Turning toward the light too soon causes blindness and distraction from shiny objects. Eve's shiny object was the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Eating it caused a whole history of distraction--it wasn't till Moses that humanity remembered that the breath of life had been God's name the whole time. Moses' shiny object was the burning bush. But to Moses, God said "come no closer...for the ground on which you stand is holy." Despite seeing the light, Moses would spend his life dealing with shadow. Indeed, shadow work might have been Moses calling all along: he so identified with Israel's thirst that he disobeyed God, striking the rock at Meribah and Massah twice. And for that he was denied the privilege of entering the promised land. Christ would allow himself to be accused for similarly unjustifiable reasons, and Saint Paul would famously muse about how "lack of fulfillment" seemed part and parcel of following Jesus in this life. Perhaps, when the divine radiance is behind us, when we've abandoned ego but can't seem to do so permanently--perhaps a time will come when our calling will come to light--as an obligation to notice the interplay between light and shadow in the first place.
Our friends in the Eastern Orthodox tradition were right--steeped in a tradition of Desert Solitaries, they spoke about our need to unearth the Divine Image within--they called the teaching "Divinization." The Christian West is familiar with perichoresis (the relation between the persons of the trinity in divine mystery) but very few of us have taught about internalizing the Trinity: it's a neglect in which we students of the Logos couldn't afford to persist. By and by, we could no longer afford the toll it took on our serenity.
The teacher said "the wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is for those who are born of the Spirit." The Logos showed us that beholding the Spirit within would involve ceasing to identify with the "you" who is doing the knowing. A tree was known by its fruit--and the Word had attuned us to how action, thought, and emotion came with different sensations. On the off-chance it might help, we abandoned the narrative of self, blame-ridden and rationalizing as it was. Our serenity increased, even as we were confronted with a great deal of darkness. Without the false protections of ego, the dark was no longer "other," but instead it was a part of us. To the extent that we hung in there, the character of the darkness changed. It went from foreboding to familiar.
We, who were (none of us) great saints, could empathize with them nonetheless. It's said that, psychologically, they did not experience themselves as becoming more perfect. Instead, their knowledge of their sins increased. They were able to bear it, though, because the God's light shone behind them. As we descended with our minds into our hearts, we laid aside the trappings of intellect and learned to flex the atrophied muscles of intuition. We found a whole new way of learning, characterized by realization instead of reason--and learned to live with the doubt that came before the "aha moment."
We stared into the darkness, full of terrible unknowns which seemed both sentient and morbidly preoccupied with desire and fulfillment, stimulus and response. On account of this apparent "battle of wills," the Desert Solitaries had sought out sparse environments, called what they struggled with demonic. Any monk will tell you that, in the end, hermits find themselves alone on a train platform full of people. We found ourselves similarly alone. But we couldn't shake the feeling that the different voices inside us were just repressed echoes of our own consciousness. We looked at our family histories, and saw a gathering of wounded voices. We learned they could change--we could become, for ourselves, the nurturing voice we always wanted to hear.
This became the foundation of Trinitarian Deity Meditation--a discipline at the center of Tantra. We would eventually find, within us, a voice whose only task is to become Christ--we would grow in ability to state our needs, echoing the thirst of the crucified Christ, without expectation of fulfillment. More importantly, Christ's tendency to "seek out the lost" became a way to avoid narcissism. Exploiting our divinity in garnering the adoration of others seemed fruitless. Idolatry takes a toll in the subtle anxiety it creates, and already our track record with bearing even life's mundane stresses was wretched. So we stuck with what was doable. We tried to become more aware of all that was inside us. We tried to coax the ear of our own hearts into hearing the Gospel that the Christ within us had been preaching the whole time. To ourselves, we preached Christ crucified--the Cross never seemed entirely finished with us, as we often found ourselves mentally fleeing from its agony. Somewhere along the line, we heard it said "suffering is pain you have yet to accept." As we grew in acceptance, pain increasingly struck us as "just another sensation"--one that, if we listened deeply, had teaching we needed. As Isaiah says, we "gave our backs to those who beat us" so that morning by morning we could "listen as one who is taught."
The Father began to show us all of the grasping at control and micro-judgement behind our opinions. The Teacher said "do not judge, lest you be judged" and "which of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to your life"--we heard him more clearly now, and longed to respond. Like Zacchaeus, we descended the tree of ego, taken concrete steps toward restitution. But the ways we'd come to grief were often too much for us, so we took refuge in the cross of Christ, reascending to be with the Father. On the cross we discovered the ability to reparent, reframe and recapitulate our self-imposed anguish: these were God-given skills central to turning our resentment into the quiet mind of Christ. On the cross we found compassion for the back-biting business of human life--the tendency to prattle on was in us, we knew, as much as in others. On the cross, remaining in suspension Christ began to remedy our desire for control. We had only to train our desire in daily remembrance. it was constant work, but it made our lives better. We were back in Exodus, where the Israelites learned the lesson Isaiah crystalized: "Listen to me, and eat what is good." Increasingly, manna was reality, and reality was manna.
We had, in the end, but a single complaint. Trinitarian Deity meditation was hard to sustain. We were aware, now, of the myriad times we ceased to be present to the workings of our minds and hearts--and where we failed at watchfulness, judgment flourished. Over the long haul, we became discouraged. The dark side of community was everywhere: we increasingly saw our own transactionality ruin our relationships, even as others sought to take from us more than we had to give. We knew the way brokenness worked because we saw it in ourselves. What was said of the teacher was said of us: "he would not reveal himself to them, because he knew what was in them." With time, we grew more reserved. Eventually we knew the truth of it: light without shadows is possible, but even when the light is invisible, there would be no shadows without it.
In Christian Tantra, opposites are relativized; the part of us dies that's weary of bearing what is, and so "what we will be" is, in a sense, what we have always been. The beginning and the end are one: so it is for those who are born of the Spirit. Ultimately we find that, when we were discouraged, we didn't give the Spirit enough credit. It was in inverted symbol that the Triune God showed itself to our ego-veiled eyes. Once we learned the lesson, we realized Christ had been present to us the whole time--he was just present in things we were averse to. We solitaries weren't huge fans of strangers, and yet Christ made himself present there. We were wounded ourselves, still learning self-care, and Christ made himself present in the sick. The Wisdom of Solomon spoke of "a prison not made of Iron"--and we knew immediately it was our ego--but it took a minute to teach ourselves to be comfortable visiting the imprisoned.
It's a poverty, to be certain. The words of life are the work of wisdom. We were too used to denial to be in the present moment without mentally checking out. But Christ turned our willfulness to willingness in the breaking of the bread. As we brought the Lord's offering of gently focused attention and intention, our hearts grew increasingly generous. We are like other people not in our gifts or uniqueness, but in our liabilities. For Israel, the passover was a remembrance, certainly of Exodus, but of all twelve tribes at all times. The Passover was the bread of the Exodus broken in the moment while fleeing the ego. It recalled, as well, the bread of the presence--which symbolized all 12 tribes as one community. We followers of Christ have fallen afoul of all 613 mitvot--and we're on the hook for every jot and tittle. But for God's love, we are a noisy gong, and an inverted symbol. As often as we work to remember, we can see all those who struggle to listen. Whether in the body or out of the body, we don't know, God knows. We're convinced the seven spirits of God shine inside us--and by their shadows, we will know them.
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