We remembered our habit of abstraction and othering, and our denial was suffused with discernment. We brought consciousness to our actions. Some of them brought us serenity, some of them brought us anxiety. Some of them made our lives more workable, some of them made our lives unmanageable. We ourselves were the tree of which the teacher said "a tree is known by its fruit" and again "produce fruits worthy of repentance." We wanted to live more mindfully, but found ourselves full of hidden motivations that stunted our growth. Rather than cut the tree down, we dug around and under it. In other words, to correct action, we brought gentle attention and intentionality to all that contributed to it. In this way, we hoped that action might be restored to health.
We recalled our tendencies to blame and shame, and became increasingly able to peaceably shoulder more than our share of systemic sin. We could tell the difference between compulsive and deliberate thought because each had a different emotional signature. The roots of our own behavior were visible in generational trauma, and pain our parents failed to face became our inherited karma. We increasingly saw the communal effects of denial, and changed it in ourselves, the only spot where we actually had any control over it. We came to see our psyches as a compilation of snapshots: all creation groaned, and it showed us the part of our mind that communicates in grunts. We related to Adam and Eve, hiding behind a garment of leaves: after all, we hid behind ego in the same way. And in the pharisees' divinely-countenanced judgment, we saw our own judgement clearly. The illusions of all humanity were no less than our own illusions--reality was just mirroring ourselves back to us.
We kept it constantly before us, the way desire and craving have coopted our very muscle memory. In the mirror of the scriptures, we saw our misuse of emotion plainly. In a tight spot, Adam blamed Eve--and we met it with understanding, because we knew the situations in which we deflected responsibility for our own choices onto others. God let Cain live physically, but his ego died daily in the light of his choice. Our guilt is as objective as his, but we have the ease of our breath in jars of clay--we live in Christ and die to self daily. The Pharisees inappropriately endowed their own judgements with divine authority: just so, we believed ourselves transcendently righteous when the conditions were right. The powerful in Roman society murdered an innocent man without dirtying their hands, and they called it justice. And, inside of us, we saw ego killing humility daily, so we were unsurprised when communal egotism took advantage of our weakness. We asked to grow in the grace of the teacher, who walked in the steps of our sinfulness so that we'd know it'd be safe to do so ourselves. Our purgatorial predicament was this: we began seeing ourselves in the worst of others. The body stored the stress of prolonged illusion, and when the fullness of time came, we looked straight at the self-imposed physical pain we'd caused ourselves, and stored trauma we'd been carrying. We endeavored to stop making pain worse for ourselves.
We remember our responses to attraction and aversion, and we learned to meet both with non-attachment. We realized that physical sensations are the body's attempt to help us find the quiet center of both trauma and bliss, if only we would encounter them consciously. We learned that intention is just the guts-form of resolve, and that keeping intention trained on willingness was more possible than we'd previously admitted. Fulfilled desires contain a whole merry-go-round of stimulus and response, a merry go round we wanted, more and more, to get off of. The two thieves with whom Jesus was crucified show that it's possible to feel pain and still have an agenda: but we knew, as well, that we could act and feel sensations without the flood of egoic chatter. On the Cross, the Teacher recapitulated suffering, made its unsatisfied desires for control a means of giving up self, facing vulnerabilities, admitting needs honestly. Reality became a Cross, and Jesus embraced it. As the nails bit into his flesh, the teacher simply said "I thirst." It's risky (at best) to conjecture about Jesus' psychological life, but we would like to think that, when he prayed the words "Father forgive them" over the crowds, Jesus was also forgiving himself for ever wanting to dodge pain's hidden lessons. We keep our intention, as much as we could, trained on physical sensation, hoping for the day that it lays bare the thoughts of our hearts. In our own way, we share Jesus' task of redeeming all that the flesh remembers.
Finally, we fessed up to our capacities to resentment remorse, and we gained the ability to adjust attention. This taught us not to label or objectify what, at base, was just an energy we had the option to be one with. An incarnation is an inherently tense situation: its a situation of scarcity that, on the surface, seems illogical, unresolvable, and on the face of it, fairly bleak. Not to mention how obvious it increasingly becomes that the tool--ego--with which we tend to handle our own poverty is the wrong tool for the job. But an ego, seeing its own ineffectiveness, doubles down on the chatter. To silence it, we chased shiny objects and coping mechanisms till the comfort they generated stopped aiding our forgetfulness. It turns out rehearsing our pain and mentally workshopping our choices affords only the illusion of control. Some relief, somewhere, needed to emerge. So we turned within. We listened so intently that we, like Elijah, heard the sound of sheer silence. We listened so intently that sound and sensation became one and everything vibrated with the energy of paradox. And it was this--to be lifted up on the Cross of paradox without any attempt to control--this was the place where our life and the Teacher's became one, where all of our choices were pure because our actions and choices and thoughts weren't driven by desire, but by the Spirit.
This was the place where the paradox of the logos broke the yoke of permanence that our falsely prophetic mind took as a sign. Being totally one with energy through the marriage of sound and sensation gave us rest from ourselves. This kind of prayer made the rest of our lives easier--created more space between stimulus and response, kindled a fire of the Spirit between inhalation and exhalation, consoled the suffering Son within as he cried "Abba, Father." We are both the cries of anguish and the compassionate Father. We are both the open ear and the broken heart. We had no idea how to proceed in the absence of instruction, and it led us to immeasurable prodigality. But coming to ourselves was the return we needed. Living and dying are the same, and good work of wisdom leads all paths to oneness. And, though we trip over our own feet in the dark, oneness is where we students of the Logos will walk. On the way, God willing, we will never cease to learn.
