XVI: Deity Meditation and the Life of the Spirit

Until we become the light, we are standing somewhere relative to it, and shadows are part of the deal. Moses had to hide in the crag of a rock while God's brilliance passed by. That gave the light direction, and it implied that much of what viewing God's glory does is "make shadow visible." We students of Rabbouni have borne the heat of the day. We've watched shadows move with the sun as our selves die. We've shaken hands with the noonday demon and, next to Christ, have breathed our last. It is enough for students to become like the teacher. [bxA]

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.

XV: Recapitulating the Ego in Christian Tantra

We Christian Tantrikas, as students of Rabbouni and disciples of the logos, are not asked to learn from miracles, but from normalcy. We don't have the fortitude to be Red Martyrs, whose blood is the seed of the Church. We don't have the temperance to be White Martyrs, as the ancient renunciants were who gave all they had and took the monastic habit. At our best, I suppose we could call ourselves "grey martyrs," but perhaps it's best to just be quiet. [bxA]

The Teacher destroyed the clingy causality of sin and death by submitting to it.  For him, acceptance of things as they are was the climate in which the Spirit arose within him.  Knowing that self is a good thing so long as we get rid of it at the right time, the teacher nurtured self in order to give it up, in order to avoid being the dog that returned to his vomit.  He'd spent his life denying his attractions and encountering his aversions, but doing so without weaving a new identity out of it.  Further, he'd developed the "Father voice" that rang through his psychological makeup so deeply that, when it came time to hand all things over to his Father in death, he managed to bear the agony of it.  

This transformed anger, judgment and desire.  To deal quickly with the first two: anger lost its edge and became an insistence on getting rid of distractions, a tool for being in the moment.  This came out of Jesus' deep knowledge of his own distractibility.  Jesus knew the part of him that simply couldn't afford to grasp at shiny objects.  It's no surprise that later, he would talk about longing to run every which way after the lord, but learning to sit with it, until his day is like lightning from one end of the sky to the other. Judgment became, for Jesus, a tool for becoming attuned to the Spirit within.  He learned to discern the promptings of the truth while distinguishing between one sensation and another, one emotion and another, one thought and another.  Later, out of his own knowledge of the fruits of different kinds of thinking, he would say "if you call your brother a fool, you will be liable to the lake of fire."

We have no doubt that Jesus' own desires were purified--after all, he entirely ceased to manipulate to get his needs met, and was able, on the cross, to simply say "I thirst." But here, as a testament to how the Word has transformed us, instead of assuming we've measured the teacher's insights correctly, we wish to offer our own journey with desire. We knew that we usually only wanted things that were pleasant to us. We only wanted things that accorded with the system of expectations our minds had set up. Desire struck us as a terrific source of constant suffering because, well, we were making it that way. We could confirm this by the emotional tailspins that denial of desire and unmet expectations cause us. Then one day it struck us that we were going about it wrong. It struck us that desire was given us so that we could become devoted to things as they are.  In other words, God says he'll use absolutely everything to guide us, and some of that won't be pleasant. God will teach through our aversions as much as through our attractions, and we will need a way to pay attention to both. Desire, it seemed, was our means of absorbing all of the lessons. The more we trained desire on acceptance of all things, without exception, the more desire itself became both a tool we could willingly both pick up and put down, as well as a gutsy form of prayer. Relating to desire in this way made us understand that a vow is performative language, and that most of the time, fulfilling that vow would involve dispensing with words in preference of listening.

Jesus surrendered his self concept. He did not count equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself. He found willingness by abandoning willfulness.  He ceased to cling to an identity formed by the desire for control.  His language for this was paternal: he was "handing all things over to the Father." In Gethsemani, the teacher said "if this cup cannot pass unless I drink it, thy will be done." We theorize that, for Jesus, "doing the Father's will" was a way Jesus had conscious psychological access to what his faith told him was always (philosophers would say "ontologically") true. There was a way in which "the Father and I are one" was the deepest truth of Christ's life, whatever might be happening psychologically--we students of Rabbouni make bold to think that this is true, not just of Christ, but of all people. The mechanics of that truth are for theologians to work out--we need only remain focused on being with Jesus by his own measure. In other words, it's only when we refuse to look up to heaven, but stand in the back of our places of prayer saying "Lord have mercy on us, sinners" that we will know what it means that "everyone, without exception, is the Trinity enfleshed."

We desire to do what Jesus did. Looking within, we see that our family relationships are full of conflict. We were fed up with that stored trauma making wreckage of our adult choices, so we began to work with it. We became, to ourselves, the kinds of parents we had always needed. When we realized that there was no loss that couldn't be reconciled, it allowed us the safety to become healthy adults, always engaged in the work of nurturing the wounded parts of ourselves.  This psychological reparenting and reframing became the foundation of two aspects of Christian Tantra. We claim that every Christian has a share in the way Christ recapitulated all creation: in doing this work, we'll see vices turn to virtues. We claim that every Christian has a desperate need to turn their ears away from ego and superego, listening instead to the higher, humble self that is Christ within, constantly handing all things over to the father. This isn't a badge of honor, it's a tool supplied by wisdom. It's accessible to all, and if it's used at all, it's to be used in the service of the weak, and never for the garnering of personal adoration. Those who have it never admit to it. Instead they keep their sight on the one Christ said was "destined to be lost"--that is, on their own egos. And they pay attention to the teacher when he says, of the self, "if it is my will that he tarry until I return, what is that to you?" If you can hear this, we have this work in common: to follow Christ, without thought of the destination and regardless of objectives.

Remember, says the Logos, the words of the Teacher: "There were many lepers in Israel at the time of Elisha the Prophet, but not one was cleansed except Namaan the Syrian." Elisha bucked Namaan's expectations of how healing would happen. The great warrior thought Elisha would come and wave his hand over him and speak words of healing for all to hear. Instead Elisha refuses to meet with him, tells him to wash in the Jordan River seven times. Elisha bucked Namaan's system of attraction and aversion. The soldier, (who'd conquered many lands,) claims to know a great many rivers more grand than the Jordan. But Elisha asks him to immerse himself in the Jordan nonetheless. 

Our logical minds represent, often by inverted symbol, the ineffable things humility beholds clearly. In silence we hear the Lord asking "Can you drink the cup of which I am to drink." Undoubtedly, our desire for a spot at Christ's side--for the pleasant bits of being with Christ-- will lead us to say "yes." This is why Christ says "It's the Father's job, not mine, to hand out spots at my left and my right." Jesus is alerting us that a hard teaching is coming: he's going to use our aversions to teach, as he once used our attractions. We're asked if we can bear a share of the worlds sinfulness that's more than we deserve to bear. As soon as we say yes, Jesus asks "what if enduring the sins of the world and being asked to take on too much at work are the same?" We're asked if we're willing to descend into hell with Christ. No sooner do we agree, than we're told that bearing with gossips at work (to purify our own opinionatedness)--this is what descending with Christ will look like. We're asked if we are willing to bear other people's purgatorial debt on their behalf. Full of our glorious self-righteousness, we agree. And we're immediately asked "what if assuming the debt of others and allowing the routine dependency of those we love are the same?" We have heard it said, "if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own." But Christ says to us "If we can't process the scandal inherent in the growth of our own humility, what inner resources will help us to perform greater works?" If God uses what is low and despised in the world--things that are not--to bring to nothing things that are, isn't it time we stop trying to pretend to be good when our ability to just be is critically impaired? We can formulate no response here, and it bows our heads.

We wash in the rivers of mundane daily tasks. We're given not seven cracks at it, either, but seventy times seven of them. If others, or if even our own egos feel the need to call us martyrs of any shade--God willing we'll, have the grace to wax nonsensical, to fry the brains both of others or ourselves. Followers of the buddha, when asked "what is budda" would spontaneously tie their sandals on their heads and exit the room. We followers of Jesus would be lucky to be so humble. At the least, our job is to listen. "When you have finished all that was asked of you" said the teacher "say "we are worthless servants, for we have done nothing more than what was asked of us." Then, when the quiet asks "who do you say that you are" may we only answer as silently as we were asked.

XIV. Layers, Listening, and Life

When we decided we were powerless over ego, the paradox of the Word formed irreversible skills  in us.  We knew our actions were driven by thought, knew that thought was motivated by emotion, that emotion was caused by sensation, and sensation by the energies of the body.  But we routinely lost sight of many layers of healing we needed, distracted as we were by thoughts of the divine.  After great struggle, we came to this: if we could actively engage our shadow, cultivate awareness of what we would otherwise relegate to the unconscious--perhaps then the Spirit would make the Trinity arise within us of its own accord.  So it became a saying among us: "pay attention to the shadows, and the light will do as it wishes."  At first, consciously allowing taboos to cancel ego kicked the feet out from under our sense of self-righteousness.  Allowing tensions to remain unresolved was difficult at best, and keeping our failed track record in front of us caused a massive aversion response.  But as we learned to peer into our inner darkness with curiosity and non-judgment, we realized we had work to do in healing attention and intention, and that we were watching for nothing short of divine revelation. [bxA]

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. 

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.

IX. The Four Humble Truths

Tantra asks us to live, act and choose in a way that creates serenity. Sometimes though, that work doesn't really begin until we shed misconception.  Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon could not praise God until his pride spent a whole 7 years driving him insane.  The Gerazene demoniac, being healed, expected and greatly wished to follow Jesus: but the Teacher asked him simply to return to his home with loud and vocal gratitude.  The Bethesda paralytic had to become entirely willing to have the Lord cure him. Healing costs a great deal in transformation: in the shedding of misconception, in grieving the difference between expectation and reality, and in learning to be willing instead of willful. But the prospect of finding a path to proactive tranquility was real, and we could no longer afford to fail at following it. [bxA]

We students of Rabbouni and disciples of the Logos cause ourselves no small amount of suffering by how we think. But the teacher said "consider the lilies" then revealed that human serenity rested on acceptance of loving impermanence. We had to face the mental and emotional cost of assuming that a great deal is more permanent than it is: We wanted a messiah that exempted us from suffering; we wanted grace to exempt us from having to look at our purgatorial predicament. No such messiah, and no such grace exists for Christians.  We saw that the gap between our expectations and reality was our responsibility--and failing to address that gap felt like an ever-increasing impairment. And it was our job to take up more workable first principles: we called them the "Four Humble Truths"--with apologies to buddhism--and made them our mantra and daily call to prayer.

We looked at the true nature of things: our worldview is blessedly composite.  Every moment was a complex of thought, emotion, sensation, and energy. At worst, those things hardened into ego energy.  To counteract that, we said "All life is abstraction."  We wanted to deal with life on the level of oneness, and that entailed a careful deconstruction of "things as we believe them to be."  We would eventually see that all reality is the body of Christ.  Saying "all life is abstraction" is simply an admission that, at worst, we have a congenital tendency to divide ourselves from people and things that are, in a very real sense, a part of ourselves.  At best, we're admitting that the body of Christ has many parts.  Either way, it was our job to remember the tendency to weave a narrative of fakery around absolutely everything.

We considered that, perhaps, Jesus disappears by ascending, ascends by going inside us, and goes inside us so we can share in his work.  We said "All is in need of recapitulation"--because that is Jesus' primary work-- and we thought ourselves presumptuous for not assuming we'd have a part in it.  It was incumbent on Rabbouni's students to become like the teacher.  That meant lifting our burdens and carrying them, but it also meant psychologically reframing the burdens until we can look at them as something to be curious about: actively engaged in instead of dreaded.  The more we reframe, the more the experience of suffering itself was "remade."  By and by, our sense that life was a burden decreased.

We said "the vehicle of recapitulation is the body of Christ."  This began as a very personal experience, and it became more impersonal.  It was quite specific at first, and grew more general: initially, we had particular spiritual experiences, we were awakened to the sacred by particular rites.  As it continued, "the body of christ" became a broader and broader reality.  Jesus said "I am the bread of life" so we saw him in the Eucharist.  But when he said "I am the gate for the sheep," he was saying it to a shepherding culture audience-- we took it as an invitation to see him in the things we were surrounded by in daily life.  Jesus had a historical body, but he re-appeared as a stranger and became present in everyone.  As our faith developed, we followers of the logos had to bow to the fact that there is nothing from which Christ was absent. Holy writ says "to the pure of heart, all things are pure." We admitted that, to those looking on the world with humble eyes, everything is Christ.

But we admitted that, most of the time, we were caught in an egotistical and dualistic mindset.  We needed practical guidelines--as reminders of reality.  So, we said "The way of the Body of Christ is the humble Tenfold Way."  And to remember what that was we said "Practice Perfects in all eating, so we knead the bread."  The humble tenfold way consisted of humble prayer, humble presence, humble intention, humble effort, humble speech, humble work, humble knowing, humble knowing, humble thinking, and humble belief.  We'll dive deep into these in the next chapter, but at base, these were all ways of reminding ourselves that all dualism was passing away, yielding to oneness--that the apparent absence of God yielded to presence in proportion to our movement from denial to consciousness.

All life is abstraction. All is in need of recapitulation. The vehicle of recapitulation is the body of Christ. The way of the body of Christ is the Humble Tenfold way. For us, these were the keys to sane living, the way to shed willfulness, the way to become willing. Already we have spent too long letting our most broken ways of thinking run our lives. We are troubleshooting our thinking and adjusting our expectations today and tomorrow, and the third day we are on our way. Every bit of us wants to be made well. We are making our feet strong: when we hear the teachers voice inside us say "rise, pick up your mat, and walk" the voice will sound like our own. Tantra asks "how often are you present enough to listen to your own footsteps?" Our record is spotty. But when we hear them, it will always be now.