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.