V. Where we're going

Being constantly nose-to-nose with human frailty and our own ingrained faults caused us suffering--even in the context of tantric practice. Leaving desires routinely unfulfilled was consistently disquieting--even with the expectation that the energy underneath them would shift, that it would get easier. Facing our vulnerabilities without egoic defense mechanisms was was absolutely painful--despite the fact that we saw the real-time work of the Spirit, giving us the resources to handle it. We were like the blind man, after the Teacher first touched his eyes: we could see people, but they looked like trees. We could see change, but it seemed a trading of one kind of suffering for another. [bxA]

But we were still caught up in seeing suffering with our egos instead of our eyes. We'd not yet learned to focus our attention and intention. We were not using our bodies to keep us grounded in what's real. We asked Jesus to touch the eyes of our hearts. He did not do, on our behalf, what we were unwilling to do for ourselves. In other words: he obliged--but that, in itself was an invitation to work.

We prayed, "I lift my eyes to the mountains, from where shall come my help?" Rabbouni told us to set our attention on place, but to disengage our wills. We sat, we waited. we watched. Slowly the question clarified. To have mountains on our mind was to be internally elsewhere. Inside ourselves, we corrected, and the words leapt up from the silence of our hearts "Here I am, O God." No sooner had the words been spoken than Hashem appeared within.

"How long O Lord?" we asked, "Will you forget me forever?" The Teacher told us to focus intention on time but to make no demands. We quieted, listened and prayed. To fill our minds with better or different times is to judge the one we're living in. In our hearts we heard the words "do not judge, or you will be judged." When we admitted the problem was ours, in this moment, God appeared.

We prayed "Why do the wicked prosper?" Jesus told us to focus on "selves" but to avoid blame. We took responsibility, shouldered our burdens, adjusted expectations. To cling internally to a self of our own making turns the whole world into an Other, keeps us morbidly focused on the big empty hole in our own chest. The Spirit whispered "This alone is flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone" and we saw, in the teacher's side, the marks of the lance. The wickedness was our own: others just mirrored it back to us. We donned the sackcloth and sat in ashes, and God was with us.

We said "What do people get for all the toil they work with under the sun? Their days are full of pain and their work is a vexation. Even at night their minds to not rest." Rabbouni told us to focus on opposites without withdrawing willingness. We saw our own feelings of attraction and aversion: that we withheld our willingness when life got difficult, only to see our resentments multiply. As soon as we admitted our impairment, the still, small voice within said "why have you come here?" There were lessons in both pain and pleasure, we asked that life might not change until we learned them.

When the teacher disappeared from our sight, people kept saying "here he is" and we ran after him, "there he is" and we searched feverishly. The teacher told us to "pay attention to direction" but to leave no stone unturned. We searched the ten directions, only to find him absent each time. The sadness we felt disclosed the one place we had not looked. In overturning the stone of our heart, and in facing ourselves, we found the Teacher.

To the Father, we prayed "Your kingdom come, your will be done." Rabbouni told us to pay attention to potential without spiritualizing the journey to become ourselves. For the teacher, the height of self-renunciation was not the garden, but the cross; not "your will be done" when God seems present but "into your hands I commend my spirit" when psychologically the Teacher was asking "why have you forsaken me?" When we see reality with vision unobstructed by ego, we simply stop asking whether it's God or "things as they are" that we're looking at. Using the Spirit's energy to just "be" strikes us as far more important than using it to separate reality into "this and that".

In the end, searching the heavens for divinity becomes futile, given our great need to follow the Spirit within. We are never anywhere but here, and there is no time other than now. Learning to be compassionate towards ourselves changed how we saw others. It transformed what, of ourselves, others mirrored back to us. We are all a collection of legitimate needs and this incarnation crucifies us amidst both willful desire and willing cooperation with providence. We lose track of ourselves somewhere between ego and the boundless consciousness of the divine within, but only if we're lucky: and only, ever, as the Spirit leads.

Tantra is just this: prayer, practice, and purification--a training of the mind, body and soul in conscious pursuit of paraclete's vagabond meanderings. In the sins and the graces of generations, God sees our own purgatorial predicament--he will not leave us before it becomes a sword to pierce our own souls, too. The prayer "if you are willing, you can make me clean" turns to dust in our mouths awaiting the Teacher's answer.  You have heard it said "no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except in the Spirit." What's true of speaking applies to deep silence as well. Amen, we say to you: not a word falls from our mouths unless God knows it, and not a single urge goes calm unless by the Spirit's promptings. The Triune God sees it all together: the whole time, our own denial was the only source of suffering. Even suffering transforms when we look deeply at it.  If the task of today were to see the world with our eyes instead of our egos, would we be willing? Only when Rabbouni's words "I am willing" come spontaneously to our own lips: only then will we be completely clean.

II. The Solution

To the general sadness we all felt, we students of Christian Tantra arrived at a solution.  It lay in intuiting the Spirit, in following its promptings, in not bucking our impermanence.  Tantra uses taboos and shadow work, the very stuff other religious visions distance themselves from, to "dig underneath" patterns of sin.  Without simply reacting to our brokenness--although, insofar as we are all learning, we do plenty of that--we began to ask why a part of us didn't wish to be fixed.  Looking deeply, we saw ego, craving, attraction and aversion, all for the impediments to serenity that they were. We began to mine the scriptures, building a toolkit to deal with them. [bxA]

We tackled the curriculum of wisdom: life and death, sin and suffering, getting basic needs met.   We eliminated all efforts to force the hand of providence.  We made ourselves open--not only to good guidance from all religious traditions, but to the judgement of our own and others' worst egoic natures.  Being crucified with Christ, we found, surfaces our own and others' toxicity--bearing witness to this was simply part of the game.  Still, we admitted that, for all the advice in the world and despite the sting of judgment, we remained the only ones who could make decisions for ourselves.  We begged for the help of grace, and worked compassionately with the part of us that assumed God's grace was absent.

We diagnosed and began to treat our sense of permanence.  The desire to be good led to neurotic avoidance of what was bad, and it whittled our range of acceptable actions down way too far.  Both neurosis and the false narrative of ego fueled less and less positive change, and our lives became unmanageably bleak.  In truth, all flesh is like the grass and all will be thrown down in the end: thinking otherwise took subtle, ongoing effort that we could scarce afford.  In many ways, admitting we thought ourselves permanent--and finally acknowledging it was a problem--this was like waking up in a prison.  We sought to increase our range of options within it.  Sometimes, we took an example from the patriarch Joseph, who learned to run the jail he was unjustly held in.  Other times, we empathized with the good thief, crucified next to Jesus, who took responsibility for his faults and declared the Lord innocent.    We hoped for a day when, like the apostles, we would set our minds to hymn singing only to have our chains fall off, and the locked doors of our cells swing open.  Increasingly, we began to intuit that the doors never had locks in the first place--and indeed that there had never been a prison.  

Ultimately we discovered that reality itself was the Body of Christ--this meant that all manifest phenomena were composite--reducible to smaller chunks when we couldn't get a handle on the whole.  Practically, after coming clean about the limits of our own worldview, we were expanding the repertoire of dance moves with which we spun through the cosmic ballet.  If our days seemed an unending march of monotony, we lived in the present moment alone.  If we could not rouse ourselves to self improvement even by fear of hell, we sat in moral quandaries and learned what was holding us back.  Gradually we confronted our fears, deep desires and attachments: one by one and whenever the Logos and the Spirit colluded to teach us.  These were hard lessons.  When we could pull it off, we would provide ourselves with the help we were seeking, and when we discovered the limits to our strength we would search for empathetic community.    

As old patterns continued to crop up, we didn't deny them; as our practiced deepened, we spent less and less time paralyzed by them.  We learned to treat our defense mechanisms with humor--a task that got easier as we found empathetic community.  We thanked our defense mechanisms for keeping us safe, even reverenced them.  Ultimately, like the disciple who shed his garment to flee at the mount of olives, we had to let them go.  Practitioners more deeply steeped in buddhism would talk about "cutting the cord of the mind"--and although we know the timing has to be right to avoid denial, it was a practice we engaged in too seldom.  Meanwhile, we pay close attention to the words of Jesus: "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as the branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near."  The Son of Man is rising within us at an unexpected hour: were we under threat, we would be constantly vigilant. We wished, at least, to be as watchful for the Lord as we were for the next catastrophe.

We realized we were looking everywhere except ourselves for divinity.  We asked the Teacher to live inside of us, so we could learn to live as he lived.  First, we began to imitate his actions--just for the sake of experimentation.  In one way or another, we fed the hungry, clothed the naked, sheltered the homeless and buried the dead.   When we needed to recharge, we experimented with prayer methods: all manner of mantras, prayers recited on beads,  and contemplative sitting. Simply giving sustained attention to prayer clued us in to the fact that we could do a great deal more to look at our own experiences directly.  Next, we asked the Triune God to share in each of the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of "being ourselves."  We began to pay more attention to the messages our body was sending us.  What situations were inducing a hyper-vigilant trauma response?  We worked on boundaries, and limited our exposure to those scenarios.  Where were we feeling stored tension?  We brought awareness to the place the tension was stuck, and often, it relaxed.  We asked the Teacher to guide us through the revelation of our own embodied existence.  Eventually, we began to pick up on subtle differences in sensation we never previously had the patience to notice.  We learned to live with our bodies from the inside-out, not the outside-in.  At that point, as at the Ascension, the Lord disappeared from our sight.  What Ram Dass experienced with his teacher Maharaj-ji, we experienced with Christ--the Teacher disappeared, in both cases, because as Ram Dass said, "he had gone inside."

We began to do for ourselves what we had hoped God would do for us.  We, who felt such poverty and who wanted God's attention were either paying attention to other people's situation at the expense of our own, or we were unable to look squarely at ourselves.  We decided to invite the Triune God into absolutely every aspect of our physical and psychological being.  We experimented with showing ourselves the compassion that the Teacher showed the marginalized.  We sought out our own darkness and sat with it until it became familiar and serene instead of fearful.  We observed the working of the ego with empathy, waiting for the Spirit to well up within so that returning to the Father would be a genuine move.  And we waited to settle into the stillpoint, to be stretched on the Cross between attention, sensation, presence and responsibility.  This taught us discernment: it gave us the wisdom to distinguish what we could change from what we could not.  It taught us the difference between insight--which was mostly theory--and obedience--which was love, enacted at thought's expense.  When we hit snags, we were usually caught in our heads without realizing it.  We self-adjusted with increasing ease and speed.  As we took more responsibility, what we asked of God--we saw this had, indeed, changed drastically.

We decided that life didn't need to be fair or logical for us to live it.  After the scandal of the Cross scattered our egos, we began to come to conclusions by realization rather than reason.  By leaving logical tensions unresolved, we were awakening to intuition, paying better attention to our emotional lives, praying from our guts.  As to whether all creation groaned, we were uncertain; what we knew for sure is that deep parts of ourselves were crying out, and it was our job to listen.  As we did this more consciously, answers began to occur to us spontaneously, whenever the Spirit wished them to.  We learned to wait for this, and learned, along the way, to let go of all of the clinging that made the Spirit's timing hard to accept.  We began to approach all phenomena, pleasant or unpleasant, as a means of letting go of self.  Gradually we discovered that our overdependence on logic and fairness had been a subtle bid for control all along.  Control yields anxiety--albeit on a level too subtle for the ego to perceive-- and we wanted to be less anxious.

Where our attention was, there our energy would move also.  We found that tension in different parts of our bodies belied real neglect, but that shifting awareness could improve our prospects for feeling. Acknowledging stored tension might occasion a bit of discomfort, but eventually the discomfort would resolve, to the increase of our calm.  This kind of "body work" had good emotional consequences.  Feeling tightness in the hips, we faced the root chakra's insecurity issues.  It made us less paranoid and reactive, and eventually, we were less physically tense.  Becoming aware of tension in the upper abdomen, we had to deal with how to advocate gently and prudently for  ourselves and others.  As we figured out how to do that, our physical tension decreased.

Though shedding ego was an option, we also saw that we needed to wear an ego just to function in society while we cultivated skills of self-protection.  The Teacher died violently on the Cross, and it centralized our own deaths.  We decided that a certain amount of anger, sadness, depression, bargaining were acceptable and normal--these were all part of a life whose centerpiece was letting go.  And a certain amount of egotistical hypervigilance and impulsiveness were a predictable response to a world with no respect for personal boundaries or the common good. We decided to treat egotism like the terminal illness it was. We exercised, meditated, took hot baths and drank tea as a way of pausing to check in with ourselves.  We treated all manner of physical, mental and spiritual discomfort as cancer patients do when the drugs have stopped working: to wit, we so deeply entered into them that they transformed.  Grief, for us, became as important a discipline as prayer.

Over time, though nothing had changed about how the world works, we, ourselves had changed, and that paid dividends in serenity. Though nothing had changed about desire, we changed whether and how we acted on it, and it allowed us to greet all things magnanimously, then let them go. Though nothing had changed about craving, we no longer wanted the consequences of pursuing our cravings, and it increased our ability to focus. At first blush, it was not the solution we wanted: we would have preferred a solution that kept us in a position of strength. When the Spirit and the Logos collude, we are crucified with the teacher. We are facing facing our fears and being vulnerable because the Teacher did it first, because he is doing it inside of us at this very moment: and that is, we realize, a kind of strength. We work it because it works on us. We say it now because, in union with the spirit, all tongues will eventually be silent: "When I am not two with the three in one within, I am not one."

I. The Problem

We followers of the Logos felt it important, after a great deal of thinking, to describe what impelled us to become disciples of the Word.  But let us, immediately and for a moment, work with the medicine of clarity: we have no wish to set anything in stone.  What Aquinas found at the pinnacle of revelation, we proclaim at the start of our search.  All we have written is straw.  From what little we've practiced, we know impermanence as one of the deep truths the Logos has used our silences to reveal.  To us--in a way we'll explain, by and by-- it's important not to get too hung up on beliefs and believers, teachers or teachings.  We are disciples of one who "was destined for the rise and fall of many...so that the secret thoughts of many will be revealed."  Before the end, everything dies, descends, resurrects, ascends and and goes within.  Our job is to go to our rooms, shut the door, pray in ways we can't speak about, and follow. [bxA]

Living with our own hearts, we found, was unbearable. Something was off, weirdly and genuinely amiss, that none of us could adequately name.  To differing degrees, we were tortured souls, ill-at-ease in our own skin.  We searched endlessly for the language to label the problem, for the words and the skills that form a solution.  It's dismissive to call what we felt "ennui"--because we weren't just bored.  It's incomplete to use psychology's term "dysthymia," because "long term, low grade depression" didn't address the ways "divine intelligences" were, in fact, involved.  Religion's tendency to boil problems down to moral failures--resolvable by "trusting God more"--this had failed a great many before us, and was no more effective in our case.  Still, some of us spent years praying, asking the advice of our priests.  We find it still valuable, but for different reasons.  We spent years talking to psychologists--and perhaps we were eventually told "you seem better" (the only problem being that we didn't feel better.)  Some of us allowed psychiatrists to label our problems and treat them with drugs, only to find neither labels nor drugs to be a complete and magical remedy.  Others sat in self-help groups, only to find that they fell short as both a solution and a source of community.

Even some of the good advice of the age failed us.  It's said that after Zen master Joshu's first experience of an empty mind--his brief glimpse of the epitome of buddha mind--he "felt utterly ruined and homeless."  We weren't sure we wanted the transformation the Logos had to offer, but we had to admit we were in the midst of experiences from which one does not return unchanged.  Even as we realized there were aspects of the search for depth we could easily do without, we saw as well that bells were ringing that could not be un-rung.  All of it we find frustratingly limited, yet for different reasons, still valuable.  We supposed it was all in the nature of wisdom, as it transitioned from a precept to a tool for transformation.  None of the advice of medicine or religion, and none of the proverbial self-help guidance can be wholly discarded, but neither does it seem fully to fit.    

The great minds of our time have given short, sage advice.  "Find the others," they said.  All of the flailing around paid dividends.  We mined happenstance for empathetic community.  Poets warned us "nobodies" to keep it under our hat.  They warned us of banishment.  Jokes on them, we thought, we already feel exiled.  We might as well huddle together for warmth. And as soon as there were two of us, we began to find words for the problem.

Quite basically, we felt trapped by our situation. The Wisdom of Solomon talks about fear being a "giving up of the helps that come from reason" and then it speaks about being "locked up in a prison not made of iron."  While we've evolved a slightly more modern way to describe the problem--which utilizes modern psychology and the wisdom of all the world religions--the end result is the same.  Our feeling of confinement and isolation is in perpetual need of address.

We had problems embracing basic reality. The Gospel of Matthew says "we played the flute for you, and you did not dance, we sang a dirge and you did not mourn." We spent time feeling numb, lacking empathy so severely it was disturbing even to ourselves.  We were having all of the wrong responses to basic human situations.

By Christianity we felt, for lack of a better word, conned.  We experienced problems with Christian truth--places it became illogical--and it felt disingenuous to pretend the heaping piles of platitudes typically thrown at  contradiction were either helpful emotionally, or productive of faith.  We were told that we were made in God's image, and we did not experience ourselves that way.  We were told that God was omnipotent, even as we were confronted with our own unresolved and unresolvable suffering.  We were told that God was omnipresent, and yet we persistently faced the feeling of being divinely abandoned.  Well meaning religious people told us God was omniscient, and we admitted, with frustration, that our knowledge was limited.  There seemed to be something lacking in the God language--and we longed for better, more helpful words.  Nobody knew what that looked like.

We had a sneaking suspicion that we, ourselves, were part of the problem--but we knew the limited help that self-flagellation had been in the past.  We wanted to handle personal responsibility with a more careful eye toward all that's constructive and gentle.

Anxiety--by which we'd been absolutely tormented from the start--slowly became the most precise of indicators.  It accompanied certain thoughts, and was absent from others.  It was attached to certain feelings, but not others.  It emerged when we behaved in certain ways, when we were in certain situations.  As our thirst for serenity grew, our dispositions and behavior began to change, all at the increasingly gentle corralling of anxiety.  As scripture says "though the Lord may give you the bread of affliction and the water of adversity, yet your teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your teacher."  Knowing that the kingdom was within, we focused on the anxious tension at the center of our chests.  "Or when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left," holy writ continues, "your ears shall hear a word behind you saying 'this is the way, walk in it.'"

Our problem dealt with divine intelligences--ones we trusted and ones we were hesitant about.  But we couldn't force the universe to provide a solution.  Our problem wasn't resolvable by "working harder to believe" or "wanting to get better"--it didn't respond to outright manipulation or more subtle game playing.  We had to find a way to deal with an intelligent and unseen source, but not on the basis of effort or desire.  This only brought to the surface our lack of trust, and the pervasiveness of our willfulness.

Silly as it seems, we had a problem with time.  We found ourselves clinging to past emotions, or rehearsing future, theoretical interactions.  Time went slowly when we wanted it to move fast, and fast when we wanted it to slow down.  Our days were filled with blame, resentment, rationalization and compulsion.  It was exhausting.  What's worse, we saw that weariness as increasingly self-imposed.  Vanity of vanities, we thought.  All is vanity.  In the now, we needed the resources for serene personal responsibility.  Too many years had already passed without our seeking them.

Our predicament was one of communication and skillfulness.  We were feeling called to change our relationship with resources the world took for granted.  We were impelled to think, but not compulsively--then explain our solution to those who couldn't empathize with the problem.  We had to work, but not willfully, and to lose none of the effectiveness and focus of those whose fuel is force.  We groped for a way to begin, even as we intuited that something needed to end.  This too was vanity, and a chasing after the wind.

And the problems grew only more complex from there.  We learned we could bypass problems by crawling up into our minds. In crudest form, this creates the self, at its most flowery this "spiritual bypassing" uses religion to end-run around trauma.  All such forms of abstraction, having shielded us from life's harshness once, became a problem so habitual we effectively denied it for years. But we cannot call good evil and evil good: we had to find a way to deal with the reach of sin.  No one acts, desires, craves just for themselves.  Only by facing our own flaws with honesty could we hope to correct the myriad social sins with which people as a whole were burdened.  It was heavy work.  But for reasons we will address, having seen the depths of human error, we could no longer do otherwise. 

Particularly for those of us who play at spiritual games, there was another pitfall.  We may have come at spirituality and made radical changes in our lives.  Many of us had given up all of our possessions and multiple chunks of our lives.  In and of it self, this was humbling, but worse yet was the fact that selfishness was not done with us.  Perhaps we were gifted, along the way with great spiritual experiences.  Each of us, to a degree, fell for the trap of thinking those revelations made us better than others.  It was a malady common to all religions, called "Spiritual Materialism"--to use the the term coined by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The term was Trungpa's; the flaw was ours.  Indeed, he had spoken universal truth.

Slowly, and before we had seen the problem at its very bottom, we began to understand it.  Religion said "be faithful," psychology said "be happy," psychiatry said "be healthy" and self-help said "be serene"--but efforts to be any of these things always fell short in the long-term.  We could not "be" anything in particular when our acceptance of being itself was deficient.

The day of the Lord, it's said, isn't to be sought after.  When it happens, it'll be like lightning, from one end of the sky to the other.  The day of salvation, the acceptable time that St. Paul talked about, is vanity if it's too full of striving.  When the thirst for the past and the future falls off, as he says, "now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation."  For our part, we began, slowly, to experience brief intervals of "being in the now".  They were accompanied by "Aha moments," realizations that began to change the game.  Anxiety became a positive thing, when suddenly we realized it was actually "creative tension."  We had to learn to "just be" and to interact with ourselves, the world, and God more skillfully. We could be "in the now" more often if we gave up our mental efforts to control emotions, situations and people.  Not only did we begin to relax, we began to arrive at conclusions differently.  It was a beginning of the heartfelt descent from intellect to intuition.  Regarding realizations and intuition, serenity fled our attempts to describe or analyze it, even as we became more confident that examination was unneeded--wisdom, it seems, is part of the toolkit available to those who focus on the moment, and listen without agenda.

And then, like lightning, the problem appeared: Ego.  Reality and God, others and ourselves, they're whole and entire and sufficient: the brokenness and broken-heartedness with which all creation groaned  forced us to admit that ego was coloring our view.  We readily admitted that we were powerless over self, that our lives had become unmanageable.  We have only just begun to understand the prattling dishonesty of our own wagging tongues, the silence of all things when we shoulder the Cross. We long for the empty stillness filling the teacher's sacred heart, bouncing off the walls of the holy of holies.

We are students of the Logos; radical recollection is the door that opens within us.  When our mouths were silent, the tension in our own chests cried out.  Along with a great deal of unfaced trauma, we heard the silence of our being preach the scriptures.  This moment is heaven and earth and a hell of our own making all at once.  But we do not bear that purgatorial predicament alone. We live and move and have our being in the Spirit who ascends our own backbones.  We have been thieves, mobs, weeping mothers and adopted sons.  We gave our backs to those who beat us, looked, and saw our own faces.  For our many sins we were lifted up.  For the healing, we remain.