XI. The Seven Sense Organs of the body of Christ

Remember, when Christ ascended into heaven, he went within all things: recall that he said "the Kingdom of Heaven is within you."  Ultimately, the seven Sense Organs of the Body of Christ--the tantric name for those spots where the veil between heaven and earth wears thin--are places where the ego is crucified.  Our utter lack of equanimity comes to the surface. We flee from our aversions and are drawn to our attractions, and can't seem to treat them both the same. We come to realize that we are full of craving and desire and resentments of all types.  These are also places of becoming--where ego becomes Christ before surrendering itself and all things to the Father.  But before that, the dualism between divinity and humanity must begin to break down. [bxA]

St. John Vianney used to sit for hours, staring at the exposed sacrament in Eucharistic adoration.  Once, a parishioner asked him "what do you do, just sitting there for all those hours each day?"  Knowing the parishioner's belief that the exposed Eucharist was the real presence of Christ, he said "I look at him, he looks at me."  Similarly, in the realm of revelation, where dualism and ego reign, there are places where God beholds us, and we behold God.  

These are places where involuntary conversion experiences become voluntary  perspective shifts, where involuntary humiliations become voluntary humility.  But the saying holds true: "before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.  After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water."  Virtue and vice use the same material.  The lustful and the chaste both have to contend with sexuality.  What's different is the "I" doing the choosing.  The choice-makers know a bit more about attachment, a little more about desire and egotism.  They can act--or not act--with a bit more sober self-knowledge.  At the Seven Sense Organs of the Body of Christ, nothing in the world or in any particular stressor has changed. Instead we, Rabbouni's students, have changed.  And the change is just this: we've seen through the false self that we project to the world, and we learn to relax that muscle and just be who we are.  We learn that all fulfillment comes at a cost, and to forego fulfillment when the cost is too steep.

So, with the balance of this chapter, we'll answer three questions.  What are the seven sense organs of the body of Christ, how do they manifest before egoic relaxation, and how do they appear after?  

The first sense organ is illusion.  We had to fess up to the likelihood that we were viewing the world in a way that causes suffering.  This couldn't be false: our perspective was too full of our own attachments and cravings--and a hidden assumption that "things as we wished them to be" could be permanent.  Our happiness rested too closely on obtaining what we longed for. Anything less sent us into an emotional tailspin.  We saw all of this as a real character flaw.  For students who've learned to interrogate ego, the corrective for illusion, we saw, was reality itself--specifically the impermanent and changing nature of reality.  We started checking in with others to confirm if our perspective was correct.  We found we had a tendency to filter reality through a host of unfair assumptions.  As we gradually let go of those assumptions, as we nursed fewer unmet expectations, our demeanor improved. 

The second place where our lies get exposed is desire.  We were so lost in a network of "things we wanted" that we could not identify the basic need in the midst of it.  We also saw ourselves getting caught in loops of desire and fulfillment.  When we obtained what we desired, often that desire would be replaced by a new one more tyrannical than the first.  Still more often, the reality of fulfillment included a great deal more suffering than we anticipated.  The humble student sees non-manipulative statements of need as a corrective for desire.  From the Cross, the teacher simply said "I thirst."  We learned to be honest about the legitimate needs our desires pointed to. Over time, we simply became less attached to fulfillment.  We also learned to live in a climate of fasting.  We allowed more time between stimulus and response.

The third sense organ is blame.  Ever since Eden, we've known the tendency to turn to the flesh of our flesh and the bone of our bone and burden them with the responsibility for our actions.  Generallly, at first, we see ourselves looking to everyone and everything other than ourselves to explain our own conduct.  When the scales of ego fall from our eyes, though, we simply realize the amount of hurt our own choices cause.  Admitting that we caused that much hurt to ourselves and others is hard--acknowledging that we're vulnerable enough to be hurt by the poverty of our situation or other people's choices, that we didn't possess the limits to stand apart or take responsibility for our own actions--this is a deeper dive into the suffering of existence than most of us are capable of.  But the more we see the futility of blame, the more we become conscious of our hurt, the general climate of vulnerability we live in and our horrendous lack of appropriate egoic limits.

The fourth place where we shout into the whirlwind and come out chastened is contradiction. We are made in the image of an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God, and yet we are vulnerable, limited and ignorant.  At first blush, Christianity itself would appear to be selling its adherents a bill of goods.  But we have to remember that we're seeing the issue through the lens of ego.  We're seeing the issue through our addiction to logic, our preoccupation with "being right," and our entitlements.  When we relax ego, contradiction begins to look like paradox.  Two opposites can be true at the same time.  In the places where truth pinches, sometimes it's the one being pinched that needs to change.  And particularly with regard to the Christian mystery--imbued as it is with living and dying and rising again--students of Rabbouni are well served to cultivate an alive sense that the movements of faith exist, each of them, within the other.  Eventually paradox simply begins to look like truth: every moment of life is also a dying.  The question is, can we sit in the sackcloth and ashes of paradox, allowing its tensions to reduce our falsehood?  

The fifth place where we come to ourselves and return to the Father is in our use of words.   Given the complex of abstraction that's the psychological cost of original sin, our mouth's first stop tends to be opining about other people and situations over which we've no control.  Only after that has proved fruitless do we examine our core vulnerabilities and powerlessnesses, beginning to be honest with ourselves about the suffering involved in living in humility, as well as the suffering involved in ignoring the need to do so.  Gradually but increasingly, the wisdom of the ages seems  as if it was addressed to us.  Having discovered the emotional spaces out of which wisdom comes, gradually and increasingly we find the scripture coming spontaneously out of our mouths.

The sixth place where we rend our garments and sit in ashes is thought.  The way we think, it turns out, is little more than a bid for control.  Making sense of the senseless, in the end, is an emotional maneuver with diminishing returns.  Holding the whole world at a distance so we can examine it--indeed, even the dualism inherent in incarnations--none of it is enduringly worth what it costs us energetically.  When we name and label everything, it leaves us clingy.  When we spend hours theorizing about how it was all connected, it makes us anxious.  More and more, racing thoughts, instead of conveying accurate information, became an indicator of the need for self care. So we breathe, we listen and we become grounded in our bodies.  First, thoughts stop racing.  And then we lose track of the "I" who's doing the thinking altogether.  Most likely, it'll all come back, and that's ok.  We've learned, in this moment and if only for a moment, that breathing, listening and grounding can loosen the hold compulsive thought has on our lives and behavior.  There is such thing as restful perception.  There is such thing as responding intuitively to events of the day.  And if we just let go, it'll all happen as it needs to.  

The seventh sense organ (where we rend the veil between divinity and humanity) is time itself.  We spent more time than we were comfortable with thinking our best days were behind us, longing for something better to come.  All the while we missed out on what was right in front of us, in the present moment.  We had to face facts: mental habits of projecting into the past and the future were costing us more than they were benefitting us--and were costing us in places like "trust in God" where the price was steeper than we wished to pay.  We heard St. Peter with opened ears "The Lord is not slow as some think of slowness."  Instead, says the first Pope, "he is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentence."  In another place, St. Paul says "now is the acceptable time."  For all the fortitude, all of the conversion, all of the willingness we need to believe, we searched the present moment and reality itself.  As we searched, so did we find.

It is certainly true that God is more accessible to us who have used the seven sense organs of Christ's body to see the Father--indeed, when egoic striving ceases, Christ is literally present, no less than in the Eucharist--but this isn't true in the way we'd anticipated.  We hoped for rest, and instead we know existentially the Teacher's call to work.  "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me" he says. "For I am gentle and humble of heart."  We had unmet needs and we were given an appropriate spirit of hustle by which we supplied for ourselves what we hoped for from God.

We had to go within to learn it, but "inside and outside" is a false distinction. Instead, as holy writ says, "to the pure of heart, all things are pure." Here, in the end, is where we notice results: when we focus intention and attention, remaining in willingness and watching for the spirit, what we notice about the world changes.   Life was stressful before we found Christian Tantric practice, and now our augmented spiritual toolkit allows us to detach from stress faster.  At first we feared we were permanent and wanted to change; but we hadn't faced our need for control.  Now, we die daily, and we want to troubleshoot our attachment to the self doing the changing.  In all things, we look at God, and he looks at us.  Reality is a bit of a void, but when the ego relaxes, things as they are become a staring contest with God. But we're convinced that, if we only look at it intently for long enough, God will blink first.

XII. Chakras, and the Spirit of the Lord

The Ancient Catholic practice of recollection has pride of place in Christian Tantric Meditation. There is a point, see, where sound and sensation are the same.  We can listen so deeply that we develop a set of "interior senses."  And there is a point where we can hear so deeply that our senses invert--we are no longer "listening to" a sound coming from outside of us.  We become aware that all actions are motivated by thought, all thought by emotion, all emotion by sensations in the body and all bodily sensations by energy--and after a while, whatever our body is aware of becomes our manner of "going within."  We accustom ourselves to watching thoughts and emotions and energies shift and change. [bxA]  

As we practice turning our attention away from external stimuli--as we stop "listening to" the world, instead we "listen for" the more subtle sounds of "being itself."  This is more like a hum or a vibration  than anything else.  But if we've learned to tune our attention, we can, in fact, feel sound.  Underneath the egoic stories we tell ourselves and the tensions of existence, each incarnation is "energy attempting to flow freely."  This mixture of factors is sometimes felt as a palpable energy, sometimes known only intuitively.  The Spirit works with the Logos, through a careful dance of creative tension and impulsion,  teaching us to remove obstacles and abide in the resulting serenity.  "Recollection" is not just withdrawing the attention from exterior distractions, it is turning attention inward and learning to flex the different interior muscles that expand our range of choices with what seems like a fairly static incarnational predicament. 

It's in this climate of deep listening that the promptings of the Spirit become intelligible.  In the midst of unearthing the connection between sound and sensation, we are being gently impelled--impelled to let go of this or that distraction, impelled to act this or that way in our relationships, impelled to be quieter here, or to move quickly and efficiently there.  This is happening inside and outside of us, and the question of both is this: are we quiet and watchful enough to abide at the still-point between tension and impulsion, waiting to cooperate with the Spirit's movement.

The Spirit's energy can either be palpably felt or intuited.  Physically, it feels like a very low vibration, which causes pressure as it moves up the spine.  When known intuitively, it usually manifests underneath psychological concerns.  Psychologist talk portray our basic human needs as indepenent voices that only want one thing--and we know well the tendency for spiritual people, after experiencing altered states of consciousness or spiritual visions, to represent that in the logical mind's often inverted system of symbol and metaphor.  So we get a great deal in scripture about descending to ascend,  ladders and snakes on poles and crucified saviors.  This makes sense: the lizard brain controls our fight, flight and freeze response...when St. Paul talked about how "all creation groans," this may well have been the part of himself that he was talking about.  Similarly, when the psalmist originally wrote psalm 22, frozen as it is in the pain of divine abandonment, what part of himself must the psalmist have been tapping into when he said "I am a worm and not a man?" The Limbic System is more emotional: the Desert Fathers used to go into solitude and "struggle with their demons."  That struggle might be more articulate, but we are still dealing with the same thing--the independent personification of a basic human need.

Students of tantra know that the groanings of the Lizard brain and the struggle with demons--these are only half the story.  Enter the book of Isaiah, and the Seven Spirits of God.  The prophet says " The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord."  To us, this is an inverted list of the psychological voices that manifest as the Spirit's energy moves up the spine.  

The root chakra, at the base of the spine, is the place in the body where our basic human need for survival is "stored."  The spirit of God manifests, there, as "fear of the Lord."  So it's rightly said that "fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  Breath is a basic human need expressed at the root chakra, and it's no mistake that, in Jewish mysticism, it's theorized that the name of God is the transcribed sound of  a breath cycle.

The Sacral Chakra, at the groin area, is the place where security is negotiated.  The energy at this chakra is what we use to procreate--we have to remember that, especially in the ancient world, to have a family was to have a labor force and an army all at once.  It's no mistake that biblical sexual relations were spoken of as "knowing"--Adam "knew his wife Eve" and she conceived.  When the spirit of God rests and remains at this chakra it's referred to as "the spirit of Knowledge."

The Solar Plexus Chakra, just above the belly button, is the place where we first experience strong desire.  Used without skill, this energy reveals all of the resentment, blame, shame, remorse, rationalization and entitlement of which ego is capable.  Of course, we're quick to direct that towards others. But used in responsible cooperation with the Logos, the spirit within is called, here, the spirit of might.  Echoing the way God made all things and called them good, we've been given an entire incarnation--a garden in need of tending.  That will inevitably happen by the sweat of our brows--but it will either lead to peace, if  done willingly, or to inner and outer conflict, if we're willfully egotistical. 

In the lower Chakras, the Spirit Makes us witness the futility of abstraction and othering. Abstraction might lead us to draw conclusions about situations that, while logical, aren't necessarily accurate. Othering is the process of seeing our own problems as having real causes in others--thus opening the door for blame, resentment, and entitlement. Granted, just like watching Christ on his Cross, we look at these things with full knowledge of our powerlessness to stop them. We who made our bed must lie in it. But if we can wait and watch, after a while the energy shifts. Our range of choices, our ability to see our darkness without reacting to it--this will all expand, but not if we're unable to take responsibility for the suffering we've created or the suffering of being the same as all other miserable sinners who ever walked an unremarkable turn on the earth. For now, we focus on watching and taking responsibility. 

At he Heart Chakra, just behind the breastbone, the Spirit's Energy begins to help us work with the dark corners of human experience--our own, and others.  When we take the newly minted spirit of might and bend it in a unitive direction, it travels one chakra further and becomes a spirit of counsel. This comes from a deep-rooted compassion.  With our eyes turned inward, toward ourselves, we find that everything we blamed others for is our problem too. Deeper than that, it's the malice within that makes us see malice without. And we're confronted with the heartbreaking reality of how powerless we are to change both ourselves and the world. Further spiritual work rests on remaining in a place of vulnerability and broken-heartedness. We are able to empathize with the wounds people carry around--acknowledged or ignored--because we are engaged in the same struggle to acknowledge our wounds before the stress of bearing them comes out sideways.

At the throat Chakra, the Spirit gives us great creativity. When he was in the region of the Decapolis, Rabbouni said "ephphatha," touching the tongue and ears of a deaf man. However much Jesus asked the man to be silent--he, instead proclaimed Jesus' healing all the more loudly. The Spirit within, when it hovers in the throat, is called the spirit of understanding. This is the stage at which students, knowing themselves, begin to become teachers. As the prophet Isaiah says: "The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens--wakens my ear to listen as one who is taught." So it is true of us, who allow the energy of the Spirit to rise into the throat. Indeed, we're able to honestly self apply a great many of the scriptures--but if we're doing our work with any integrity, it's not just the flattering ones. We see ourselves as much in Scriptures utterly delusional characters as its awakened ones. We see ourselves in Scriptures self-induced suffering as well as its glimmers of liberation. In times of conflict, passages we've committed to memory suddenly arise in our hearts, giving all of these a name. 

At the third eye chakra, between and slightly above the eyes, the spirit within manifests as a spirit of wisdom. When the Spirit's energy is working out blockages in this area, we might be given altered states of consciousness--which are problematic for the young, who will suffer for any resulting spiritual elitism. We might have profound insights about the nature of existence or the inter-connectivity of religious truths. When Peter James and John had their third eyes opened, they saw Jesus' divinity plainly--as they saw him "conversing with the law and the prophets" embodied in Moses and Elijah. In the end, what's written in the scriptures proves true of us. "In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh...your sons and your daughters shall prophesy and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams." For us practitioners of Tantra and students of Rabbouni, the last days and the first are both alike: they are all here and now. Our question--and the question that has a bearing on our perception of the Spirit's action-- is this: can we be here and now as well?

At the Crown Chakra, at the top of the head, our Spirit manifests as the Spirit of the Lord. In truth, the entire journey of the spirit within has made a Via Dolorosa of our spines, and the entire journey has been one of what the Christian East calls "divinization." We have witnessed and fessed up to our part in the damage done by venting our energy in the lower chakras. At the heart chakra we learned to be Christ to ourselves--to seek out the marginalized parts of our psyche we've relegated to shadow and bring them to light. We've learned to treat ourselves with compassion--to face our capacities for creating suffering and perhaps, by grace and practiced gentleness, avoid reactively externalizing it. Our track record is less than stellar, but by this kind of exploration of our capacity for darkness, we are, like Christ, learning how to become sin without knowing sin. It's appropriate that the last Chakra is located at the top of the head: we end up "crucified at the place of the skull" just as he was. We are suspended with Christ. We're able to enter fully into experiences we're averse to--because we've developed the equanimity and serenity to do so. But we're unable to take solace in the wisdom we sometimes hear ourselves conveying to others, unable to escape either the temptations to ignore our shadow or the desire to wield our divine image for narcissism instead of service. But past lives, spent as denial ridden hedonists or selfish minor deities, are a real possibility--so we ask for the grace to handle our divinity and humanity humbly, as the Teacher did.

All that remains to say is this: the only spiritual processes that are complete are the ones that fly completely under the radar of our awareness. When we become not-two with the spirit within, the dualism of thoughts and words collapses entirely, pulling the edifice of ego down on itself. The Spirit within is a festival to which we've been sent while the teacher stays behind. If he goes up to the festival later, that's his choice. Meanwhile, the journey's still ours to get lost in. What we're doing here may, perhaps, be helpful. Clear concepts have a great deal of importance. But in the end, every moment we spend writing books about Tantra is a moment we don't spend practicing it. No one who says "I am a student of Tantra" is actually practicing as one. Practice is always and only quiet, and silent serenity is the mark of a practitioner. All others, alas, are just kidding.

At the higher chakras, we've seen the truth: that there are no others, just beings who mirror our own purgatorial predicament back to us. Some of the wisest we've known have asked "what's your route in"--meaning "what are trails you've cut from your outside to your inside, from head to heart?" For students of Rabbouni and practitioners of Christian Tantra, breathing, listening at the expense of thought and grounding in sensation are the vessel into which the wine of our practice is poured. We're cleaning the inside of the cup, we're doing shadow work and inner family work--but we do it with such focused attention and intention that it evolves into deity meditation. In the end, like Christ, we give over all things to the Father, commending our spirits into his mystery and resting in "things as they are." We become the ones whose silence is an invitation for the stones to preach. Then, clothed and in our right minds--and as if to start over--we sit and listen.

XIII. Tantric Prayer

Prayer is the silence itself, the waiting itself, the emptiness itself--and at the core of all of these is paradox: the absence within presence, the presence within absence that Jewish tradition experiences as the weight of the Divine.  We see it in the holy of holies--the inner room of Jerusalem's temple which the conquering Romans expected to find full of riches, and instead, found empty. We see it in the Teacher's pierced and sacred heart, which ran with blood and water till it was finished. But the lesson does not stop with such obvious undercurrents of sadness. [bxA]

Of course, deep calls upon deep.  We're busy being what we're not--and that part of us calls on presence like it's elsewhere, like it's an agenda.  The distance we feel--this is our predicament. The stepwise motion of vocal prayer, meditation and contemplation is designed to decrease the distance between God and his devotees. That distance would be miniscule indeed, if only we could intuit when to let go of words and thoughts, emotions and desires. Giving up self, the mature practitioner simply ceases to identify with an existence that's separate from God. "How do I give up self?" Buddhists are helpful when they call it a "non-question," a query whose answer, quite simply, gives the problem too much power. In the garden, when the beloved disciple ran away naked rather than allow Christ's detractors to grab hold--in this, we see Christ depriving all Christians of their attachment to self.

All of the words we say and the thoughts we think are just the medications we take to make "dying to self" a little less rough.  Word and concept are just palliative care--but the drug is not the rest we seek. There are times when we speak with high levels of honesty and vulnerability--that's an absolute good, and the heart opens accordingly.  Watching the superego turn that vulnerability and honesty into an agenda is a hard thing indeed.  Harder still is giving any attention at all to the dual task of self-soothing and self-abandonment in the midst of daily responsibilities requiring undivided attention.  When something--emotionally, energetically, spiritually--seems off, many of the tools of tantra are designed to be quick fixes, after which we can speedily return to what we're doing. Whether or not we fill it with activity and noise--and whether or not that noise is mundane or pious--prayer will always be the silence itself, the waiting itself, the emptiness itself. And it is always beckoning us back.

The Word has been with God since the beginning--it's a fact with colossal implications.  It means that the universe, suffused with both the Spirit and the Logos, is conscious.  God and Christ sustain creation, even on the sabbath.  The heavens and the earth, at various times in the scripture, cry out to God, and the stones, faced with the apostles' silence, proclaim the gospel.  It's not just metaphor: we have reason to think that prayer is always, already happening. We need a healthy dose of St. Paul here: "we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the holy spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words."  When we fail at prayer, the path to recovery is simply a return to listening for the small nuances of sound in the silence of things.  Even in a loud room, a moment of pause is available between each practitioner's in-breath and out breath. For those who give healthy attention to emptiness, nothing is lacking.

For Christians, contemplation is "being" with God--and all that is seen and unseen, just by being, is praying.  So the brief moments when we concentrate on feeling our own weight against the floor of the grocery store's produce aisle, the small interval of breathing deeply while closing our eyes and putting both hands on the cold linoleum of our desks at work--these aren't just "grounding activities forestalling nervous breakdown."  They're attempts to listen to, and join in, the prayer that the cosmos is always offering.  For students of Christian Tantra, all spiritual methodology strives, first, to recognize that what the Triune God wills to happen--this is, underneath ubiquitous suffering and ego and violence, already happening.  

We can stand outside of prayer--pretend that there's an "us" that exists independent of silence and waiting and emptiness--but that'll always feel angsty to us (on some level, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.)  A certain amount of hustle is, of course, appropriate.  If meditating on internalizing the Trinity brings serenity, do it.  But if thought comes from anxiety instead of peace, we need to give it up.  Again, this is rough--the mind loves to use concepts as a shield--and they're not.  Trust, not the absence of conflict, not our own carefully-crafted defensiveness, is the only protection. Trust that the words will come at the right time, that the energy for what feels beyond us will spontaneously well up within us, that we'll find quiet quickly when our serenity's disturbed. There is a voice behind us, indeed, saying "this is the way, walk in it." And we need to listen.

So what ought we do?  Ultimately, rest in sensation, listen without thinking, and breathe consciously.  Sensation, deep listening and conscious breathing--these are the tools that we prodigal students have been given to return to ourselves.  And they're as close as the "garment of skins" we received during our exit interview with Eden.  Silence isn't "other," and neither is waiting or emptiness.  They are all "us."  For a while, they seem like atrophied muscles we're re-learning to use.  After a while we won't know what's us and what's God. For the willing who learn to wait, confusion turns out to be the door to humility.

Trappist Monks follow a rule that mandates they rise and rest at the same times each day, pray communally at the same times each day, and live  a life of silence, celibacy and fasting.  About their routine, they say "placidity teases out toxicity."  In other words, the serene grind of the monastic day brings each practitioner's attachments and egotism to the surface.  This is a chastening, and nothing about it is easy.  Practitioners of Christian Tantra--while not following an externally mandated rule, notice the limitations of a life lived in pursuit of desire.  There's never enough time, never enough rest, never a full enough experience of God to afford lasting peace. We have a teacher who taught us, by taking seder bread and calling it his body, that celebrating poverty turns sadness to joy--we sit and listen and breathe until the Spirit changes the dread in which we wait to joyful hope.

Humility is not an objective: heaven has no gate, and God has no house.  When we've gone through the gate and entered the house, we'll see it plainly. Unfiltered by the mental defenses we deploy against reality, the person we need to be is who we are.  To a dreaming Jacob, God said "The land on which you lie I will give to you; I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."  God, see, is utterly present.  And he hears our prayers before we speak them.   The question prayer poses is: are we, ourselves, listening? Can we, in the end, be present to ourselves?  

Can we, who sit empty, hope for the transformation of our sad little subtexts? Remember: empty, as well, was the tomb. Empty, as well, were the nail marks and the hole in Rabbouni's side. We want, and maybe we expect the resurrection to be a pleasant experience. But the teacher says to our ego "if it's through other people's anger that I choose to appear with my wounds still open, what is that to you?" We are betraying our location to a joy that includes sorrow, to a gentleness that includes wrath, to a victory that includes failure. Our entire being is becoming the "yes" to the whole of reality that it has always been. When we are nowhere but here, joy-enfleshed will find us.

III. What is Tantra?

On a world stage, it's a normal thing to acknowledging that devotional religious paths are incomplete. The Bhakti path in Hinduism--with devotion to the guru at its center--remains incomplete without accounting for what happens when the guru dies.  However "God" is conceived of, that conception lacks without envisioning how God acts within each believer.  However much "inner stillness" might be a gratuitous gift of God, it remains un-claimed if the devotee cannot render themselves appropriately receptive. [bxA]

And there is a stage, for believers, where the desire to break down the dualism--between Guru and devotee,  God and the individual worshipper, speech and silence--this desire becomes quite intense.  On a world stage, practitioners who feel such a desire switch spiritual paths.  Breaking down dualism is the modus operandi of the Tantric Path.  Through the study of Tantra, there's a systemic way in which all distant spiritual ideals--whether they're a distant time, a distant place, a distant person or a distant potential--these ideals are rendered immanent.  This happens because the student is encouraged to reduce ego.  Absent ego, all time is now, all places are here, all people teach us lessons about ourselves, and who we are is who we have always been.  And God's entire life, including the teaching of the guru--this is all available inside of us.  It is as close as making the decision to be our true self, and the consistency to remember we were never anything else.

Here is an interesting thing: Christianity is just such a devotional religion. It has all the same shortcomings as the world's other devotional religions.  Jesus even warned us against a sort of imprudent ignorance of earth that our longing for heaven can cultivate.  So he said "The children of this world, in their generation, are wiser than the children of light" and "behold, I am sending you out as sheep among wolves." But a Christian Tantric Path, that's clearly laid out, remains entirely absent from the range of western options.  The type of Christian, therefore, who's possessed of a longing for unity with God and Guru and Self--this believer, while they may begin to read the mystics a bit more, ultimately has nowhere to go.

This is why Christian Tantra is necessary.  It is the umbrella concept under which mystical prayer journeys, the Christian East's Deification process, St. Theresa's "Christian as an other Christ," and St. Paul's claim that "now is the acceptable time"--it's in Christian tantra that all of these (and more) find clear articulation.  If we pay attention to starting on sane footing, (with our earthly existence,) we cannot but think that, when we come to die, God will look at what follows and pronounce it good as well. 

So, we submit that Christian Tantra teaches the following:

Jesus truly was two natures in one person, was the third person of the triune God.  He was born in history, taught, died, was buried, descended into hell, rose and ascended.  When he ascended, he went inside each believer so that the devotee might undergo a process of living, suffering, dying and rising in conscious remembrance of him.  

The logos has always been whole and entire.  There's insufficient evidence to suggest that Jesus went to India or Tibet, but ample evidence to show that paradox is an equal opportunity ego reducer across religious traditions. So we believe the Word is present in riddle so that our intellect might be purified.  It is present in multiple belief systems, so that our own faith might be purified.  It is present in silence and mystery so that proclamation and revelation might be beholden to humility.  Christ is indeed the definitive statement of the truth: and we can't forget that, in the temple, he sat at the feet of the elders and asked questions. We, his followers, do not practice sanely until we sit at the feet of the worlds great teachers, showing Jesus' same curiosity. 

God is present in (but not confined by) his creation.  This is the end game of the sacramental economy.  It would be a tragic missing of the point if Jesus was being literal when he said "I am the bread of life" and "this is my body," and yet his disciples accused him of being metaphorical when he said "I am the gate for the sheep" to a shepherding culture audience, and "whenever you do this for the least of my brothers and sisters you do it to me" to a marginalized crowd.  Christian Tantric practitioners believe God is fully present in everything--and that our sin only hides him when we abandon him long enough to forget that.  

God's Truth rules out neither other truths, nor the existence of other gods.  Though the church inherited a culturally defensive monotheism (typical of Israel and Judah's periods of exile), Christian Tantric practice turns on cooperative, accepting monotheism (typical of Abraham's wholesale adoption of Melchizedek's beliefs in the idol el-elyon).  God placed bits of his wisdom in many different paths, and our belief is incomplete until we've assimilated those truths on someone else's terms.

Resurrection and reincarnation share about the same likelihood of being accurate and inaccurate. Let us remember that, at Pentecost, all heard the Apostles in their own tongue.  Regardless of what is next for us, when we are transfigured with Christ, we believe that hindus will see reincarnation and that Christians will see resurrection.  We believe that there is a strong possibility that, at all times, we are living out all these possibilities at once, and only experiencing a narrowed perspective because of ego and the demands of the "endurance of purgatory on earth" that's the task of every Christian.  It's also quite possible that the choice facing us will be this: are we ready for now to be the end time?  Are we ready to surrender everything impermanent about our minds and bodies, so as to be given the mind of Christ, the glorified body that is a small part of Divine Consciousness? Are we ready to remain in the abiding stillness of mystery, having learned the entire curriculum of the realm of revelation?  Time will tell if we are right.  And when we're ready, that time will be now. 

We're uncertain what heaven and the more abstract aspects of faith may hold for us.  What we know is this: the revelation of God and the scripture call his people to live fully embodied existences in the here and now.  Underneath action, there is thought.  Underneath thought, there is emotion.  Underneath emotion, there is sensation, underneath sensation, there is energy: and becoming one with energy, we can experience a foretaste of what self-abandonment to Divine Mystery will be like when now and the hereafter are one.  Until then, we learn form the limbic system: our psychology is a window into the trauma our bodies have stored, and our spiritual lives are a wind into the fact that it was our own dry bones that preached to us the whole of revelation.  When all creation groans, it is just our own pre-verbal longings coming to the fore within us.  We listen to the silence of the body, and the stones of our hearts cry out.

This involves making a conscious practice of all things.  It means becoming aware of ego and shadow, becoming aware of our attractions and aversions, of our cravings and desires.  It means realizing how highly distractible we are, seeing that we have a limited amount of energy with which to fuel, each day, our intentions to be present.  It means being careful to point our attention and intention toward things that will use that energy skillfully.  For Rabbouni's students, conscious grounding in physical sensation, listening and breathing will always be chief among those things.  Beyond that, we benefit from all manner of yogic practice--by which, if nothing else, we gradually bring the workings of our mind and body into the light of mindfulness--but by which we often find our sense of deliberacy and freedom expanding too.

At the close of this chapter, we are as uncertain of the Way as we imagine we will be at the moment of physical death.  We claim to lay hold of sane, conscious living--nothing more.  We have intuited that this will lead only to blessing.  But if we are wrong--if, indeed, we should find ourselves in a self-made hell--we at least have expanded our capacity for compassionate choices.  We have a bold hope that, when we abandon ourselves to the Father just as Christ did, it will be a humbler self than when we began.  God willing, that is enough.

 

X. The Humble Tenfold Way

Rabbouni said "I have come into this world for judgment. So that those who do not see may see, and [so that] those who see may become blind." For students of the Logos, this is the core of the humble tenfold way. We have been the ones who said "we see" for too many years. And it gradually warped our entire worldview. We were looking all the time, but it fell short of true watchfulness. What we learned is this: the blindness to which we're called isn't a loss of eyesight. And any who want to know what that means need only ask the Teacher. [bxA]

Because the Humble Tenfold Way is dualism seeking unity, we can confidently paraphrase the Tao: the way that can be seen is not the eternal way. The Humble Tenfold Way identifies ten strongholds of egotism, asks us to play with energies deeper than self.  It notes the suffering  we're surrounded by, sees the mental muscles that use compulsive thought to bypass embodiment, then invites us to wonder what "mental rest" would feel like.  The different paths of the Humble Tenfold Way are all deep dives into self-imposed suffering--and having helped us identify and back away from our attachments, they reveal a simpler life than we could have imagined.

Humble prayer is the first path on the way.  Like the publican--who stood at the back of the temple saying "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner"--we needed a way, morning by morning, to remember our liabilities.  At base, we knew thought to be an effort at control. So--a thousand times a day--we said "I'm powerless over God, self and others."  At the same time, we sought to be self-protective.  As hard as it was, we increasingly took cues from the Teacher's passion.  Just as he remained silent before Pilate, trusting in the impermanence of all things, we sought to take refuge in quiet and patience.  Sure enough, the bits that were challenging two weeks ago seem small compared today's challenges.

Humble presence is important.  We are absolutely certain, at the very least, of this: If our mind were on the past or the future, if we were concerned about things we can't control, if we willfully manipulated people instead of cooperating with them or pushed our way through the world--our energy would be sapped that could have otherwise been used for openness and willingness.  Be here now: this is the advice Bhagavan Dass gave Richard Alpert, who would become Ram Dass and write a book with that title.  We students of the Logos know this isn't just a pithy phrase, it's an entry-point into oneness with the intelligent force that rules the entire cosmos. There is a still point in which the spirit moves as it wills, and serenity rests on remaining there, but bodies in motion tend to stay in motion: it's available to all, but few find it.

Humble intention is necessary if we're to live in the moment.  Rabbouni's students follow the dictum "limit the suffering you cause and do what you will."  In the hands of ego, faith hope and love all become shadows of what they should be.  Even Augustine's "love and do what you will" becomes the banner of all kinds of egotistical relativism.  So followers of the logos start by asking "why are you blocking the light?"  Nothing would make us happier than if troubleshooting our toxicity led to goodness and holiness.  But we don't do it for results.  We do it to find skillful means: to "live into" being more compassionate with the broken parts of ourselves.  Hopefully, efficient work with the right tools will lead to a quality result.

Humble action is.  We wanted to say "humble action is necessary to live a good spiritual life" but then we realized we were just duplicating the problem.  We compromised our peace by getting too hung up on results.  We compromised our relationships by acting with the subtle expectation of being able to influence others.  Now we simply wish to move in the world in a manner less driven by our subtle agendas and attachments.  Too rare were the instances of walking down the street for the sake of walking down the street alone.  We were usually going somewhere.  Too seldom were the instances of giving alms with a pure heart--our left hands always knew what our right hands were doing.  And it was merely a first-step corrective to say "if the Lord wills we will live and do this or that."  Eventually, we had to simply do this or that, putting the details in the Father's hands. 

There can be no serenity without humble effort.  For the ego, there is no in between: it either over-exerts itself, or opts out. Energetically, both cost us dearly. Humble effort is, above all, a yielding of the spirit within to the Holy Spirit transcending all things.  That involves deep attentiveness to things as they are, and gentle movement that's congruous with the Way of all the earth.  Humble effort is a well known thing: religious thinkers have called it "betweenness"--a willing effort that's neither willful nor avoidant.  Martial artists talk about "1000 strikes" with the Katana.  The point is to so exhaust your capacity for added mental effort that the natural gravity of your body drives the strike.  For students of the logos, that's a perfect allegory for exactly half of the spiritual life.  We are disciples of the logos. Isaiah says: "As the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth.  It shall not return to me empty."  We see, in this, a symbol of how the Spirit works within us.  Like a tree that takes root in the crag of a rock, splitting it apart, so does the Spirit break open the stone of our hearts. Both in our non-action and in our action, we train our attention on the empty space.  Within and without, we don't move until something within or outside us does.

This is the malady: an unrestrained tongue will only net anxiety.  Patterns of compliance and defiance establish themselves first in the mouth.  Humble speech--the next step in the Tenfold Path--is simply remembering that the mouth is a liability: that we say things we don't mean, opting instead for what we think will get us what we want.  It not only perpetuates our own delusions, but mindlessly pokes at others' sensitivities.  So we are quiet--excessively, if our life situation and emotional constitution will support it.  We want our speech to be guided by the creative tension between intelligence and intuition.  If we take refuge in quiet, how the tension resolves will be determined by a power greater than ourselves.  We'll hear Jesus' words "When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourself or what you are to say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour."  They'll strike us differently if we know that every hour of life--every moment we could possibly call now--is precisely this kind of trial.  As always, we seek not only to know what the scripture says--we want to know why it was said the way it was.  Perhaps, if we're fully acquainted with the predicaments the scripture talks about, the words will sink into our hearts faster.

With humble work, We students of the logos asked: if our occupations were humanizing, would our lives be more peaceful?  Ecclesiastes asks "What do people get for all the work with which they toil under the sun?  Even at night their minds do not rest."  We spend the majority of our lives working to earn money--that, in itself, causes suffering.  We make it worse if we're involved in an industry that's inherently exploitative.  We ask ourselves: does our work seek unreasonable profit from the needs of others?  Does our work value our own labor enough to survive?  Does our work allow us enough time to rest?  If the answers to those questions falls short of ideal, we make choices that gradually move them as close as possible.

All of the disciplines in the humble tenfold path eliminate a dualism: they gradually unite subject and object.  This is particularly true with humble knowing.  In the realm of revelation, where ego reigns, we don't "know" a thing until we are aware of how little we know.  This can also take the form of mirroring, of "others projecting our own purgatorial predicament back to us": we will see selfishness in others, then realize that it's in us as well.  In the realm of mystery, as the dualism inherent in incarnations diminishes, we don't know something until the knower and the known become one.  In Christian Tantra, this is most clear in the discipline of internalizing the teacher.  After we've done all the external actions he did, we go within.  We imagine every thought to be Christ's thoughts, every sensation to be his sensations.  Our arms are his arms, our feet his feet, our hands his hands.  His depression and ours are one, his anger and ours are one.  Our sin is our own only because we put him out of our mind long enough to do what we wanted.  That doesn't mean he wasn't there and can't incorporate it--the isolationism was ours, and ours alone.

Especially when it's used as a means of control, nothing is more exhausting than thinking.  Thinking enforces a subject-object distinction, holds all creation at a distance so that it can be examined. Humble thinking, which relaxes the objectifying gaze that's part of egotism, is more like perception. Absent from humble thinking are things like craving, desire, clinging to what's attractive or rejecting what we're averse to--and as the force involved diminishes, our general sense of calm increases. Our first forays into this kind of perception occur through realizations and "contemplative experiences"-- they're given to us less frequently as "involuntary, transcendent events" as the emotional tools for ego relaxation become more voluntarily accessible. Humble thinking nets a greater openness to intuition and increased speed at letting go of what we can't change.

Humble belief is trust in the unseen, full stop. It often happens amidst a great struggle with doubt and fear. And it helps us arrive at certain helpful first principles. But this is why we need the "dark nights" of the faith journey: because the superego re-entrenches, names those first principles "our beliefs," then rejects anything other than iron-clad certainty. Perhaps alongside super-egoic "belief-sets" students of Rabouni make shadow work and the facing of doubt a normal practice. Humble belief asks us to face the abyss more often, to remain on the horns of a dilemma until the ego dies and the "new creation" rises again within us. This process often more vulnerable than we wish to be, and certainly more than we can handle. Daily, we ask God to show us how our wounds can be a door to the divine image.

If Jesus came into the world to judge anything, it is judgement itself. If a belief doesn't help us as individuals, we throw it out. If a belief divides us from others or gives us a superiority complex, we get rid of it. Division always creates anxiety, and union always yields serenity. In all these things, we gradually diminish ego's foothold, poke holes in the iron-clad facade of "put together." It's constant work: sometimes it involves gentle effort, sometimes it involves relaxing. We learn to read the subtexts of self-deception and anxiety beneath our steady flow of "self chatter." 

The primary effect of Jesus' teaching, for us, his students, is this: we cease to be a judging subject, objectifying the whole world. He has come to blind those who see. If it had been our eyes that the teacher had blinded, our sin would remain. Instead, he blinded our wills. So while we don't cease to act out our purgatorial predicament--which includes elements of (God willing, ever-decreasing) sinfulness--the "we" who is sinful is harder and harder to locate. 

We looked so deeply that the beholder and the beheld merged. We looked until the whole body became the ego's blinded eye. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? Listen: the entire cosmos is a living question. "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" it asks. We thought him a prophet a prophet at first, and in the thinking, both the ears and the eyes of our heart began to open. We didn't know how, but had to just bow to the one whose silence makes here and now the route to an answer. At all times, in all places, through everything, the one speaking to us is he. No one says "Lord, we believe," except in the Spirit. And in the Spirit, listening and worship are one.