instead we know existentially the Teacher's call to work.  "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me" he says. "For I am gentle and humble of heart."  We had unmet needs and we were given an appropriate spirit of hustle by which we supplied for ourselves what we hoped for from God.

We had to go within to learn it, but "inside and outside" is a false distinction. Instead, as holy writ says, "to the pure of heart, all things are pure." Here, in the end, is where we notice results: when we focus intention and attention, remaining in willingness and watching for the spirit, what we notice about the world changes.   Life was stressful before we found Christian Tantric practice, and now our augmented spiritual toolkit allows us to detach from stress faster.  At first we feared we were permanent and wanted to change; but we hadn't faced our need for control.  Now, we die daily, and we want to troubleshoot our attachment to the self doing the changing.  In all things, we look at God, and he looks at us.  Reality is a bit of a void, but when the ego relaxes, things as they are become a staring contest with God. But we're convinced that, if we only look at it intently for long enough, God will blink first.

XII. Chakras, and the Spirit of the Lord

The Ancient Catholic practice of recollection has pride of place in Christian Tantric Meditation. There is a point, see, where sound and sensation are the same.  We can listen so deeply that we develop a set of "interior senses."  And there is a point where we can hear so deeply that our senses invert--we are no longer "listening to" a sound coming from outside of us.  We become aware that all actions are motivated by thought, all thought by emotion, all emotion by sensations in the body and all bodily sensations by energy--and after a while, whatever our body is aware of becomes our manner of "going within."  We accustom ourselves to watching thoughts and emotions and energies shift and change. [bxA]  

As we practice turning our attention away from external stimuli--as we stop "listening to" the world, instead we "listen for" the more subtle sounds of "being itself."  This is more like a hum or a vibration  than anything else.  But if we've learned to tune our attention, we can, in fact, feel sound.  Underneath the egoic stories we tell ourselves and the tensions of existence, each incarnation is "energy attempting to flow freely."  This mixture of factors is sometimes felt as a palpable energy, sometimes known only intuitively.  The Spirit works with the Logos, through a careful dance of creative tension and impulsion,  teaching us to remove obstacles and abide in the resulting serenity.  "Recollection" is not just withdrawing the attention from exterior distractions, it is turning attention inward and learning to flex the different interior muscles that expand our range of choices with what seems like a fairly static incarnational predicament. 

It's in this climate of deep listening that the promptings of the Spirit become intelligible.  In the midst of unearthing the connection between sound and sensation, we are being gently impelled--impelled to let go of this or that distraction, impelled to act this or that way in our relationships, impelled to be quieter here, or to move quickly and efficiently there.  This is happening inside and outside of us, and the question of both is this: are we quiet and watchful enough to abide at the still-point between tension and impulsion, waiting to cooperate with the Spirit's movement.

The Spirit's energy can either be palpably felt or intuited.  Physically, it feels like a very low vibration, which causes pressure as it moves up the spine.  When known intuitively, it usually manifests underneath psychological concerns.  Psychologist talk portray our basic human needs as indepenent voices that only want one thing--and we know well the tendency for spiritual people, after experiencing altered states of consciousness or spiritual visions, to represent that in the logical mind's often inverted system of symbol and metaphor.  So we get a great deal in scripture about descending to ascend,  ladders and snakes on poles and crucified saviors.  This makes sense: the lizard brain controls our fight, flight and freeze response...when St. Paul talked about how "all creation groans," this may well have been the part of himself that he was talking about.  Similarly, when the psalmist originally wrote psalm 22, frozen as it is in the pain of divine abandonment, what part of himself must the psalmist have been tapping into when he said "I am a worm and not a man?" The Limbic System is more emotional: the Desert Fathers used to go into solitude and "struggle with their demons."  That struggle might be more articulate, but we are still dealing with the same thing--the independent personification of a basic human need.

Students of tantra know that the groanings of the Lizard brain and the struggle with demons--these are only half the story.  Enter the book of Isaiah, and the Seven Spirits of God.  The prophet says " The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord."  To us, this is an inverted list of the psychological voices that manifest as the Spirit's energy moves up the spine.  

The root chakra, at the base of the spine, is the place in the body where our basic human need for survival is "stored."  The spirit of God manifests, there, as "fear of the Lord."  So it's rightly said that "fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  Breath is a basic human need expressed at the root chakra, and it's no mistake that, in Jewish mysticism, it's theorized that the name of God is the transcribed sound of  a breath cycle.

The Sacral Chakra, at the groin area, is the place where security is negotiated.  The energy at this chakra is what we use to procreate--we have to remember that, especially in the ancient world, to have a family was to have a labor force and an army all at once.  It's no mistake that biblical sexual relations were spoken of as "knowing"--Adam "knew his wife Eve" and she conceived.  When the spirit of God rests and remains at this chakra it's referred to as "the spirit of Knowledge."

The Solar Plexus Chakra, just above the belly button, is the place where we first experience strong desire.  Used without skill, this energy reveals all of the resentment, blame, shame, remorse, rationalization and entitlement of which ego is capable.  Of course, we're quick to direct that towards others. But used in responsible cooperation with the Logos, the spirit within is called, here, the spirit of might.  Echoing the way God made all things and called them good, we've been given an entire incarnation--a garden in need of tending.  That will inevitably happen by the sweat of our brows--but it will either lead to peace, if  done willingly, or to inner and outer conflict, if we're willfully egotistical. 

In the lower Chakras, the Spirit Makes us witness the futility of abstraction and othering. Abstraction might lead us to draw conclusions about situations that, while logical, aren't necessarily accurate. Othering is the process of seeing our own problems as having real causes in others--thus opening the door for blame, resentment, and entitlement. Granted, just like watching Christ on his Cross, we look at these things with full knowledge of our powerlessness to stop them. We who made our bed must lie in it. But if we can wait and watch, after a while the energy shifts. Our range of choices, our ability to see our darkness without reacting to it--this will all expand, but not if we're unable to take responsibility for the suffering we've created or the suffering of being the same as all other miserable sinners who ever walked an unremarkable turn on the earth. For now, we focus on watching and taking responsibility. 

At he Heart Chakra, just behind the breastbone, the Spirit's Energy begins to help us work with the dark corners of human experience--our own, and others.  When we take the newly minted spirit of might and bend it in a unitive direction, it travels one chakra further and becomes a spirit of counsel. This comes from a deep-rooted compassion.  With our eyes turned inward, toward ourselves, we find that everything we blamed others for is our problem too. Deeper than that, it's the malice within that makes us see malice without. And we're confronted with the heartbreaking reality of how powerless we are to change both ourselves and the world. Further spiritual work rests on remaining in a place of vulnerability and broken-heartedness. We are able to empathize with the wounds people carry around--acknowledged or ignored--because we are engaged in the same struggle to acknowledge our wounds before the stress of bearing them comes out sideways.

At the throat Chakra, the Spirit gives us great creativity. When he was in the region of the Decapolis, Rabbouni said "ephphatha," touching the tongue and ears of a deaf man. However much Jesus asked the man to be silent--he, instead proclaimed Jesus' healing all the more loudly. The Spirit within, when it hovers in the throat, is called the spirit of understanding. This is the stage at which students, knowing themselves, begin to become teachers. As the prophet Isaiah says: "The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens--wakens my ear to listen as one who is taught." So it is true of us, who allow the energy of the Spirit to rise into the throat. Indeed, we're able to honestly self apply a great many of the scriptures--but if we're doing our work with any integrity, it's not just the flattering ones. We see ourselves as much in Scriptures utterly delusional characters as its awakened ones. We see ourselves in Scriptures self-induced suffering as well as its glimmers of liberation. In times of conflict, passages we've committed to memory suddenly arise in our hearts, giving all of these a name. 

At the third eye chakra, between and slightly above the eyes, the spirit within manifests as a spirit of wisdom. When the Spirit's energy is working out blockages in this area, we might be given altered states of consciousness--which are problematic for the young, who will suffer for any resulting spiritual elitism. We might have profound insights about the nature of existence or the inter-connectivity of religious truths. When Peter James and John had their third eyes opened, they saw Jesus' divinity plainly--as they saw him "conversing with the law and the prophets" embodied in Moses and Elijah. In the end, what's written in the scriptures proves true of us. "In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh...your sons and your daughters shall prophesy and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams." For us practitioners of Tantra and students of Rabbouni, the last days and the first are both alike: they are all here and now. Our question--and the question that has a bearing on our perception of the Spirit's action-- is this: can we be here and now as well?

At the Crown Chakra, at the top of the head, our Spirit manifests as the Spirit of the Lord. In truth, the entire journey of the spirit within has made a Via Dolorosa of our spines, and the entire journey has been one of what the Christian East calls "divinization." We have witnessed and fessed up to our part in the damage done by venting our energy in the lower chakras. At the heart chakra we learned to be Christ to ourselves--to seek out the marginalized parts of our psyche we've relegated to shadow and bring them to light. We've learned to treat ourselves with compassion--to face our capacities for creating suffering and perhaps, by grace and practiced gentleness, avoid reactively externalizing it. Our track record is less than stellar, but by this kind of exploration of our capacity for darkness, we are, like Christ, learning how to become sin without knowing sin. It's appropriate that the last Chakra is located at the top of the head: we end up "crucified at the place of the skull" just as he was. We are suspended with Christ. We're able to enter fully into experiences we're averse to--because we've developed the equanimity and serenity to do so. But we're unable to take solace in the wisdom we sometimes hear ourselves conveying to others, unable to escape either the temptations to ignore our shadow or the desire to wield our divine image for narcissism instead of service. But past lives, spent as denial ridden hedonists or selfish minor deities, are a real possibility--so we ask for the grace to handle our divinity and humanity humbly, as the Teacher did.

All that remains to say is this: the only spiritual processes that are complete are the ones that fly completely under the radar of our awareness. When we become not-two with the spirit within, the dualism of thoughts and words collapses entirely, pulling the edifice of ego down on itself. The Spirit within is a festival to which we've been sent while the teacher stays behind. If he goes up to the festival later, that's his choice. Meanwhile, the journey's still ours to get lost in. What we're doing here may, perhaps, be helpful. Clear concepts have a great deal of importance. But in the end, every moment we spend writing books about Tantra is a moment we don't spend practicing it. No one who says "I am a student of Tantra" is actually practicing as one. Practice is always and only quiet, and silent serenity is the mark of a practitioner. All others, alas, are just kidding.

At the higher chakras, we've seen the truth: that there are no others, just beings who mirror our own purgatorial predicament back to us. Some of the wisest we've known have asked "what's your route in"--meaning "what are trails you've cut from your outside to your inside, from head to heart?" For students of Rabbouni and practitioners of Christian Tantra, breathing, listening at the expense of thought and grounding in sensation are the vessel into which the wine of our practice is poured. We're cleaning the inside of the cup, we're doing shadow work and inner family work--but we do it with such focused attention and intention that it evolves into deity meditation. In the end, like Christ, we give over all things to the Father, commending our spirits into his mystery and resting in "things as they are." We become the ones whose silence is an invitation for the stones to preach. Then, clothed and in our right minds--and as if to start over--we sit and listen.

XIII. Tantric Prayer

Prayer is the silence itself, the waiting itself, the emptiness itself--and at the core of all of these is paradox: the absence within presence, the presence within absence that Jewish tradition experiences as the weight of the Divine.  We see it in the holy of holies--the inner room of Jerusalem's temple which the conquering Romans expected to find full of riches, and instead, found empty. We see it in the Teacher's pierced and sacred heart, which ran with blood and water till it was finished. But the lesson does not stop with such obvious undercurrents of sadness. [bxA]

Of course, deep calls upon deep.  We're busy being what we're not--and that part of us calls on presence like it's elsewhere, like it's an agenda.  The distance we feel--this is our predicament. The stepwise motion of vocal prayer, meditation and contemplation is designed to decrease the distance between God and his devotees. That distance would be miniscule indeed, if only we could intuit when to let go of words and thoughts, emotions and desires. Giving up self, the mature practitioner simply ceases to identify with an existence that's separate from God. "How do I give up self?" Buddhists are helpful when they call it a "non-question," a query whose answer, quite simply, gives the problem too much power. In the garden, when the beloved disciple ran away naked rather than allow Christ's detractors to grab hold--in this, we see Christ depriving all Christians of their attachment to self.

All of the words we say and the thoughts we think are just the medications we take to make "dying to self" a little less rough.  Word and concept are just palliative care--but the drug is not the rest we seek. There are times when we speak with high levels of honesty and vulnerability--that's an absolute good, and the heart opens accordingly.  Watching the superego turn that vulnerability and honesty into an agenda is a hard thing indeed.  Harder still is giving any attention at all to the dual task of self-soothing and self-abandonment in the midst of daily responsibilities requiring undivided attention.  When something--emotionally, energetically, spiritually--seems off, many of the tools of tantra are designed to be quick fixes, after which we can speedily return to what we're doing. Whether or not we fill it with activity and noise--and whether or not that noise is mundane or pious--prayer will always be the silence itself, the waiting itself, the emptiness itself. And it is always beckoning us back.

The Word has been with God since the beginning--it's a fact with colossal implications.  It means that the universe, suffused with both the Spirit and the Logos, is conscious.  God and Christ sustain creation, even on the sabbath.  The heavens and the earth, at various times in the scripture, cry out to God, and the stones, faced with the apostles' silence, proclaim the gospel.  It's not just metaphor: we have reason to think that prayer is always, already happening. We need a healthy dose of St. Paul here: "we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the holy spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words."  When we fail at prayer, the path to recovery is simply a return to listening for the small nuances of sound in the silence of things.  Even in a loud room, a moment of pause is available between each practitioner's in-breath and out breath. For those who give healthy attention to emptiness, nothing is lacking.

For Christians, contemplation is "being" with God--and all that is seen and unseen, just by being, is praying.  So the brief moments when we concentrate on feeling our own weight against the floor of the grocery store's produce aisle, the small interval of breathing deeply while closing our eyes and putting both hands on the cold linoleum of our desks at work--these aren't just "grounding activities forestalling nervous breakdown."  They're attempts to listen to, and join in, the prayer that the cosmos is always offering.  For students of Christian Tantra, all spiritual methodology strives, first, to recognize that what the Triune God wills to happen--this is, underneath ubiquitous suffering and ego and violence, already happening.  

We can stand outside of prayer--pretend that there's an "us" that exists independent of silence and waiting and emptiness--but that'll always feel angsty to us (on some level, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.)  A certain amount of hustle is, of course, appropriate.  If meditating on internalizing the Trinity brings serenity, do it.  But if thought comes from anxiety instead of peace, we need to give it up.  Again, this is rough--the mind loves to use concepts as a shield--and they're not.  Trust, not the absence of conflict, not our own carefully-crafted defensiveness, is the only protection. Trust that the words will come at the right time, that the energy for what feels beyond us will spontaneously well up within us, that we'll find quiet quickly when our serenity's disturbed. There is a voice behind us, indeed, saying "this is the way, walk in it." And we need to listen.

So what ought we do?  Ultimately, rest in sensation, listen without thinking, and breathe consciously.  Sensation, deep listening and conscious breathing--these are the tools that we prodigal students have been given to return to ourselves.  And they're as close as the "garment of skins" we received during our exit interview with Eden.  Silence isn't "other," and neither is waiting or emptiness.  They are all "us."  For a while, they seem like atrophied muscles we're re-learning to use.  After a while we won't know what's us and what's God. For the willing who learn to wait, confusion turns out to be the door to humility.

Trappist Monks follow a rule that mandates they rise and rest at the same times each day, pray communally at the same times each day, and live  a life of silence, celibacy and fasting.  About their routine, they say "placidity teases out toxicity."  In other words, the serene grind of the monastic day brings each practitioner's attachments and egotism to the surface.  This is a chastening, and nothing about it is easy.  Practitioners of Christian Tantra--while not following an externally mandated rule, notice the limitations of a life lived in pursuit of desire.  There's never enough time, never enough rest, never a full enough experience of God to afford lasting peace. We have a teacher who taught us, by taking seder bread and calling it his body, that celebrating poverty turns sadness to joy--we sit and listen and breathe until the Spirit changes the dread in which we wait to joyful hope.

Humility is not an objective: heaven has no gate, and God has no house.  When we've gone through the gate and entered the house, we'll see it plainly. Unfiltered by the mental defenses we deploy against reality, the person we need to be is who we are.  To a dreaming Jacob, God said "The land on which you lie I will give to you; I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."  God, see, is utterly present.  And he hears our prayers before we speak them.   The question prayer poses is: are we, ourselves, listening? Can we, in the end, be present to ourselves?  

Can we, who sit empty, hope for the transformation of our sad little subtexts? Remember: empty, as well, was the tomb. Empty, as well, were the nail marks and the hole in Rabbouni's side. We want, and maybe we expect the resurrection to be a pleasant experience. But the teacher says to our ego "if it's through other people's anger that I choose to appear with my wounds still open, what is that to you?" We are betraying our location to a joy that includes sorrow, to a gentleness that includes wrath, to a victory that includes failure. Our entire being is becoming the "yes" to the whole of reality that it has always been. When we are nowhere but here, joy-enfleshed will find us.

III. What is Tantra?

On a world stage, it's a normal thing to acknowledging that devotional religious paths are incomplete. The Bhakti path in Hinduism--with devotion to the guru at its center--remains incomplete without accounting for what happens when the guru dies.  However "God" is conceived of, that conception lacks without envisioning how God acts within each believer.  However much "inner stillness" might be a gratuitous gift of God, it remains un-claimed if the devotee cannot render themselves appropriately receptive. [bxA]

And there is a stage, for believers, where the desire to break down the dualism--between Guru and devotee,  God and the individual worshipper, speech and silence--this desire becomes quite intense.  On a world stage, practitioners who feel such a desire switch spiritual paths.  Breaking down dualism is the modus operandi of the Tantric Path.  Through the study of Tantra, there's a systemic way in which all distant spiritual ideals--whether they're a distant time, a distant place, a distant person or a distant potential--these ideals are rendered immanent.  This happens because the student is encouraged to reduce ego.  Absent ego, all time is now, all places are here, all people teach us lessons about ourselves, and who we are is who we have always been.  And God's entire life, including the teaching of the guru--this is all available inside of us.  It is as close as making the decision to be our true self, and the consistency to remember we were never anything else.

Here is an interesting thing: Christianity is just such a devotional religion. It has all the same shortcomings as the world's other devotional religions.  Jesus even warned us against a sort of imprudent ignorance of earth that our longing for heaven can cultivate.  So he said "The children of this world, in their generation, are wiser than the children of light" and "behold, I am sending you out as sheep among wolves." But a Christian Tantric Path, that's clearly laid out, remains entirely absent from the range of western options.  The type of Christian, therefore, who's possessed of a longing for unity with God and Guru and Self--this believer, while they may begin to read the mystics a bit more, ultimately has nowhere to go.

This is why Christian Tantra is necessary.  It is the umbrella concept under which mystical prayer journeys, the Christian East's Deification process, St. Theresa's "Christian as an other Christ," and St. Paul's claim that "now is the acceptable time"--it's in Christian tantra that all of these (and more) find clear articulation.  If we pay attention to starting on sane footing, (with our earthly existence,) we cannot but think that, when we come to die, God will look at what follows and pronounce it good as well. 

So, we submit that Christian Tantra teaches the following:

Jesus truly was two natures in one person, was the third person of the triune God.  He was born in history, taught, died, was buried, descended into hell, rose and ascended.  When he ascended, he went inside each believer so that the devotee might undergo a process of living, suffering, dying and rising in conscious remembrance of him.  

The logos has always been whole and entire.  There's insufficient evidence to suggest that Jesus went to India or Tibet, but ample evidence to show that paradox is an equal opportunity ego reducer across religious traditions. So we believe the Word is present in riddle so that our intellect might be purified.  It is present in multiple belief systems, so that our own faith might be purified.  It is present in silence and mystery so that proclamation and revelation might be beholden to humility.  Christ is indeed the definitive statement of the truth: and we can't forget that, in the temple, he sat at the feet of the elders and asked questions. We, his followers, do not practice sanely until we sit at the feet of the worlds great teachers, showing Jesus' same curiosity. 

God is present in (but not confined by) his creation.  This is the end game of the sacramental economy.  It would be a tragic missing of the point if Jesus was being literal when he said "I am the bread of life" and "this is my body," and yet his disciples accused him of being metaphorical when he said "I am the gate for the sheep" to a shepherding culture audience, and "whenever you do this for the least of my brothers and sisters you do it to me" to a marginalized crowd.  Christian Tantric practitioners believe God is fully present in everything--and that our sin only hides him when we abandon him long enough to forget that.  

God's Truth rules out neither other truths, nor the existence of other gods.  Though the church inherited a culturally defensive monotheism (typical of Israel and Judah's periods of exile), Christian Tantric practice turns on cooperative, accepting monotheism (typical of Abraham's wholesale adoption of Melchizedek's beliefs in the idol el-elyon).  God placed bits of his wisdom in many different paths, and our belief is incomplete until we've assimilated those truths on someone else's terms.

Resurrection and reincarnation share about the same likelihood of being accurate and inaccurate. Let us remember that, at Pentecost, all heard the Apostles in their own tongue.  Regardless of what is next for us, when we are transfigured with Christ, we believe that hindus will see reincarnation and that Christians will see resurrection.  We believe that there is a strong possibility that, at all times, we are living out all these possibilities at once, and only experiencing a narrowed perspective because of ego and the demands of the "endurance of purgatory on earth" that's the task of every Christian.  It's also quite possible that the choice facing us will be this: are we ready for now to be the end time?  Are we ready to surrender everything impermanent about our minds and bodies, so as to be given the mind of Christ, the glorified body that is a small part of Divine Consciousness? Are we ready to remain in the abiding stillness of mystery, having learned the entire curriculum of the realm of revelation?  Time will tell if we are right.  And when we're ready, that time will be now. 

We're uncertain what heaven and the more abstract aspects of faith may hold for us.  What we know is this: the revelation of God and the scripture call his people to live fully embodied existences in the here and now.  Underneath action, there is thought.  Underneath thought, there is emotion.  Underneath emotion, there is sensation, underneath sensation, there is energy: and becoming one with energy, we can experience a foretaste of what self-abandonment to Divine Mystery will be like when now and the hereafter are one.  Until then, we learn form the limbic system: our psychology is a window into the trauma our bodies have stored, and our spiritual lives are a wind into the fact that it was our own dry bones that preached to us the whole of revelation.  When all creation groans, it is just our own pre-verbal longings coming to the fore within us.  We listen to the silence of the body, and the stones of our hearts cry out.

This involves making a conscious practice of all things.  It means becoming aware of ego and shadow, becoming aware of our attractions and aversions, of our cravings and desires.  It means realizing how highly distractible we are, seeing that we have a limited amount of energy with which to fuel, each day, our intentions to be present.  It means being careful to point our attention and intention toward things that will use that energy skillfully.  For Rabbouni's students, conscious grounding in physical sensation, listening and breathing will always be chief among those things.  Beyond that, we benefit from all manner of yogic practice--by which, if nothing else, we gradually bring the workings of our mind and body into the light of mindfulness--but by which we often find our sense of deliberacy and freedom expanding too.

At the close of this chapter, we are as uncertain of the Way as we imagine we will be at the moment of physical death.  We claim to lay hold of sane, conscious living--nothing more.  We have intuited that this will lead only to blessing.  But if we are wrong--if, indeed, we should find ourselves in a self-made hell--we at least have expanded our capacity for compassionate choices.  We have a bold hope that, when we abandon ourselves to the Father just as Christ did, it will be a humbler self than when we began.  God willing, that is enough.

 

X. The Humble Tenfold Way

Rabbouni said "I have come into this world for judgment. So that those who do not see may see, and [so that] those who see may become blind." For students of the Logos, this is the core of the humble tenfold way. We have been the ones who said "we see" for too many years. And it gradually warped our entire worldview. We were looking all the time, but it fell short of true watchfulness. What we learned is this: the blindness to which we're called isn't a loss of eyesight. And any who want to know what that means need only ask the Teacher. [bxA]

Because the Humble Tenfold Way is dualism seeking unity, we can confidently paraphrase the Tao: the way that can be seen is not the eternal way. The Humble Tenfold Way identifies ten strongholds of egotism, asks us to play with energies deeper than self.  It notes the suffering  we're surrounded by, sees the mental muscles that use compulsive thought to bypass embodiment, then invites us to wonder what "mental rest" would feel like.  The different paths of the Humble Tenfold Way are all deep dives into self-imposed suffering--and having helped us identify and back away from our attachments, they reveal a simpler life than we could have imagined.

Humble prayer is the first path on the way.  Like the publican--who stood at the back of the temple saying "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner"--we needed a way, morning by morning, to remember our liabilities.  At base, we knew thought to be an effort at control. So--a thousand times a day--we said "I'm powerless over God, self and others."  At the same time, we sought to be self-protective.  As hard as it was, we increasingly took cues from the Teacher's passion.  Just as he remained silent before Pilate, trusting in the impermanence of all things, we sought to take refuge in quiet and patience.  Sure enough, the bits that were challenging two weeks ago seem small compared today's challenges.

Humble presence is important.  We are absolutely certain, at the very least, of this: If our mind were on the past or the future, if we were concerned about things we can't control, if we willfully manipulated people instead of cooperating with them or pushed our way through the world--our energy would be sapped that could have otherwise been used for openness and willingness.  Be here now: this is the advice Bhagavan Dass gave Richard Alpert, who would become Ram Dass and write a book with that title.  We students of the Logos know this isn't just a pithy phrase, it's an entry-point into oneness with the intelligent force that rules the entire cosmos. There is a still point in which the spirit moves as it wills, and serenity rests on remaining there, but bodies in motion tend to stay in motion: it's available to all, but few find it.

Humble intention is necessary if we're to live in the moment.  Rabbouni's students follow the dictum "limit the suffering you cause and do what you will."  In the hands of ego, faith hope and love all become shadows of what they should be.  Even Augustine's "love and do what you will" becomes the banner of all kinds of egotistical relativism.  So followers of the logos start by asking "why are you blocking the light?"  Nothing would make us happier than if troubleshooting our toxicity led to goodness and holiness.  But we don't do it for results.  We do it to find skillful means: to "live into" being more compassionate with the broken parts of ourselves.  Hopefully, efficient work with the right tools will lead to a quality result.

Humble action is.  We wanted to say "humble action is necessary to live a good spiritual life" but then we realized we were just duplicating the problem.  We compromised our peace by getting too hung up on results.  We compromised our relationships by acting with the subtle expectation of being able to influence others.  Now we simply wish to move in the world in a manner less driven by our subtle agendas and attachments.  Too rare were the instances of walking down the street for the sake of walking down the street alone.  We were usually going somewhere.  Too seldom were the instances of giving alms with a pure heart--our left hands always knew what our right hands were doing.  And it was merely a first-step corrective to say "if the Lord wills we will live and do this or that."  Eventually, we had to simply do this or that, putting the details in the Father's hands. 

There can be no serenity without humble effort.  For the ego, there is no in between: it either over-exerts itself, or opts out. Energetically, both cost us dearly. Humble effort is, above all, a yielding of the spirit within to the Holy Spirit transcending all things.  That involves deep attentiveness to things as they are, and gentle movement that's congruous with the Way of all the earth.  Humble effort is a well known thing: religious thinkers have called it "betweenness"--a willing effort that's neither willful nor avoidant.  Martial artists talk about "1000 strikes" with the Katana.  The point is to so exhaust your capacity for added mental effort that the natural gravity of your body drives the strike.  For students of the logos, that's a perfect allegory for exactly half of the spiritual life.  We are disciples of the logos. Isaiah says: "As the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth.  It shall not return to me empty."  We see, in this, a symbol of how the Spirit works within us.  Like a tree that takes root in the crag of a rock, splitting it apart, so does the Spirit break open the stone of our hearts. Both in our non-action and in our action, we train our attention on the empty space.  Within and without, we don't move until something within or outside us does.

This is the malady: an unrestrained tongue will only net anxiety.  Patterns of compliance and defiance establish themselves first in the mouth.  Humble speech--the next step in the Tenfold Path--is simply remembering that the mouth is a liability: that we say things we don't mean, opting instead for what we think will get us what we want.  It not only perpetuates our own delusions, but mindlessly pokes at others' sensitivities.  So we are quiet--excessively, if our life situation and emotional constitution will support it.  We want our speech to be guided by the creative tension between intelligence and intuition.  If we take refuge in quiet, how the tension resolves will be determined by a power greater than ourselves.  We'll hear Jesus' words "When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourself or what you are to say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour."  They'll strike us differently if we know that every hour of life--every moment we could possibly call now--is precisely this kind of trial.  As always, we seek not only to know what the scripture says--we want to know why it was said the way it was.  Perhaps, if we're fully acquainted with the predicaments the scripture talks about, the words will sink into our hearts faster.

With humble work, We students of the logos asked: if our occupations were humanizing, would our lives be more peaceful?  Ecclesiastes asks "What do people get for all the work with which they toil under the sun?  Even at night their minds do not rest."  We spend the majority of our lives working to earn money--that, in itself, causes suffering.  We make it worse if we're involved in an industry that's inherently exploitative.  We ask ourselves: does our work seek unreasonable profit from the needs of others?  Does our work value our own labor enough to survive?  Does our work allow us enough time to rest?  If the answers to those questions falls short of ideal, we make choices that gradually move them as close as possible.

All of the disciplines in the humble tenfold path eliminate a dualism: they gradually unite subject and object.  This is particularly true with humble knowing.  In the realm of revelation, where ego reigns, we don't "know" a thing until we are aware of how little we know.  This can also take the form of mirroring, of "others projecting our own purgatorial predicament back to us": we will see selfishness in others, then realize that it's in us as well.  In the realm of mystery, as the dualism inherent in incarnations diminishes, we don't know something until the knower and the known become one.  In Christian Tantra, this is most clear in the discipline of internalizing the teacher.  After we've done all the external actions he did, we go within.  We imagine every thought to be Christ's thoughts, every sensation to be his sensations.  Our arms are his arms, our feet his feet, our hands his hands.  His depression and ours are one, his anger and ours are one.  Our sin is our own only because we put him out of our mind long enough to do what we wanted.  That doesn't mean he wasn't there and can't incorporate it--the isolationism was ours, and ours alone.

Especially when it's used as a means of control, nothing is more exhausting than thinking.  Thinking enforces a subject-object distinction, holds all creation at a distance so that it can be examined. Humble thinking, which relaxes the objectifying gaze that's part of egotism, is more like perception. Absent from humble thinking are things like craving, desire, clinging to what's attractive or rejecting what we're averse to--and as the force involved diminishes, our general sense of calm increases. Our first forays into this kind of perception occur through realizations and "contemplative experiences"-- they're given to us less frequently as "involuntary, transcendent events" as the emotional tools for ego relaxation become more voluntarily accessible. Humble thinking nets a greater openness to intuition and increased speed at letting go of what we can't change.

Humble belief is trust in the unseen, full stop. It often happens amidst a great struggle with doubt and fear. And it helps us arrive at certain helpful first principles. But this is why we need the "dark nights" of the faith journey: because the superego re-entrenches, names those first principles "our beliefs," then rejects anything other than iron-clad certainty. Perhaps alongside super-egoic "belief-sets" students of Rabouni make shadow work and the facing of doubt a normal practice. Humble belief asks us to face the abyss more often, to remain on the horns of a dilemma until the ego dies and the "new creation" rises again within us. This process often more vulnerable than we wish to be, and certainly more than we can handle. Daily, we ask God to show us how our wounds can be a door to the divine image.

If Jesus came into the world to judge anything, it is judgement itself. If a belief doesn't help us as individuals, we throw it out. If a belief divides us from others or gives us a superiority complex, we get rid of it. Division always creates anxiety, and union always yields serenity. In all these things, we gradually diminish ego's foothold, poke holes in the iron-clad facade of "put together." It's constant work: sometimes it involves gentle effort, sometimes it involves relaxing. We learn to read the subtexts of self-deception and anxiety beneath our steady flow of "self chatter." 

The primary effect of Jesus' teaching, for us, his students, is this: we cease to be a judging subject, objectifying the whole world. He has come to blind those who see. If it had been our eyes that the teacher had blinded, our sin would remain. Instead, he blinded our wills. So while we don't cease to act out our purgatorial predicament--which includes elements of (God willing, ever-decreasing) sinfulness--the "we" who is sinful is harder and harder to locate. 

We looked so deeply that the beholder and the beheld merged. We looked until the whole body became the ego's blinded eye. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? Listen: the entire cosmos is a living question. "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" it asks. We thought him a prophet a prophet at first, and in the thinking, both the ears and the eyes of our heart began to open. We didn't know how, but had to just bow to the one whose silence makes here and now the route to an answer. At all times, in all places, through everything, the one speaking to us is he. No one says "Lord, we believe," except in the Spirit. And in the Spirit, listening and worship are one.

IX. The Four Humble Truths

Tantra asks us to live, act and choose in a way that creates serenity. Sometimes though, that work doesn't really begin until we shed misconception.  Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon could not praise God until his pride spent a whole 7 years driving him insane.  The Gerazene demoniac, being healed, expected and greatly wished to follow Jesus: but the Teacher asked him simply to return to his home with loud and vocal gratitude.  The Bethesda paralytic had to become entirely willing to have the Lord cure him. Healing costs a great deal in transformation: in the shedding of misconception, in grieving the difference between expectation and reality, and in learning to be willing instead of willful. But the prospect of finding a path to proactive tranquility was real, and we could no longer afford to fail at following it. [bxA]

We students of Rabbouni and disciples of the Logos cause ourselves no small amount of suffering by how we think. But the teacher said "consider the lilies" then revealed that human serenity rested on acceptance of loving impermanence. We had to face the mental and emotional cost of assuming that a great deal is more permanent than it is: We wanted a messiah that exempted us from suffering; we wanted grace to exempt us from having to look at our purgatorial predicament. No such messiah, and no such grace exists for Christians.  We saw that the gap between our expectations and reality was our responsibility--and failing to address that gap felt like an ever-increasing impairment. And it was our job to take up more workable first principles: we called them the "Four Humble Truths"--with apologies to buddhism--and made them our mantra and daily call to prayer.

We looked at the true nature of things: our worldview is blessedly composite.  Every moment was a complex of thought, emotion, sensation, and energy. At worst, those things hardened into ego energy.  To counteract that, we said "All life is abstraction."  We wanted to deal with life on the level of oneness, and that entailed a careful deconstruction of "things as we believe them to be."  We would eventually see that all reality is the body of Christ.  Saying "all life is abstraction" is simply an admission that, at worst, we have a congenital tendency to divide ourselves from people and things that are, in a very real sense, a part of ourselves.  At best, we're admitting that the body of Christ has many parts.  Either way, it was our job to remember the tendency to weave a narrative of fakery around absolutely everything.

We considered that, perhaps, Jesus disappears by ascending, ascends by going inside us, and goes inside us so we can share in his work.  We said "All is in need of recapitulation"--because that is Jesus' primary work-- and we thought ourselves presumptuous for not assuming we'd have a part in it.  It was incumbent on Rabbouni's students to become like the teacher.  That meant lifting our burdens and carrying them, but it also meant psychologically reframing the burdens until we can look at them as something to be curious about: actively engaged in instead of dreaded.  The more we reframe, the more the experience of suffering itself was "remade."  By and by, our sense that life was a burden decreased.

We said "the vehicle of recapitulation is the body of Christ."  This began as a very personal experience, and it became more impersonal.  It was quite specific at first, and grew more general: initially, we had particular spiritual experiences, we were awakened to the sacred by particular rites.  As it continued, "the body of christ" became a broader and broader reality.  Jesus said "I am the bread of life" so we saw him in the Eucharist.  But when he said "I am the gate for the sheep," he was saying it to a shepherding culture audience-- we took it as an invitation to see him in the things we were surrounded by in daily life.  Jesus had a historical body, but he re-appeared as a stranger and became present in everyone.  As our faith developed, we followers of the logos had to bow to the fact that there is nothing from which Christ was absent. Holy writ says "to the pure of heart, all things are pure." We admitted that, to those looking on the world with humble eyes, everything is Christ.

But we admitted that, most of the time, we were caught in an egotistical and dualistic mindset.  We needed practical guidelines--as reminders of reality.  So, we said "The way of the Body of Christ is the humble Tenfold Way."  And to remember what that was we said "Practice Perfects in all eating, so we knead the bread."  The humble tenfold way consisted of humble prayer, humble presence, humble intention, humble effort, humble speech, humble work, humble knowing, humble knowing, humble thinking, and humble belief.  We'll dive deep into these in the next chapter, but at base, these were all ways of reminding ourselves that all dualism was passing away, yielding to oneness--that the apparent absence of God yielded to presence in proportion to our movement from denial to consciousness.

All life is abstraction. All is in need of recapitulation. The vehicle of recapitulation is the body of Christ. The way of the body of Christ is the Humble Tenfold way. For us, these were the keys to sane living, the way to shed willfulness, the way to become willing. Already we have spent too long letting our most broken ways of thinking run our lives. We are troubleshooting our thinking and adjusting our expectations today and tomorrow, and the third day we are on our way. Every bit of us wants to be made well. We are making our feet strong: when we hear the teachers voice inside us say "rise, pick up your mat, and walk" the voice will sound like our own. Tantra asks "how often are you present enough to listen to your own footsteps?" Our record is spotty. But when we hear them, it will always be now.

IV. Ways that Christian Tantric Practitioners Nuance Christian belief

We are not naive enough to think that every Christian will look at our practice and automatically be able to accept it as Orthodox.  Here, we hope to outline some of the innovative bits of Christian Tantra--in hopes of illustrating their scriptural and traditional roots.  For what it's worth: [bxA]

1. Keep in mind, we all have a picture of Jesus in our head--one that includes the fact that Jesus lived in the past-- against which comparisons with the people around us fail. When Jesus rose from the dead, he appeared to his disciples as a stranger. This was to wean the disciples off of their dependence on that idealized intellectual paradigm. If we students of Rabbouni get rid of our ideas about him, we can accept that everyone around us can be the Risen Jesus.

2. When Jesus ascended, and disappeared from the sight of the Apostles, he went inside all things, as the true nature of all reality.  Ever after, viewing things as they are is the pre-condition for interaction with Jesus. We are Jesus, our true self, only when we give up self; the sheep gate is Jesus when we see it without ego; strangers are Jesus when we stop judging them "different from how we expected christ to be."  Furthermore, particular instances of holiness--such as the divine presence in the sacraments or a devoutly offered rosary--these must necessarily flow into the holiness of all things.  Ultimately, the Tantric vision is Theistic Monist: we believe God to be revealed in--but not limited by--all things. 

3. Students of Rabbouni are "Abrahamic Monotheists" not "Exilic Monotheists." Abrahamic Monotheists can do as Abraham did with Melchizedek. Melchizedek was a follower of El-elyon, a foreign god at the time Abraham encountered him. But everything that Melchizedek believed about El-elyon--Abraham believed all these things about his own God...so Abraham gave Melchizedek a share with the people, and appropriated his beliefs. Exilic Monotheists are defensive--because they're culturally under threat--so there's an emphasis on saying things like "YHWH is the only God who exists--all other gods are non-existent and toxic to believe in." Unfortunately, the wider Christian Church has inherited an "Exilic Monotheism"--that can't but focus on cultural threat.  We students of Rabbouni know how we must be different.

4. Just as Jesus sat with the scholars in the Temple, asking them questions--so students of Rabbouni sit before all world religions.  We learn about them without judgment, and we don't evangelize.  (Remember the papal encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi, that permitted testimony about Christ only to those who have first vocally expressed curiosity about our life with him.  Also remember the good witness of Charles de Foucault, who quietly followed Jesus, loved people and gained no disciples till after he was killed by thieves.)  As it seems good to us--paying attention to our intuition--we participate in other traditions' religious rites.  We do not worry: we focus on speaking with a pure heart, and listening to ourselves.  The God who exists, (who can be called by many names if he wishes) will hear us.

5. Students of Rabouni have an experiential relationship with the indwelling spirit, which is united to the Holy Spirit, and is one in the same. (The Holy Spirit might act differently when it transcends us, but we don't, for the moment, wish to digress.)  We believe everything Hindus have said about Kundalini energy and the chakra system is accurate, without modification.  The first thing the indwelling Spirit does is highlight mixed motivations and thought content that's unsavory...we have to see our shadow and endure our purgatorial predicament.  We see the layers of our psyche in thought, emotion, sensation and energy.  This is all due to the light of the indwelling spirit--it's a privilege to see, even if it's difficult.  Where our attention is drawn, there also the Spirit is.  If I have a difficult thought, I sit with it.  I ask what emotions I'm feeling.  I ask what part of the body I might be feeling sensation in.  I ask what judgments I might be subtly making about the energy that underlies the sensation, and I abandon it.

6. Students of Rabouni believe that the Seven Chakras are referenced in Scripture as the "Seven Spirits of God" referenced in Isaiah (Assuming, of course, that the content of our lectio divina can inform our living as much, in this instance, as Tradition. If time proves us presumptuous, we will bear our purgatories and hells as we already do, and as we must).  Like our basic needs, the Spirit manifests like autonomous parts of our personality that have their own intelligence--which we can either use harmoniously, or not, depending on whether we're being willing or willful.  As stated in scripture, they are "The spirit of fear of the Lord (at the muladhara chakra), the spirit of Knowledge (at the Svadhishthana Chakra), The Spirit of might (at the Manipura Chakra), the spirit of counsel (at the Anahata Chakra,) the spirit of understanding (at the Vishuddha Chakra), the spirit of wisdom (at the Ajna Chakra) , and the spirit of the Lord (at the Sahasrara Chakra).

7. Students of Rabbouni do "inner family work that leads to deity meditation"--they familiarize themselves with the unhealthy child within them and with the healthy child, with the unhealthy adolescent and the healthy one, with the unhealthy adult and the healthy one.  We also possess unhealthy and healthy voices in us that correspond to roles: so I can be an unhealthy son or a healthy one.  I can speak as an unhealthy father or a healthy one.  Slowly we come to know how our family experience and psychological conditioning makes all of this manifest.  But that is only the beginning.  As we learn to voluntarily be the healthiest version of ourselves, we come to realize that by noticing what we're drawn to, we can follow the Spirit within.  We aren't just working to be healthy infants, adolescents, adults, children or parents.  We are working to answer the question "how would the God the Father and the Christ the Son speak, if they had to speak to us and through us.

8. This "following of the Spirit within" from inner-family work to Trinitarian Deity meditation yields to a new model of Christian Contemplation. Jesus bandied about torah with the Tempter for a while, but eventually told him to be gone.  Jesus will draw all people to himself, and will lose nothing of what the Father has given him except the ego that was destined for loss--but in the end, the Lord will hand all things over to the Father.  This is a yielding of meaning and thought--and ultimately, this yielding of dualism entirely and the drive for control it relies on.  When can sit with the purgative process of divinization, clothed and in our right mind, we will, in our own flesh, see God.

9.  Students of Rabbouni do not wish to indulge in theological thought at the expense of more embodied experience.  That is spiritual bypassing: the tendency to use positive content of faith to end-run around belief's more challenging bits.  Students of Rabbouni do not wish to claim spiritual experience as a means of claiming they're different or better than others.  That is spiritual materialism: the tendency to use spiritual content as a means of self-exaltation or division from others.  By our following of Jesus, we become what all people are: poor, asking that our basic needs be met, hoping to find that we're not the only ones at odds with ourselves.  This, to us, is a primary grace of the Eucharist: we learn to celebrate poverty, and in that poverty, we find the others.

10. Just as Ezekiel prophesied to the dry bones--just as that proclamation knitted them together with flesh and breathed God's spirit into them--so our own silence must be, on every level, an internalization of the scriptural narrative.  Just as our bodies store trauma, they also store revelation.  (It takes consistent lectio divina practice to awaken the ways our bodies preach, but they do.) As an additional caution: we must remember to be honest.  We are the crowds that shouted hosanna, and the crowds that called for our teacher's crucifixion. Our story is represented in both the evil characters of scripture and the good ones.  We are everything, everywhere always, and it's all a part of us: we do not get to pick and choose.  The God who is within us is using the messy story of salvation to make us admit what we'd rather deny: "Tat Tvam Asi" as he says in the Upanishads: "Thou art that."

11. We accept traditional renderings of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, also strive for "orthomorphosis." That's a high brow way of saying we believe there's a right way to practice, we believe there's a right set of first principles: but we also believe there's a "right way to be transformed."  To a great extent, this is traditional--not one jot or tittle could be modified in Benedict's ladder of humility, for instance, and it would still produce saints.  We've made bold to find our own way. It's a way based on radical recollection: the following of thoughts to emotions, to sensations to energy--all as the Spirit wills, with willingness and serenity instead of willfulness and ego. 

12. Students of Rabouni endure their purgatory on earth.  This thing that was once presumed to be the provenance solely of great saints--it is revealed to be the task of every incarnation.  We must look at ego, attachment, attraction, aversion, craving, desire and fulfillment--to bring it into the light of conscious awareness, to work with the Spirit within as Christ recapitulates it.  We must see how and where we careen toward gluttony, greed, sloth, sorrow, lust, wrath, vanity and pride to avoid feelings of insecurity.  On the level of ego, learning to see this process, in ourselves, with compassion--it's key to extending compassion to others.  Psychologically, we have to make a habit of voluntary encountering what we're averse to with as much willingness as we encounter what we're attracted to with non-attachment.  Behaviorally, we have to interrupt loops of stimulus and response that reinforce compulsivity.

13. We learn, in particular, from the living paradox of the logos--the silent music to which the Trinity's inner life dances.  We are made in the image of the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God; and yet the vast majority of us are ignorant weaklings that can't be in two places at once.  We allow the world's brokenness to reduce ego, to break our hearts.  This happens alongside work for justice, when we're working at something we can change, but in lieu of work for justice when something we can't change is working on us.  Therefore, it's said "broken-heartedness is the bride of the logos."  We try to lift, not just our corner of systemic evil, but a little more besides--we know, you see, that our actions have echoes, consequences that reach beyond our own sphere of influence.  We try to do more than we should, while avoiding the feeling that it's all up to us.  Students should become like the teacher, but self-care is important: and long-haul self-emptying is a marathon, not a race.

14.  We believe that, in terms of "becoming" and the "end times," all is as it needs to be, right here, right now.  Inequities, injustices, sins, attachments--these all exist so that we can give up self and train in the Way.  We learn self-care and self renunciation simultaneously, but giving up self is the end.  Other people have changed: they're simultaneously mirrors of ourselves, and so vastly different from us that attentive compromise is indispensable--but ultimately all consciousness is One. Therefore, we don't really see a difference between resurrection and reincarnation--if resurrection is true, we're dying and being reborn, simultaneously and always.  If reincarnation is true, we are living all our incarnations at once.  The transmigration of souls, the pre-existence of souls, the myriad Church councils that have conjectured about them--these are highly important, but only on the level of dualism. We're unequal to those kind of intellectual questions, and will leave them to the theologians.  And anyway, dualism is meant to yield to oneness: not at the end of the age, but in this moment; not when we become who we're meant to be, but even today, as we work to properly accept and share Christ's work of recapitulating who we are.

VIII. The Four Gospel Seals

For Jesus, the passion wasn't metaphor or allegory.  It was reality.  Ever after, we who follow Jesus can't enter his passion without entering into reality. Therefore, look at what's in front of you.  It could be a coffee table, the clock on the wall, the crumbs on the kitchen counter, a stranger in a cafe--whatever you're currently seeing with your own eyes.  Everything you're about to read can be experienced there.

We students of the Logos, who walk the way of Christian tantra with Jesus as our exemplar, do not experience the gospel as happening in the past, to someone else.  It is happening now, to us.  We are like blind men who experience the touch of Jesus twice.  First, we can see people, but they look like trees.  Later, when we see things as they are, the teaching makes itself plain.  We call it the "Four Gospel Seals" and to us, these are the teachings with which all Christian Teaching must agree. [bxA]

In order to hear the crowds, first shouting hosanna, then calling for crucifixion, we need look no further than our choices and preferences.  When we look intently, we see impermanence.  Jesus' teaching conveyed it, and so did his life: Jesus compared the grandeur of the tiniest lily to Solomon--to remind us of our dignity, but then tells us it's "alive today and tomorrow [it is] thrown into the oven."  Even Jesus, glorified in the Trinity till the end of the age, will hand all things over to the Father, and God will be all, and in all.  It's not only from all creation, but from the very life of Christ himself that "you, too, are impermanent" is a message we hear, clear as cathedral bells.

In order to find the veil that was torn in the temple, we need look no further than our own ego.  When we look intently, we see non-self.  Jesus said "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me."  Interiorly, we are always including and transcending parts of ourselves that we've repressed.  We face it because we don't want to pretend our egotism hasn't, by turns, protected us and caused a great deal of harm to others.  By "transcending," we mean we're conscious of the need to gently elevate the energy we're working with.  Faced-insecurity becomes blame we chose to forego, blame becomes a radical taking responsibility.  This is what Christ did, and as we meditate on that we are swept up in different kinds of thought about our share in divine life.  Ultimately we become one with God's consciousness.  We look down at the workings of ego only after facing it and thanking it for bearing the burden of our sinfulness for us.

In order to find the garden of olives, we need look no further than our own unwillingness.  When we look intently, we find acceptance.  Every day, every minute, every transition we experience initiates us into a grieving process.  We grieve the loss of Jesus' historical body, and it makes us face our own bodily death.  That, in its turn, allows us to echo St. Paul: of our egos, we said "I died daily."  Grieving became, for us, a practice as daily necessary as prayer.  We familiarize ourselves with its stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  And we begin to allow them to happen.  When we experience anger, if we can figure out what, in particular, we are grieving, we do.  But we are not in the business of picking apart the process.  Our job is "limit setting and self care."  First, we decide where we will, and won't express our grief, and who we'll allow to see us at our most vulnerable.  Then, we exercise, we take walks and drink tea.  We make time to be in the woods.  We pay attention to the basic obligations of job and family and friendships.  We are not in charge of the process, it moves on its own. When we care for ourselves deeply, we become more skillful in helping others.

In order to find Christ's tomb, we need look no further than our dualistic minds.  When we look intently, we see interbeing.  Interbeing is an acknowledgement that everything is part of everything else, and each thing contains its opposite.  Dualism is part of manifestation, and not to be demonized.  In the Christian prayer teaching, vocal prayer and meditation should not be scorned when we're given the gift of contemplation.   However, in what's often referred to as the "the figure-ground reversal," those experiences of unity flip our perspective. Every death is a rebirth.  All of God's glory is given, according to the Teacher, "so that they may be one, as [the father and I] are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one."  

Interbeing is akin, in many ways, to transubstantiation.  Jesus said "I am the gate for the sheep."  We don't believe he was speaking any less truly, nor any more metaphorically, than when he said "I am the bread of life." Interbeing is the capacity to see the interconnectedness of opposites.  Jesus was a sheep gate.  He is the doorway to all things being as they are, and all things being as they are, are Jesus.  

We could not have seen God's presence in all things if not for his presence in the sacraments.  And we could not have seen interbeing without transubstantiation.  The sacramental presence that required particular elements led to God's presence in everything, visible to those who give up self.  The change that happened regardless of the sins of the priest hinted at a perspective shift available to those who have faced their purgatorial predicament: the wheat is in the bread, the sunlight in the wheat, the energy in the light is both inside us and outside us. 

Many of us use the Four Gospel Seals as a filter for belief.  Permanence, self, denial and dualism, we know that, held too tightly, these all increase suffering exponentially.  Ego and all of its works are too much of an energy drain: they take a toll too subtle to notice, and too costly to afford.  Impermanence, non-self, acceptance and interbeing are the remedy and relief.  The teacher says "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens."  We pray to hear with the ear of our hearts, to take the yoke and learn.  We are all students, learning from one teacher.  Over everything, we've put on love; and when love is all that remains, it's the oneness that's his greatest lesson.