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."
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