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]
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.
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.
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