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.
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