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.
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