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.