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.

VII. The Two realms

Because our egos are wounded--as every ego is--our track record with giving up self was spotty.  The Teacher called us to forsake ego, and yet our woundedness made us go back to it like dogs to vomit.  There were benefits, on the one hand: this led us to the internalization of the Trinity, and a whole new way of working through the layers of the interior life.  On the other hand, dabbling with self was still clinging to something impermanent: it was still, ultimately, a source of suffering.

We were like Job, sitting with our own empty-handedness amidst a torrent of our own objections and a cacophony of well-meaning, but unhelpful advice. The undeserved nature of our suffering was as unchanging as the climate of loss it took place in.  And the press of its weight was unremitting.

Suffering requires self care.  If we were going to follow the teacher's advice and give up self, we needed a way to account for this dual responsibility of "self care and self renunciation."  Some catalyst was necessary, to re-infuse our hyperlogical existence with paradox.  As in a Koan, or on a Cross, something needed to suspend us between two opposites--so that the Spirit could well up within and do its work.  When we looked, we saw it had been there the whole time. [bxA]

The Church says words cannot fully describe the ineffable.  It says there is a perichoresis--an existence that the Trinity has "in and of itself."  The mystery of God, we decided, wasn't given enough credit for working in the world.  And the benevolent tension between mystery and revelation--the very paradox of the logos--this was not given its due as a creative force.

It's become a teaching, among us students of Rabbouni, that we are suspended, in the present moment, between mystery and revelation.  These two realms break the façade of permanence wide open.   As a framework, it has helped us recapitulate and reframe what we once saw negatively: anxiety became "creative tension." Sorrow became "grief." Desire became "vulnerable admission of need."  With apologies to Buddhism and the Heart Sutra, followers of the Logos say: first, mystery is revelation and revelation is mystery, then mystery is mystery, and revelation is revelation.  "Except," we said sheepishly "when mystery is revelation, and vice versa."

In the realm of mystery, ego has no authority.  Embrace of impermanence and the emptiness of all things, the lack of rules: attention and loving spontaneity are the universe's only mandates.  Our failures at virtue lay bare things we haven't yet even thought about: attachment, aversion, attraction, the thirst for being and nonbeing and satiation.  Cause and effect are interdependent, happening together yet separate as they arise.  Others do not cause us anger.  Solitude is as full of reasons for rage as community: and we have thoroughly failed to see what God knows is in our hearts.  It's a relational abyss in which the Almighty eventually speaks, collapsing all time into the now, rendering all potential realized, nestling our sense of place firmly wherever we "come to ourselves", and making all others simply mirrors of ourselves.

In the realm of revelation, ego renders our entire existence palliative care. When St. Paul admitted that he "died daily," he said it of every Christian.  We live carrying crosses.  In a climate of loss, we make Christ's passion our own: the only escape from causation is full submission to it.  In the realm of revelation, we're beset by finitude and limitation.  Others are a quite-real training in letting go of what we can't control.  Time is linear, and we wear out shoes traversing distances.  We learn from experience, build virtue, and see cause and effect as especially linked in the suffering our vices cause.  Ever increasing unity with Christ, it turns out, also entails being all the more nose-to-nose with our "purgatorial predicament:" the view of our sins, except this time our ego is fully engaged in self-care instead of denial. Our dead-time, when it comes, awaits the third day, and the rising it promises.

In any incarnation, we are like students taking two classes at once, developing two opposite skillsets. Besides waiting, we need to know when to let go and when to hold fast.  When we let go, we're dabble in the realm of mystery and employing the same skills addicts use when they admit they're powerless.  We're admitting that thought and maneuvering and trial only led to error--and we stop ourselves in advance.  We see paradox instead of contradiction: indeed every moment of living is also a dying.  When we hold fast, we play in the realm of revelation. Our empowerment grows hands and feet, sees gains in muscles that aren't just emotional.  We admit the accumulated pain of our past, and let it go.  Taking an active role in Christ's recapitulation, we face our wounds thoroughly enough, gradually learning to converse with the parts of ourself as a compassionate parent to a responsible child--no, further, as God the Father to a compassionate Divine Son. We don't do this willfully-- our encounter with the sensations of the body is a willing one, underneath which courses the energy of the Spirit. It ascends the spine like angels did Jacob's ladder. Rabbouni's students awake to find the "ground on which they're standing"--that is, the body itself--has been holy the whole time.

Here's where the learning curve is: we don't always know when it's time to let our wills rest, when it's time to put them to work. That takes years of sustained attention, years of breathing and listening at the expense of thought, years of recollection.  As the Pilgrim with his Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodox renown, we too "descend with the mind into the heart." The AA promise is fulfilled that says "we will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves." The miracle is this: the Son of Man's day is today, and the teacher is telling us " go and tell my students the kingdom of heaven is within them. There, they will see me."

Remember: theologians will argue about which side of the end-times paradox is is truer. "Yes, the kingdom is already here. But it's true as well that the kingdom is not yet here." For Rabbouni's students, all is realized. God's presence in the world is whole and entire and complete. When the Teacher said "it is finished," he meant it. The ego is the only veil left between us and the holy place, where God's name laces each breath. The veil will be rent, and the Spirit will dwell with us, turning our very spines simultaneously into a Via Dolorosa and a Ladder of Humility.

In the meantime, we will look upon him whom we have pierced. His face and ours are one. We are crucified with Christ, and we will spend time as both good and wicked thieves before we realize we have it in us to say "I thirst" and "forgive them, they know not what they do." When it comes from our mouth, we will indeed be talking about the mindless voices of our own psyche still desperate to be heard, cared for, protected.

When the veil of ego is torn, it is torn between mystery and revelation. When we're stretched to the breaking point, we're stretched between the unmanifest and the manifest. It's a paradox, not a contradiction: nothing is false except the parts of us that have yet to rest in emptiness. If seeds fall to the earth and die simply because the wind blows as it wills, how much more important must it be to attend to the Spirit in that place where death and rebirth are one? 

We are suspended, in this life, whether we like it or not: the question is, between which two poles do we hang, and with what disposition? We have given up, become willing: in scriptural terms, we have either withstood the loss of everything or learned that, in every moment, we stood to lose it. Like Job: between what we know and what's concealed from us, we were confronted by the fruitlessness of knowledge. With minds full of the wisdom figures of old, we opened our mouths to speak of despising our lives--but the Lord made us quiet and empty. "Your life," said the Logos "is itself your penance." We asked what the Lord would give as dust and ashes, and what he'd make our sackcloth. Almost too softly to hear, over and over, he said "Everything. Everywhere. Always." 

   

VI. The Theonoias

We're made in the image and likeness of God: seen healthily, our portrayals of God are a map of our own mind. God formed us from the dust of the earth, breathed the breath of life into our nostrils. We were asked to live on every word that came from the mouth of God, but instead we indulged desire. Our mind rehearses the steps constantly: the steps which, in light of sin, have hardened into ego. We were given every fruit bearing tree, now we hide behind its leaves. We remember naming the animals. Now--however inaccurately, in the end--we can't stop naming and labeling everything. We remember reaching for one who fit the hole in our side. One minute we said "this alone is flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bone;" and now we can't stop theorizing connections between things, accurate or not. God created us and called us good. We created desire and craving and sin, interacted with thought instead of reality, and whether we called our surroundings good or bad, we related to them by the sweat of our brow. [bxA]

The flaw we called "abstraction." It was an exercise in bypassing "things as they are" for the sake of what we wished them to be. No sooner had we labeled than we blamed. First we said "This one shall be called woman; out of her man this one was taken" and then, on its heels we pointed fingers: "the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate." No one--not even the serpent--told us we were naked: that judgment was ours, and we covered ourselves with mental pictures of our own being, concealing ourselves as with sewn-together fig leaves. Desire and craving, fulfillment and ego played naming and labeling and theorizing on continuous loop. Blame and remorse, othering and exile were just the cost of our indulgence.

But we wondered, if we mapped out the flaw and retraced our steps--even if it meant carrying a cross--could we follow the way back to oneness? Could we find the still mind of Christ just by owning our missteps down the turns of our own? We'd been taught that a quiet mind was a gift from God--and this is true--but in our worse moments this kept us from claiming whatever quiet we, with humble and persistent work, could have laid hold of. Students of the Logos searched the traditions of the world, trying to find a method--as Ram Dass called it--of "using the mind to beat the mind." We worked at it, learned how to use the tool we were creating, and gave it a name. Borrowing a structure from Buddhism, we called it "the theonoias."

Like wattage in electricity, the Theonoias are units of mental force. In and of themselves, they are morally neutral--they can express either straying from or returning to oneness. The first theonoia is total mental rest. In the Christian Tradition, contemplation is a temporary experience of the first theonoia, and humility is the first theonoia carried into action. A mind at the first theonoia is the "mind of Christ" St. Paul described. To stay in this quiet state is to "remain in Jesus" as the Gospel of John referred to it. 

The second theonoia is naming and labelling: the mind divides the world into this and that. Everything has its own name, its own characteristics. An arm is not a fish, and neither are a sports arena full of people. Noting differences, judging and dividing the world--these become the constant work of an ego too unwilling to admit to its own vulnerability, much less sit with it patiently. 

The third theonoia is theorizing: the mind supposes connections between what it has just labelled. This is hard when we're not focusing on ourselves--it can lead to every manner of insecurity and egotistical angling--and it's hard when we, in fact, are focusing on ourselves--a few modest successes and our ego gets clingy again, this time narrating a string of spiritual successes to distract us from the emptiness within and without.

Here's the trick: the theonias are nothing but an expression of the flaw if we get caught in thinking they're permanent. We got ourselves into a terrible mess by failing to admit that the mind's compulsive workings aren't a problem and don't need care and attention. We had to learn the saying "sometimes, things that aren't your fault might still be your problem."

But, rooted in impermanence, with the right amount of letting go, the theonoias help us realize that our mind's grasping for control won't make our lives better. if we focus on the small things we're able to change and admit we're powerless over the things that make us anxious--then we can use the theonoias as a road map to the solution, following them backwards to mental quiet. Let's take a look at a scriptural example of how this works.

Once, while fleeing conflict, Elijah asked God to end his life. God directed him to self-care: "get up and eat." This moved the prophet's focus from threats he couldn't control to the self-care he could control. Elijah travelled to the mount of God and took shelter in a cave: there, the Lord spoke to him. God simply asked "what are you doing here, Elijah?" The prophet offered an explanation full of how zealous he'd been, how shocked he was at the life-threatening nature of the whole thing. Elijah was working with the third theonoia. He had to let go of his theories--about himself, and how the world worked. Then he had to get past some distractions. There was an earthquake, a strong wind and a fire--but Elijah intuited that "the Lord was not in" any of what he was experiencing. The Scripture mentions nothing but what the different phenomena were called. To the student of Rabbouni, this points to the second theonoia--the need to let go of names and labels. 

Only after letting go did Elijah hear the sound of sheer silence-and he covers his face and walks to the mouth of the cave, ready to meet God. For followers of the Logos, this is the first theonoia. It's rest in God, the mind of Christ, and the height of humility. In terms of practice, here's the the take-away: if we simply continue to ask "what is my mind doing here," --so long as we're grounded in impermanence--then we turn naturally away from what we're powerless over and toward self-care. We let go of theories, let go of labels, and eventually rest in silence.

Sometimes the help of grace is a call to work. Sometimes God appears absent in order to tease out a deeper hustle from his people. Sometimes all God does is lay the steps out in front of us till we wait in quiet. Then the scriptures ring in our own silent ears: you shall hear a voice behind you saying "this is the way, walk in it." And all creation will mirror the path back to us. Our eyes will, indeed, see our teacher. But his face will look like our own.