Tantra and the Anatomy of Recollection

What I have to say, ultimately, is this: Tantra, as a philosophy and a discipline, is just Catholicism that has centralized the discipline of recollection.  It was a conversation with Hanuman Dass, my brother and guru, that helped the words emerge.  He'd been asking "What's your way in?"  He meant "what's your way into the interior life?"  [bxA]

I did what I always do: I fumbled through an answer, then thought about it and spoke further about it later.  At the time, I talked about the senses as a mantra to get rid of ego.  When I am seeing without being "an ego doing the seeing", when I am hearing without being the hearer, touching without being the one treating my body like the ego boundary between me and the world--that, I said, is the beginning of internalizing Christ.

In the following days, Hanuman Dass had talked about how he, in prayer, could have at one point given himself goosebumps at will.  I brought up a host of tiny, insignificant, sensory things that happened when I attended the sacraments: tears in the confessional, a burning feeling in my legs when going to communion.  We both called them "consolations from God" and made too much of them.  Then, I said "Maybe we got too puffed up about those feelings, but it certainly seems like they were a vital part of 'coming to ourselves' like the prodigal son did, a vital part of getting recollected."

"Wow."  Hanuman Dass interrupted me. "I haven't heard or thought about that term in years.  But you're right.  That's what it is.  Recollection."  I first heard the term, as I suspect Hanuman Dass did as well, when we were serving in the monastery together.  It was popular among the Post WWII generation of "Merton Converts," people drawn to the monastic life by Seven Storey Mountain and other writings by the Gethsemani monk Thomas Merton.  Recollection meant "gathering your faculties together."  Such a "circling of the wagons" around attention and focus and senses was a vital step in having an undistracted prayer experience.  Merton converts would have said it was vital in seeking God.  And that's true.  But back then, I would have seen recollection as an effort to muster my ability to focus.  Back then, I'd have missed the notes of self-emptying. 

What I began to realize, and what Tantra fundamentally believes, is that recollection is also vital in seeking an embodied encounter with the God who lives within me.  In recollection, because it's part of a large giving up of self, focus is found, then lost, then found again.  In other words, "God" can easily remain a concept, bandied about in our heads.  Part of recollection is letting that go, so as to intuit a deeper connection to the whole body.  Ultimately the powers of concentration return to us, but only once we've  become familiar with breath, attention, emotion, sensation and energy.  And we've known this from the beginning--as scripture says "so shall my word be that comes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it." 

My ultimate point, to Hanuman Dass, was this:  the "recollection" to which the monastery's old men referred was, to say the least, underwhelmingly robust.  Given the amount of anxiety I suffered from, I needed the term desperately.  But I had to go to Buddhism and learn about Vipassana meditation, to psychology and learn about the limbic system: ultimately. the body remembers all the trauma a person has ever suffered--even, perhaps, that of multiple incarnations--and "recollection" was a matter of facing, feeling and releasing that pain.  

I had to go to Hinduism and learn about Pranayama (breath meditation) and kundalini (energy meditation):  there was a great deal that mindful breathing, deliberate breathing and especially a held breath could do to limit anxiety.  There are days where I walk around feeling like one of those touch sensitive energy globes--days when anything that touches me draws little lightning bolts of overstimulation.  I know for certain that energy underlies all physical sensation; I'm still learning how to healthily interact with it.  

Lastly, I had to go to Adult Children of Alcoholics, to learn that my psyche was just a collection of dysfunctional family voices.  I had to go to Tantra and learn about deity meditation.  I had to work with both, watch them change, until I could identify at will with the loving Father, the compassionate Son.  And then I had to do all the things a compassionate father and a loving son do: like face the darkness until it feels kind again, like find the lost bits of myself, like shoulder my own crosses and bear my own pains.

The Logos has shown me: its possible for the senses to be a teacher.  The senses can certainly do as the scripture says, they can "go into their room and shut the door, and pray to their Father who is in secret."   But there has to be a figure-ground reversal, where touch ceases to shore up ego and craving and attachment, and begins to lead to non-self, humility and impermanence.  And it takes many, many forms of real presence to accomplish this: the Eucharist, where he stands eyelash to eyelash with us, the throes of terrible grief from which he seems absent, the subtle stirrings of the soul that are the tombs within us opening.

What of it?  Go to your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.  Like the teacher, go into your room and shut the door.  If your hands are God's, he'll do all the things that need doing.  It'll feel a bit confining at first, like a prison at times.  But adjusting to the tensions is inevitable.  Pray, sing hymns, eat all the crappy prison food.  The day of the Son of Man will come like a lightening flash of realization.  Then the chains will fall off on their own.  And the doors will open. 

 

Grief: Soliloquies and Sequels

Some time ago, I wrote a post saying "broken heartedness is the bride of the logos."  It's been a while: I don't even know what I said and I'm unmotivated to reread it.  But I've become more convinced that it's true, so I need to give it some time.

A little while ago, a question formed itself in my head. "How do emotions transform when the logos is active?"  My heart chakra's been a dance floor lately, and all my emotions have shown up wearing polyester leisure suits.  I'm a sucky dancer, so sitting with all of it hasn't been comfortable or fun.  But here, for what it's worth, is what it's yielded: [bxA]

When people become students of the Logos, when contradiction yields to paradox, we students are suspended on the Cross with Christ.  Suspended on the Cross, we don't know if the choices we've made will lead to health or insanity.  We don't know if what we're doing is the right thing or not.  Morally (and in all other ways that involve the judgement of others) we are on the hook for all of the wrong things we've done, and we are not free from the consequences of our actions.

Initially, when a student is working with the Logos, emotions become large enough to include their opposite.  Both becoming happy and avoiding sadness cease to be important goals.  At the same time, happiness isn't seriously threatened by sadness, nor are the two emotions mutually exclusive. When Abraham's servant found the Matriarch Rebekkah, he asked her parents for permission to initiate courting proceedings.  Her parents responded "We cannot say one thing to you, bad or good.  The thing comes from the Lord."  When the rebuilt temple was dedicated, the multigenerational gathering included both returned exiles, who remembered the first temple's destruction, and the young who knew nothing of it.  Scripture describes the noise of the gathering by saying "the sound of the laughter was indistinguishable from the sound of the weeping."  So it is with each of us, crucified with Christ.

But it's deeper than that.  Remember, suspended students are as condemnable as they are praiseworthy.  And letting go of ego--to say nothing of physically dying--these involve both a careful handling and a grieving process.  If students can sit in unresolvable tensions, the first temptation is to resort to blame, rage, remorse and resentment: the shallow comforts of those three afflictive emotions is sometimes the only consolation to those who can't change their situation.  Adam blamed Eve for his sinfulness.  On the cross, the wicked thief taunted Jesus, asking him to prove he was the messiah by resolving their situation.

Remaining on the cross without, blame, rage, remorse or resentment invites us to broken-heartedness.  Living and dying are rough on their own, and even rougher when we begin to discover that each is in the other.  The ego competes for its share of whatever's around to satisfy.  It's difficult to realize that, in this life, there's simply not enough "stuff" around for everybody to eat their fill of the proverbial pie.  Life's "thin times" when they're done angering me, generally just make me feel sad: sad that I'm as clingy a bloke as I am, regretful that I have enthusiasm for things I find attractive, and sorrowful that other people get coopted into my prideful, hedonistic agendas.

Scarcity is just one spot that life pinches.  Suffering, sin, and the basic human needs of affection and security are a few more.  And the news isn't good.  It's a real challenge, not just to recognize these needs at all, but then to go about getting them even partially satisfied.  The fact is, life isn't just hard because of deliberate selfishness.  Finitude is a real suffering.  Suffering leads to grief, and grief to a broken heart.  And that's if grace, luck and openness collude to allow us to see it.

Logos and broken-heartedness, order and chaos, are often represented as masculine and feminine.  To be balanced humans, we need to go about playing with those energies.  Spiritual methods by the score attempt to balance the active and the contemplative, the intellectual and the intuitive.  The impulse is no less important for rabbouni's students.  There's no right or wrong way to do it.  It simply matters that it gets done.

What of it?  What's it worth?  

Students of Rabbouni can expect that miracles won't happen TO them, they'll occur WITHIN them.  On the day water was turned to wine, the purification jars were not as important as each heart in which denial that was turned to acceptance.  Saints by the score have reported struggles with anger that made them kind and gentle.  As a Tantrika myself, I can say that all of the flowery theological language in the world is less useful than a single moment of genuine practice.  No amount of "meaning" can compete with a silence in which attention and intention coalesce.

Rabbouni, the Logos made flesh, is the true nature of all people, of all that is seen and unseen.  As we let go of ego and attachment, of aversion and and attraction and craving, we become him.  In the "deep calling on deep," the empty heart of Jesus calls on the emptiness of all things.  By letting go, we return to who we  are.  It's for a kind of living that's also a dying that Jesus came into the world.  There was never a time when Jesus was not: never a time when he wasn't part of the triune dance that sustains your pet parakeet, your Jesus statue, the pile of smelly garbage behind your garage.  Either sacredness comes from things being what they are or sacredness is a hoax.

I'm the most scatterbrained, most chatty bloke ever to give this advice: but it's important to find silences--little moments in which we can recollect attention and intention from the distracted corners they've been scattered to.  Its important to ask whether we're being gentle enough about the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives.  It's not that the present moment is too short to be wasted.  It's that our attention and intention are too flighty to stay with it.

But if we can allow a bit of dynamism in our stillness, we are already experiencing it.  If we can see that the logos speaks in riddles, and do the transformative work it takes to understand, then each moment preaches the gospel.  Prophets and poets are not irrelevant, here.  "Find the others" they say. "Stay together.  Learn the flowers.  Go light."  

If, together, we can muster the strength of intention, fumble through an important task with me: pay attention, so each breath will be a deep bow.  And listen.

Grief: the Prayer of Impermanence.

Because of the Logos, when Rabbouni lives within us: our bodies are the only place infinite divinity dies.  We turned our eyes to the mountains in hope of help.  It turned out that the mountains were inside us. Waiting for the redeemer made us prudent, taught us how to help ourselves until we realized the redeemer had moved inside as well.  Eventually, as Job did, we see God in our own flesh: we have a whole body worth of trauma to face, an entire psychological maze full of dark turns to befriend.  Open ears reveal that silence has a message: the stones preach in the absence of gospel-loosened tongues.  Science says that the limbic system has a message: as trauma surfaces and heals, the body preaches.  The story of salvation, and the story of your own deep healing are One.  [bxA]

Because of the Logos, when Rabbouni dies within us: grieving the ego is prayer, and prayer is grieving the ego.  The ego is a self-protective device, wielded compulsively at first, and we will learn to use it deliberately before the end.  But non-self is the seamless wedding garment.  That means confronting ego's limitations, and then giving it up.  We become like Christ: not in his miracles, but in his compassion.  Not in his mountaintop transfigurations, but in his valleys of self-emptying.  Like it or not, we are similar to each other in our grief, not our ecstasies.  This means we find Christ in the tables we flip, the tears we cry alone, the crosses we shut up and carry.  Like Christ, we hand all things, even our own divinization, over to the Father.  This isn't to eschew celebration, either.  Unmet basic human needs are rough.  Love, hunger, sin and death are all places of deep solitude. To find others in that space is an immensely quiet, completely palpable joy.  When the character of joy broadens to include our life's sorrowful elements, we find others, and what was once difficult becomes celebration.

Because of the Logos, when Rabbouni rises within us: we let go of the defensive emotions of rage and resentment and blame, with all their feigned pomp and permanence and we embrace the humble and impermanent emotions of anger, sadness, depression.  Life and death are one: and each incarnation is one dark night after another.  For me, so far, the weird reality of my own incarnation has been, as scripture calls it "a prison not made of iron."  But I'm taking pages from Joseph's book, trying to turn my confinement into an opportunity.  And eventually, like the apostles, we are so occupied with singing hymns to God that our chains fall off and every cell in our bodies opens to grant our release.

Because of the Logos, when Rabbouni ascends within us: we have enough distance on our own chaos to choose which voices we speak with.  With practice, I can be the equanimous father, watching as all that's still childish in me faces what it's afraid of.  I can turn my spirit's attention to listen to my own repressed anguish instead of ignoring it.  I can become the compassionate Son who find the bits of myself that I've marginalized or lost.  Becoming reacquainted with bits of ourselves is inevitable.  Doing shadow-work to face our own capacity--sometimes our craving--for chaos is absolutely pivotal.  Rage and evil and the demonic are out there, they're possibilities, as problematic if I am averse to them as if I'm drawn to them. So the point is just to pay conscious attention to them.  The spirit within will guide my interaction with them.  As long as I don't cling to the spiritual or material phenomenon I'm experiencing, as long as I remember that I'm not my ego, impermanence itself will keep me safe.  

Because of the Logos, everything hidden will come to light, and everything revealed will pass away.  And so will I.  St. Paul said "love never ends" and I believe he's right.  We're here to let all the clinging, all the attachment and attraction and aversion wear off of the way we love.  We're here to turn our wounded attention away from what's morbid or shiny, to be impelled by the Spirit to attend to reality.  And why?  I suppose because we're wired to find calm, and whatever doesn't produce serenity rightly produces anxiety.  Handled rightly, the twists and turns of our anxious little egos become the route of return.  There is light at the end of the tunnel, and in its light the Cross, the Tomb, and Hell itself will prove to have been heaven the whole time.

Seeking the Still Point

I've talked about the theonoias--units of mental activity, where the goal is the first theonoia, or mental stillness--and I've talked about the "layers"--the fact that every thought has an emotion, every emotion has a physical sensation, and every physical sensation has an energy (and our job is to witness the interconnectedness of it all.)   I've also talked about suspension--the way we are most at the disposal of the spirit within when we are beholden to two opposite sides of a paradox, without resolving the tension.

The fact is, the first theonoia isn't just mental. It has an emotional corollary, a parallel in physical sensation, an energetic equivalent.  And knowing what these are is an important part of cultivating curiosity and playfulness with all the many layers of our experience. To that end: a bit of an "umbrella concept."  I call it "the still-point." [bxA]

Theologically, this is the same as suspension, remaining with Christ.  The still-point is a ptsd sufferer's hyper-vigilance recapitulated.  The still-point is like a non-mental locus of the first theonoia.  It necessarily suspends ego--because it can only be done with the attention, energy, and presence of the whole self. (It's not the still point if, mentally, you're elsewhere.)  This can happen between opposites: when you have so united yourself to an action you're doing that you cease to be able to tell whether it's bad or good.  The still-point can happen between layers: there are points where you can't tell whether "what you're feeling" is a thought, emotion or sensation--because perhaps it's all three. The still-point can exist between powerful drive systems--when I am suspended at that place where breath, energy, sensation and attention meet, sometimes breath stops.  Then I can focus on sustained attention, feeling the subtleties of sensation, watching how they transform.  I can find the still-point in a situation: if I sit back, be present and cease judging.  Lastly, the still-point can be present in the body.  Particularly, if I am facing trauma stored in a part of the body, the still-point can be found by overcoming my aversion-reaction.  When I sit in the trauma, treating it with compassion and curiosity instead of judgment and rejection, I cultivate the resources that eventually lead to letting it go.

When a thought is present at the still-point, it dissolves.  God "scatters the proud in the thoughts of their hearts."  Pride is a thought.  When it is exposed to emotion, it begins to confront its own impermanence.  When an emotion is present at the still-point, it includes its opposite.  In the book of Ezra, when the second temple was being blessed, there were old people in the crowd, weeping at the remembrance of the first temple.  There were young people, with no such memory, rejoicing.  Scripture reports that the reaction was mixed.  Many "wept aloud when they saw this house, though many shouted aloud for joy, so that people could not distinguish the sound of the joyful shout from the sound of the people's weeping."  When a sensation is present at the still point, it is both pleasurable and painful, and it is neither of those.  Pleasure and pain are ego-categories.  As Fr. Tom Keating of Spencer says "There is a level on which pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain, because we are grounded in divine love."  When an energy is present at the still point, it burns away all words and concepts, making us totally one with ourselves and our experience.  The Spirit within is a wind that blows where it chooses, and a consuming fire.

So what of it?  I use the still-point as a litmus test.  If I am still judging people or situations, I'm not standing in the center of the paradox.  If I am still thinking that pain and joy are entirely opposite, I am not, emotionally, standing at the first theonoia.  If I am still labelling energy "dark or light" or good or bad, I am not suspended with Christ on the Cross. If I am still mentally standing at a distance from my own experience, I am not at the intersection of my most powerful drives.

And the entire invitation here is egoic malleability: on the one hand, to learn to defend yourself from other-people's unfaced and compulsively-flung-about darkness, and on the other to learn to let down your guard entirely, as prudence allows.  It's both a cultivation of intuition and a surrender into the living presence at the creatively tense center of revelation and mystery.  Some of it is your work, some of it is God's, some of it is allowing your sense of separateness from God to dissolve.

But I am saying too much, and living too little...thank God for the messy apartment, and the sink of dirty dishes calling my name.

The Program of Christian Tantra: Objectives, Ways and Means.

Words and logic may reveal a great deal about God and Christ, but if these were silent, so would the stones.  It is possible to get obsessed with our egotistical plans for spirituality, (and at some stages of the spiritual life it's more likely to happen than not,) so a practitioner should be silent and listen.  The words I am writing were straw before I wrote them.  Don't get caught up in saying silence or words are better or more necessary.  Every incarnation is a grieving process within a paradox, and the task of an incarnation is to learn to use both words and silence (indeed, all that's seen and unseen) for the acceptance of reality. [bxA]

Particularly the fact that they capitalize on our senses, the sacraments are designed to wake us up to the truth of embodied existence: Jesus made himself really present in all physical matter equally.  He who said "I am the bread of life" also said "I am the gate for the sheep" and neither of those were metaphors.  Jesus life and your life are the same, then they're different, then they're the same.  His body is your body, then it isn't, then it is.  

As a method of dealing practically with this deepening experience, I give you: Christian Tantra.  

It's a theistic monist vision, that focuses on the internalization of the Trinity to break down ego, and the equal potential of all things to reveal that the God we seek is already fully present. Its method centers on the predicament and the gift of embodied existence: behind every thought is an emotion, behind every emotion is a physical sensation, behind every physical sensation is an energy. Becoming one with that energy is a temporary dissolution of ego, and a brief experience of the Holy Spirit within.  

God is equally manifested by revelation and mystery: both at once.  His name (so he said to Moses) is I AM, but he also said to the prophets "I am not your God and you are not my people."  The tension is creative, and it's easy to get obsessed with what is being created, to pursue it, and thereby to exempt ourselves from the tension.  But exempting ourselves from the creative tension of the Spirit is ego, and it causes us suffering.  So we stay on the cross, stay at the empty tomb, until we hear it speak our names.  When we are completely present, we won't need to say "Here I AM," because the words will come from our silences.

Abstraction, interacting with our thoughts about things instead of the things themselves, is the main psychological obstacle emanating from original sin.  Egotism, attraction and aversion are all of them fairly easy--the way we bypass reality, are drawn to some things and fly from others comes fairly naturally.  But being open to less than the entirety of life is too psychologically and energetically costly to allow to continue unexamined.

Bernard's "steps of humility and pride" attempted to name what a prideful person does.  Christian Tantra acknowledges the need to describe cognitively what is happening when a prideful person substitutes his "self" for his personhood.  It does so by way of the "theonoias."  The theonoias are units of mental energy, energy we come to exert unconsciously.  The first theonoia is mental rest.  The second theonoia is naming and labeling reality, so as to separate things into "this and that."  The third theonoia uses those separations to theorize about a reality that didn't need examining in the first place.

The first theonoia is the core of the serenity that Christian Tantra promises. It is "remaining with Jesus" of the gospel of John.  Contemplation is a brief experience of that rest, obedience is that rest sustained in action.  Humility is the permanent resting at the first theonoia, a handling of all things with equanimity, without clinging or craving.  Conscious of our ability to abstract, the theonoias shift from a liability to a roadmap.  The destination, and the journey of Christian Tantra are one: to be still, listen, and watch.  If we can do that, we see that the energies of our life have been shifting the whole time, and will shift in the direction of rest on their own if we let them.

Tantra forms, in its practitioners, a skill set that isn't present as clearly in other forms of Christianity.  Attention, drawn everywhere by a million shiny objects, acquires focus.  Practitioners become "agents of recapitulation," working with energies as they change and nuance. Tantrikas learn how their own psychology echoes  their families of origin, and this becomes a springboard into a Trinitarian deity meditation rooted in the very tissue of their bodies.  Tantrikas steep themselves in the four humble truths, the four gospel seals, and the humble tenfold way, so as to become deeply rooted in their own impermanence.  Tantrikas may occasionally use entheogens--plants that modify consciousness, and that have a history of sacred use.  This is done ceremonially, to render the ego malleable, and it's always done with a goal concretizing sobriety and manageable living.  

For tantrikas, putting up and taking down ego boundaries--at will, instead of compulsively or defensively--become the foundation of "becoming Christ" and growing in humility.  Christian tantrikas become witnesses to "the layers": the emotions behind thoughts, the sensations behind emotions, the energies behind sensations.  Working with, and facing these dimensions of embodied existence is an important part of deconstructing compulsion and acting deliberately.  We come to be suspended with Christ: claiming the things of heaven only as far as our humility has made us "innocent as doves", desiring the things of earth only as "becoming wise as serpents" requires. Grieving transitions, for us who practice, becomes as consistent a discipline as prayer.  In the end, those who grieve Christ's death face their own, and those who witness his resurrection see it in their own flesh.  We tantrikas are deeply blessed and deeply impermanent. We let go of the world, and give up self, because we've learned to use and value the blessings it holds.

The promise of Christian tantra is this: that our liabilities will become our strengths,  our vices will be re-formed as virtues.  The "happy fault" will become our route of return.  The negative psychological messages driving our conduct will show themselves to be the promptings of the Trinity within.  We will deal with and release the traumas stored deep in our bodies, leaving us free to act spontaneously as the Spirit prompts us to. We who once fled from bearing our various crosses will become willing to shoulder them, to be suspended on them, to live and to die on them.  As for life and aging, birth and death, we'll discover that each was in the other the whole time: it's just that the scales had not fallen from our eyes yet, we'd not yet realized that the promptings of the spirit were as present in our liabilities as they were in life's graces.  The contradictions, under whose sway all creation groaned, will reveal themselves to have been paradoxes, tensions making all creation new.  And we'll die as we came to live: willingly, with deep rooted acceptance and equanimity.  God and the world, God and I, God and you are not two.  God is one, he will be all things, and in all things.  As we live and move,  and have our being, our part is to watch.

Dialogues with Mystery: One--Good Friday Reflection

You're the one I am speaking to.  All the garbage you've had to muddle through, the things you've had to scrounge for the willingness to bear, the stuff you suffer whether you want to or not--these things have made life painful...and I know how quickly exhaustion skews your silence toward resentment, blame, coping--whatever it takes when stopping isn't an option.  I get it.  It's rough, and that's real.

You're the one I am speaking to.  The body is an echo chamber, and you're the absence that's present there to teach me.  Right now, we wait.  We eat, we walk, we weep and we wait.  Soon, it'll be a fair question--why are you looking for the living among the dead, I mean.  But for now, dying's got a heft and a weight worth respecting, worth being quiet for, worth staring into.  We call into the garden, we betray our location, and no one calls back.  At first, it's a mournful thing, to be the only ear hearing the sound of your own pain.  But then, sound reverberates through a whole history of ignored trauma stored in the body.  After a while the pain shifts, becomes more spacious.  Grief is a darkness, and eventually our eyes adjust.  There's more here than you think. [bxA]

When we hear the sound of our own words, it's the body doing its work.  Become like I am, subject to paradox, fully and for the long haul. When that happens, the Word is first to break the silence.  Suffering may eventually tap out.  Death may eventually blink first.  The Universe reflects God's intelligence more than we might think.  But what suffering and death do is their business--no one can change any of it.  What I'm wondering is this: do we have it in us to go slow, to be conscious, to grieve?  

"What is there to grieve?" you ask.  Just this: the hard truth of impermanence.  This is what I've been trying to show you.  This is what every flower, every blade of grass, every laughing jag has been trying to show you.  Life isn't contradictory--that's ego talking-- it's paradoxical.  Falsehood and truth don't compete.  Everything is true and false at the same time.  Every moment is a birth and a death.  Every fulfillment's a reward that comes at a cost.  Every word sounds for a moment, then dies away.  Before students become teachers, the whole drama gets internalized.  Teachers die, students die, teachings die.  You can call it "dying, rising and ascending" or the "hero's journey"--whatever you like.  This is how mystery works, when it manifests.  It's terrifically uncomfortable, and only partially reflects totality's unknowability.

I want to say that you are totally safe.  You'll crash your car.  You'll lose loved ones.  You'll go years without connecting to any of life's joys.  You'll die yourself: suddenly, maybe, or prolongedly, it doesn't matter.  Be in this moment so deeply that it ceases to be an ending or a crisis, and instead draws your fascination.  You have lived before, and will again.  I am life itself: to become like me is the only newness.  You have never not been here, now.  You will never be anywhere else.  From the standpoint of the work you have to do, past and future only exist to bring you here.  Come here, then let go of them.

In the moment's deep solitude, you are never alone.  You are hanging here with me.  Behold the Cross.  Behold the cruciform burden of your own bones.  Feel their weight.  It doesn't matter whether you hallow a name or not.  Like me, you're suspended here.  Perhaps, soon, you'll give them up.  Maybe, in a moment, you'll know the heavy and the light, the descent and the harrowing and the rise.  But for the moment, breathe.  It's hard, it's heavy, and it's totally ok.  All the parts of it, even the darkest bits, are love.  I want to say "I love you" but the words are too distant.  Love is like being: you are only as far from it as you are from yourself.  

I am the one who is speaking to you.  Who do you say that I am?

Bridging the Gaps: Recovery, Family and Tantra converging

I grew up with my head in some fairly idealistic clouds. But by the time I was 25, life began to slow me down. I couldn't shake the disappointment: I felt surrounded by assholes, beset by life's unfairness. I nursed no chemical addictions, but upon reading through the Big Book of AA, felt myself being reflected in every last resentful, self-destructive testimony. It took me years to find out why. It turns out that family dysfunction turns out the same brand of boundary-deficient, people pleasing child as long term alcohol use does: the former turned out to be well within my wheelhouse. 12 step groups helped me troubleshoot the capacity for self-sabotage rooted in bits of my history I'd spent a quarter century ignoring. It turns out my disappointment was just my own assholery in prideful guise.

I suppose that's why, psychologically and spiritually, I get a lot of existential mileage out of the Triune God image. [bxA]  Honesty is hard, depressing work. It involves becoming comfortable in some fairly dark spaces, learning that fear is a malleable thing. Given my need for inner overhaul, my God image had to be functional, or else be discarded as obsolete. With a bit of nuance, the Catholic Triune God image showed itself equal to the job. Combining the "inner family" language of Adult Children of Alcoholics, the energy and breath yogas of Hinduism, and the deity meditation found in most tantras, the Trinity becomes a tool for elevating and working with all of the aspects of my otherwise weird and uncomfortable incarnation. My hope, here, is to tell you precisely how and why that is.

When I began in recovery, I wasn't a big fan of how the word "Child" was used. Calling myself an adult child--every time I opened my mouth to speak-- felt infantilizing. An ACA will freely refer to his "inner Child"--initially that seemed like a grown man's excuse to eat paste and play with crayons. Slowly and eventually, though, I had to concede to the worth of the image. People like Jordan Peterson--commentators whose intellect I respect--would talk about the basic survival needs emerging in the psyche like they are little autonomous personalities who only want one thing. The more I listened to myself, the more I got to know a part of myself that needed to feel secure. The older I got, the louder his tantrums became. I can remember the first day I consciously turned my attention to those thoughts inside myself. They instantly went quiet. It occurred to me that's the first time I had deliberately and consciously paid attention to my own emotional life--I who so often think myself mature--and I felt embarrassed that it had taken as long as it had.

When I first got into recovery, my group in Charleston was wonderfully intimate--we had our weirdos, but a great many of us would follow our formal meeting with "the meeting after the meeting" at a local eatery. I don't often let people's advice in, but I allowed that group to challenge me, because I knew it was safe. Later, during the "Chicago years," I was having immense problem building connections in 12 step groups. I kept telling myself that the program "works if you work it" but time and again, when I would pick up what the program calls "the 1000 pound phone," no one would answer. 

This exterior relational desert drove my attention inside, developed my relationship with an entire "inner family." I have, within me, a wounded inner child and a healthy one. I've a wounded adult and a healthy one. I have a sick inner parent and a compassionate one. They're personified snapshots of my family dysfunction, emotional patterns given a voice. And if I was quiet, I could begin to feel that each of those voices correlated with sensations. The "child voice" registered in the lower part of my trunk: The most wounded voices registered very subtle sensation where my legs met the body, and as they became progressively more demanding they correlated with subtle sensation in my groin and just above my belly button. 

As the practice of "body scanning" and becoming familiar with my own sensations deepened, I learned to use physical sensation to get in touch with myself psychologically, and vice versa. It led me to fully accept the truth of the Hindu teaching about the Chakras--after all, Hindus say that "energy blockage" would manifest in exactly the same spots that I was "feeling my thoughts."

I eventually began to see what my higher power was doing. He was using the "external wasteland" to turn my attention on my inner landscape. I came to see that, if I didn't go to meetings with the dysfunctional family in my own head, going to meetings with other adult children wouldn't be effective. That freed me, as well, to build bonds: these days I forgive myself for not building bonds with a specific local group--but I am in frequent touch with adult children as far away as Canada.

There's a "God correlation" here. You see, the first "substance" I was addicted to was religious zeal. I connecting bits of religious theory to buttress a pious self image like most people collected baseball cards. Recovering Alcoholics in the big book, speaking of their own lack of emotional sobriety, would say things like "I was sober, except I was working myself to death on behalf of the Parent Teacher Association." For me, it was "I was sober, but I was working myself to death in the name of religious seeking." For alcoholics, periods of sobriety driven by self-will are often stopped in their tracks by a spree of drinking, a period of terrible remorse, and egotistical resolve to stop drinking--which would last until the next spree. I would work (while my resentment of the mild imperfections around me grew), crash, then compulsively eat and oversleep for a week before the cycle began again. And that recovery period would be full of rationalizations, like "Peter betrayed Jesus, so this must be part of it." My God concept did everything for me except allow me to see myself as subject to the same basic hypocrisy as everyone else. 

For me, there was a "step zero."  It was "Realize that the God you follow is of your own making, and entirely an expression of self will." The Big book changed my focus: I thought belief drove renunciation of self will. That led to years and years of my beliefs gradually loosing significance. It turns out, giving up self drives belief. And part of what self renunciation jettisons is the religious content my superego justifies itself with. St. Paul did something similar to this when he discovered the liberation of the Spirit, his name for the Risen Christ. The Law of Moses, for him, became dead ever after. The "rules of Catholicism" would eventually do that for me. But first, I admitted the truth: my faith was a lot of things, but never an act of surrender to a higher power. 

Step zero made me give up belief. Step one helped me admit self-will was a problem. Step two and three helped me "relocate God" in whatever aided my self surrender. And here there were many aids. The Big Book talks about a bloke whose higher power was the lamp post outside his meeting. He'd hand his concerns over to the lamp post, and re-assume what he needed to as he left the meeting. For me, physical sensation began to work the same way. I found that concentrating on physical sensations diminished the cocktail of agenda and pious anxiety that ego and superego were selling to keep me hooked. I'd discovered the psychological practice of "grounding"--which many shrinks use to treat anxiety attacks. It's basically use of the body to empty the mind. But I'd discovered it in a way that, instead of contributing to a head full of psychobabble, was fueling my surrender to a higher power.

Years later I would find out it was also showing me I needed a new religious model. Devotional religious paths--like traditional Christianity--would often claim the ideal was outside a person. They'd claim the messiah was coming (at the end of time perhaps) or that the ideal could only fully be realized after death. These were claims to which I nursed no theoretical objections. But the delayed aspect of it aggravated the nervous bits of my psychology prone to hypervigilance and overwork. For a while I left Christianity entirely. 

There's a bit in here I need to mention, but must be brief about--as it's a pretty deep rabbit hole. After leaving the monastery, I used drink to avoid grieving. I drank, at one point, a 750 mL bottle of wine nightly.  It was terrifying, but I didn't know how to stop. I went on all the crummy dating sites one frequents after ending a seven year stint in a monastery. Eventually, though, all the terrible crumminess of that scene did introduce me to my fiancee. She made me want to live sober. But I didn't know where to start. 

I stumbled on the obscure AA story about Bill W. using LSD to firm up his sobriety. I had a friend who had access to psilocybin mushrooms. I sought his help, and laid on his couch while a very small dose of psilocybin did its work. In the midst of a trip, which largely defied description, I heard the words of the book of Jeremiah, ones the prophet uses when he's watching the potter smash down a project to a formless lump, then rework it. "Can I not," he asks Israel, "do this much to you?"

I got the message. I'd made a god of my pride. I'd misused drugs that modified my consciousness. The message I heard on the couch that day--well, it was the True God asking me whether he's within his rights to become an addictive substance. He'd made himself literally present in the wine I'd abused--to come and find me. This was the True God asking me whether he's within his rights to use the illumination of psychedelics--which my both my religious training and 12 step history would reject--to make me sober. And I did, in fact, get sober. Over the next year, my need to drink gradually diminished. These days I drink about twice annually, and don't feel a compulsion to do so at all.

I mention psychedelics because they taught me that the "soul" Catholicism said I had was absolutely real. Other authors referred to it as the "energy body" or the "pain body." Not only did the soul function as a receiver of divine messages, it also stored all of the trauma I'd been through, waiting for a time when I was safe enough to deal with it. The soul courses with the energy of the spirit of God, but on such a subtle level that I'd not previously been able to perceive it.

By and by I discovered an alternative to devotional Christianity, the Tantric model. Tantra is a religious model common to both Buddhism and Hinduism. It claims that everything is already realized, that the ideal is within you, and that you already are what it takes to change as you need to. Tantric Models have a long tradition of use of "entheogens," a kind name for psychedelics that open one to God, to aid in dropping the ego.

Tantra encourages "deity meditation" as a way to progressively realize the ideal we already express. After discovering the soul on the level of sensation, a great many things began to intersect for me. AA says "God will not do for you what you refuse to do for yourself." The Trinity, the inner child language of ACA, and my newfound ability to sense the soul's subtle sensations--these three combined, suddenly and consistently.

When I was speaking with the voice of a healthy father, it felt different: physical sensations were located at the top of the head, and behind the eyes. My voice, as a healthy father was compassionate and observational. I was waiting to see how everything would play out.

When I was speaking with the voice of a Son, I felt sensations in the chest: here I was negotiating my perspective on my own woundedness. If I was trying to avoid it, that filled the chest with one sensation, if I was bearing it begrudgingly, I was filled with another, and if I was bearing it entirely with willingness, still a third. And this third voice is one of utter compassion for all who suffer.

It occurred to me that, as a healthy but wounded Son, I'm sent to all the parts of myself that need care: the wounded child who tantrums his way through life, the wounded adult who uses the wrong drugs and avoids both grief and responsibility--all of these needed my attention, and when I'm able to take full responsibility for my incarnational predicament, all of them are caught up in the energy of redemption.

******

Because I've said a lot, I need to sum up: the shortcomings of the 12 steps made me realize I have a family inside me, and that I needed to meet with them regularly--to flex healthy relational muscles and tend to my own wounds. I couldn't find God when I had deified my own pride, or when I was using substances as a way of avoiding pain and responsibility. My problems with God made me abandon my selfish ideas about him, only to use my own physicality as a mantra to relocate him. My body itself taught me that the ability to store trauma is a mercy--it lets me deal with pain incrementally. My body itself taught me that I most certainly have a soul, that the soul is a tool for sharing in the work of the triune God.

ACA's 12 steps say "It works if you work it." What, exactly, we're working is no longer up for debate for me--but neither is it precisely what the 12 steps were driving at. The task of the steps is divinization: going within, in other words, and becoming, by humility, the very God who does all the loving. And all this takes place even as I remember my capacity to self-destructively ignore my shadow or to abdicate responsibility to it. I regret the chaos my life became as I realized all this, but at some point I have to simply allow that to be heart breaking, and allow it to connect me to others who suffer similarly.

God asked it of Ezekiel, and to all of us. "Son of Man," he said "can you make these bones live?" Ezekiel evades, saying "O Lord, you alone know that." When God responds, it's to all of us: prophesy to the flesh, preach to the breath. For Ezekiel, the bones were the whole house of Israel. If you're like me, it's perhaps just the skeletons in your closet. But the task, and the promise of life, is the same.

The Body of Christ's 7 Sense Organs

At some point, we hid behind a loincloth made of leaves: that forever gave the soul its form.  At some point, we accepted the gift of a garment of flesh.  That forever made the spine our via dolorosa and the body our route of return.  At some point, we jumped the walls of Eden and fled. It was a line in the sand that granted permanence to something impermanent, that pitted inside against outside and us against our false selves.

Who sees the true self sees Christ.  Who sees non-self sees God. Who becomes totally one with sensation, (the one who knows its impermanence,) is consumed in the fiery Spirit of the Lord.  And the fourth that appears is oneness, when the perceiver drowns in perceiving.  The senses are the cleft in the rock: God's hidden glory is only visible to those who will give up ego for the sake of being, and being alone.

We only ever journey toward being, toward what was here the whole time.  Impermanence is the gateless gate: no upper room is locked to those for whom there is no door.  None need enter the tomb for whom inside and outside are one and the same.  I am, and you are, and everything is the Christ who remakes all things: illumined by the truth, the flaw is the way.  That's what I'm trying to tell you.

We believe the prophets: the Spirit speaks with seven voices, feels with seven springs of sensation.  But what of it?  What good is listening till sound and sensation are one?  It's precisely the knowledge of impermanence.  We do a good bit of work trying to assert a separation between ourselves and others, ourselves and God...that stress is unnecessary and self-imposed. But in the staring contest of existence, we won't realize we can change that until God blinks first and we see ourselves plainly. 

Christ's body and my body, Christ's body and your body: all is one.  The prodigal son returned to God "when he came to himself."  When you and I "come to ourselves," through what do we perceive?  What exactly do we see? [bxA]

In the body of Christ, we perceive God, and he perceives us, through illusion, desire, blame, contradiction, words, thought and time.  These are the body of Christ's seven sense organs--and as the distance between us and God closes we're always journeying away from seeing things as we'd like them to be.  We're going toward seeing things as they are.  Illusion causes us suffering, and remaining in it is self-imposed affliction. Peering attentively into each of these is an important act of self-care.

Where the spirit of Fear of the Lord is, at the root chakra, God and you perceive each other through illusion.  Under the influence of impermanence--and fully recapitulated-- this becomes reality.  When Christ's recapitulation and your attention are not two, illusion grounds a practitioner in the truth of humility.

Where the spirit of knowledge descends and rests, at the sacral chakra, I exchange glances through desire.  When desire is recapitulated, it becomes need. Basic human needs are rough. Security, nourishment, shelter, affection, power--all of these needs are important, and yet we can't coerce others into providing them for us. We have them only by a gentle combination of hustle, generosity, and receptivity. Jesus didn't cry out "I want, and you must provide" on the cross. His desire had lost its edge, and he was blatantly honest, saying "I thirst" instead. He simply admitted a need. We necessarily undergo the same losses.

At the solar plexus, where the spirit of might lives,  the Lover sees his beloved through blame. In reality, blame causes suffering, and so does the daily grind of spiritual practice. When the suffering blame causes becomes apparent, recapitulation happens, and practitioners take responsibility. Even a single step toward taking responsibility puts us on our own Via Dolorosa. Taking responsibility hurts, both emotionally and physically. It's supposed to--and we can either explore that hurt (as we do any other sensation), or mentally stoke resentments. Hurt is a "grief emotion" and very natural to being alive. All grief is healthy when it's impermanent. (All grieving people eventually find acceptance, and cancer patients, taught to meditate through their pain, find that it transforms.) At the very least, taking responsibility is choosing a sacrifice, then shouldering and carrying it. Refusing to see my suffering as someone else's fault is an important first step in that direction. I will never take responsibility if, in my head, I'm shirking the burden.

Where the spirit of counsel speaks, at the heart Chakra, God sees his people through contradiction. A classical way to complain about the illogical nature of life is to frame it philosophically. "If God loves everyone," we ask, "why would he permit suffering?" If one thing is true, we want everything else to be false. It's not quite that simple. The opposite of contradiction isn't "things making sense." It's backing off of our egos enough to accept that everything and everyone is right, and everyone is wrong. When we learn that contradiction is designed to diminish ego, it becomes paradox. Incarnations involve grief. That can either soften our hearts or embitter them, lead to compassion or make us more callous. When we accept paradox, we feel an increased sense of compassion for all who suffer. We descend with our confused mind into our accepting and empathic heart.

At the throat chakra, where the spirit of understanding is, God's depths call to ours through words.  All that a practitioner says of others, he is saying of himself.  The mouth speaks out of the heart's abundance because, on some level, we're not aware of the heart, and need to become so. And when those voices are quiet, silence itself speaks and we descend with the mind into the heart, from intellect to intuition.  Tongues speak and then are still.  A voice cries out and then is quiet.  Words, underneath their mental baggage, preach the truth of impermanence to those who can hear.

Where the spirit of wisdom is, at the third eye chakra, we behold divinity through thought. Thought is so routinely exhausting that we've dissociated from the stress it causes. But when thought is recapitulated, it becomes perception. Thought says "I am this" which makes everything else "that." Then we have to worry about what precisely "that" is, what its characteristics are, how we're related to it. When thought is recapitulated, when it becomes perception, that kind of dualistic oppositionality doesn't cause as much stress. We let go of "who we are" enough to stop worrying what everything else is...we see it, and we let it go. We hear words, but don't cling to or quibble over their meanings. Self-definition, as well as sensory data, becomes a tool we can put down when we're done working with it. Thought sees and clings, perception hears and lets go. Perception helps us relax deeply, and it's very healthy to remain on that level as much as we can.

At the crown chakra, where the spirit of the Lord is, we perceive God through time. Time is only linear from the framework of our egos. Past and Future are only constructs for our brains. Our minds say "past contains this and that" and "future holds that and this." When we give up ego, and experience non-linear time, some of the work our minds devote to upholding the illusion can come to rest. The fact is, the present moment is all that exists, and it contains all that is. All potential is realized, all places are here, all people are me, I am in all things and all things are in me. If I don't have to grasp after anything, some of the stress desire imposes on me diminishes. (The "trouble" is, I have to give up religious knowledge too.)  Giving up my spirit at the place of the skull isn't just an imitation of Christ.  It's a practical way to free some of my energy to have compassion for others, to actively practice self-care, to assure that I'm not ignoring anything I'm averse to or clinging to anything I like.

The oneness of things is rest-within-hustle. It's receptivity within generosity. It is Father, Son and Spirit within each of us, and us in them. If we ask "what, when we're with God, must pass away?" then we already have the answer. If we ask "must we suffer for our sins?" then the answer is both "yes and no." And when we are not two with him whose being replies to the question, we will know it altogether.

The Humble Tenfold Way

I am Christ, and so are you, and so is everything the miles between us contains.  Christ is God, so are you, so am I.  All times are now, all places are here, all potential is realized, all actions and words are just "being" having a self-realization.  From the moment we're suspended with Christ on the Cross, (and the only moment that can be is now) the darkness and light are both alike to us: good and bad, attraction and aversion, pleasure and pain--all of these are one, just ego testing out its capacities and boundaries. 

The opening of the third eye chakra can lead to these kinds of epiphanies, but how we get there, and what to do with them, is an open question.

A mental framework that encourages self-emptying--and that points out the beauty and goodness of both what we lose, and the process of letting go--is important.  What follows is modeled after the Buddha's Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path.  But there are real differences between Buddhism and Christianity "[In Christianity] The goal isn't just emptiness" an old novice master said to me. "but emptiness for the sake of fullness."  The theological term for that is "recapitulation."  In other words, we sit with emptiness so everything can be remade.  The third humble truth is "The Vehicle of Recapitulation is the body of Christ." And the last of the Four Humble Truths is "The way of the body of Christ is the humble tenfold way."  These two truths deserve a deeper look: because the way they function in Christian Tantra is part of what makes it distinct, and those distinctions are important. [bxA]

I want to talk about the fourth humble truth first, not for organization's sake, but because it represents how most of us get at the truth.  In other words, just like we often flail around in error before finding the right way, the humble tenfold way is just a list of things that we need to straighten out in order to minimize our delusion, dial down the crazy on our self-imposed suffering.  

The Humble Tenfold way is "Humble Prayer, Humble Presence, Humble Intention, Humble Action, Humble Effort, Humble Speech, Humble Work, Humble Knowing, Humble Thinking and Humble Belief."  At bottom--and this, I suppose, is the most important mark of "whether you're successfully doing them"--they each eliminate the distinction between subject and object.  The work of the humble tenfold way is in "dis-identifying with the doer," allowing ego to diminish.

Humble Prayer:  When I was in the monastery, I used to expend a lot of words and effort to package what I wanted God to know about me.  I prayed like celebrities have their agents issue press kits.  Realizing this, I confessed it to a friend.  He said "I know that story, man...these days I try to minimize how much I do it.  Instead I try to just sit down and say to God 'this is what I've got.'"  Humble prayer doesn't manipulate the data.  It's an offering particularly of what you'd rather God not see.  So the tax collector who said "Have mercy on me" shows us more than the pharisee who listed his accomplishments.  Clinging to accomplishments is easy, and it can bring us further into illusion.  Admitting liabilities is hard, and it can usher us into the Truth.  Those who see both and let go of them are praying humbly.

Humble Presence:  Thich Nhat Hanh said something like "We don't usually eat our food or drink our beverage.  Instead we chew on our thoughts about the food, our concerns about the day, our anxieties and worries."  At the very least, humble presence acknowledges we have this capacity, and uses the blessings of the senses as tools to return to the moment, to eat bread when we eat bread.  Humble presence helps me let go, till there isn't as much of a distinction between me and the sunset I'm watching. Instead I just become the eating, become the seeing.

Humble Intention:  "A monk's job is to live in reality."  These were the words of Dom Timothy Kelly, longtime abbot and head of Gethsemani Abbey.  I think they're accurate for us all: plumbers, tantrikas, dog walkers-liars and seekers of all types.  Personally, I am so attached to remembering only the positive bits of life that I'll unconsciously cease to deal with suffering, pain and my own liabilities.  Everyone does what they must to remember the things that slip their minds: suffice to say, the goal of "grieving suffering" is part of the work.  Accepting reality means having an intention to face our shadow and minimize its chaotic hold on our life.

Humble Acting: To act humbly is to be willing, rather than willful.  It is to stand between acquiescing and running the show and allow intuition (and emotion, sensation and energy) to prompt my next move.  Humble acting means being subject to the creative tension between choices.  There is a way of proceeding that's respectful not just of craving and desire, but of the body and my karma--in other words, that's gentle to my incarnation as a whole, especially including my shadow.

Humble Effort: In today's technologically overstimulated climate, we've lost the ability to wield attention as a tool.  We've become an army of the distracted, led every which way by life's shiny objects.  We've become hooked on the immediate gratification of a button-pushing culture.  And so, when nothing's fun, we have trouble sitting still.  If asked to give sustained attention to a candle's flame, we'd have real trouble doing so. Humble effort does two things.  It retrains attention to focus on impulsion (on emotion, sensation and energy) instead of craving and it teaches us to evaluate how indulging in distractions has affected us.  When done gently, humble effort is a practice that heals attention, allowing it to stand aside from anxieties, to be intentional about focus, and to do so with its inner eye focused compassionately on the woundedness concealed by craving and distraction.

Humble Speech: Students who process information verbally use a great many words as they first encounter information, increasingly fewer as they integrate it.  Economy of words shows mastery.  Economy of words also shows that a person has first gone from thinking of something to doing it, then from doing it to being it completely.  They have become one with themselves, and one with the object of their study all at once.

Humble Work: The jobs we choose to accept, the hobbies we engage in--these aren't free.  They take a toll on us.  Highly evaluative jobs--like being a food critic, train the people who work in them to be subtle in judgement, and that's not always good.  Judgement can take a dark turn very quickly, turning to cynicism to conceal our insecurities.  It's also important to ask whether the way I spend my time cultivates empathy for others, or uses them as a tool of my denial.  If I remember that people like me have a tendency to drink away our problems, and that other people are just as sensitive to stress as I am, I will be less apt to open a liquor store.  And it's not a rejection of the bad, but a choice between goods: I want to take a job that, in myself and others, supports self-knowledge more than it encourages denial.

Humble Knowing: Slightly enigmatically, Ram Dass once said something like "You don't know until you know you don't know."  With most non-informational questions, until my immediate response is "I don't know," I haven't taken the question seriously.  Serenity comes from adaptability, and self concept leads to inflexibility and anxiety. So until queries cause the inquisitor to self-question to the point of realizing that impermanence is the truth, "knowing" hasn't taken place.

Humble Thinking: As a brain function, thinking can easily take on too much of the burden of being.  The mind was meant to perceive.  And in perception, all is one, and the name of God comes out of our mouth as naturally as breath.  Instead, though, we "othered" everything around us, first by labelling everything, then by theorizing about how they're related.  We were Adam, naming animals, devising lengthier descriptions of others, poetic though they were.  Innocent enough at first, in light of sin, it became an expression of egotism and clinging. Eve began as "flesh of [Adam's] flesh," and ended up a target for his blame.

Humble Belief: Ram Dass said "Faith is what is left when all your beliefs have been blown to hell." There is a difference, then, between beliefs (the intellectual statements I hold as true) and Belief (trusting that the One behind the process is intelligent and loving.)  We show the strength of our Belief by the pliability of our beliefs.

A great many of these practices involve diminishing ego and consciously closing the distance between self and other.  But the question looms: why does that matter?  That speaks to the third humble truth, "The vehicle of recapitulation is the body of Christ."  I need to say it clearly.  The body of Christ is your body, and it's my body, fully and right now.  The body of Christ is the true nature of everything in existence.  It's the Christian answer to the Taoist concept of "pu." Christ is the "uncharted block," he is "things as they are" in the Christian story.  Though certainly a truth we are "reading in" to the gospel, this identification of Christ with the "natural state" is clearly echoed when Jesus says "I am the gate for the sheep."  What Paul pushed into the future as his "true self hidden with Christ in God" St. Theresa proclaimed as immanent.  "Christ," she said, "has no body but yours."  The Humble Tenfold Way is designed to help you and me remember this.  Along the way, everybody and everything has become part of us: in the emptiness of Christ's sacred heart, (which is our own,) self love and service are one.

To close, just a small reminder, both to you and to myself: chill out.  Don't let your neuroses turn insights into marching orders.  It's totally safe to relax.  We have things to listen to, learn, and look at in this incarnation.  It's enough to let that break your heart.  These concepts are the frame around which we're building the house, but there's grace in the bricks, and divine presence.  Another began the work, and he will complete it.  

Spirits and Chakras: Making some distinctions

While Catholics know a good deal about how the Spirit has acted in the Church, they've left the spirit of God that's in each of us largely unexamined.  And so a great many Westerners have been uncomfortable in their own skin.  If God's spirit can be treated as an anthropological reality, for a moment, and not something on which one faith corners the market, a great deal more can be said--in a manner, (if you'll permit me to sound a bit nuts,) that's biblical and traditional.  My questions, of course, are about manageable living, coming to acceptance and being humble, but they're just as rooted in becoming intimate with my own incarnation.  What follows is just a roadmap to self acceptance--which will be different for each of us, surely, but worth talking about nonetheless.

I'm convinced: there's no such thing as light or dark energy, only energy to which we're attached or non-attached.  The energy that animates all life is the Spirit of God, and that energy is sentient.  Egoically, the basic human needs manifest as "darker" desires--hyper-focused and possessing their own personalties.  These were the "demons" that the desert fathers fought.  In a similar way, psychologically, the Spirit of God manifests as lighter desires, and appears to come from outside us--as angels, for instance.  It moves through the body and gets a different name for each place it typically comes to rest.  But it's important to note: just like God called himself "I AM," sentient divine energy is just wearing the language of ego and psychology to make itself knowable.  The whole time, it's been within. [bxA]

"Deep calls upon deep, in the roar of waters."  In the chaos of life, energy resonates sympathetically.  It's trying to unite--the world with us and us with each other.  I don't want to talk about that energy, I want to address it.  And I don't want to talk to that energy, I want to be totally united with it.  It's you I'm talking to.

I could say this to my fiancee or to the bodega owner as much as to God's spirit: I don't know that I see you as much as I should or as clearly as I should.  My inattentiveness causes me a great deal of both guilt (which I can change by making amends) and remorse (which my ego won't let go of until I assist "healing and letting go" at doing more of their work.)   A great number of people--from Catholics, to Hindus, to Amazonian Shamans--have been hollering at me for years: there's a need, says their united voice, for purification.  

I'm being called to actively listen, whether sound is present or not.  It's a practice made more difficult by the assault on the senses that modern daily life can be.  Tuning out counts as a survival tactic, but pretty soon someone's got to sing a song about the "sound of silence" in a central park crowd of thousands before I can hear it. I'm being called to take my time, to taste and be grateful for subtler flavors than my salty, fatty, sugar rich diet has, the one I crave to mask stress with.  I feel for the slices of the human family who are so starved for safe affection that they pounce on any touch, (or, hell, any depiction of touch,) like it's bread in the wilderness.  Fasting and consciousness are well nigh impossible in a situation of scarcity.  Despite that, I have to recognize that I'm a being of infinite longings in a world of finite satisfaction.  The Logos is speaking clearly: go within, bear the cross. Take responsibility, be honest.  Otherwise don't be surprised when life is hard--my pervasive escapism, and society's, is always (in some measure) voluntarily chosen.

There are analogues for spiritual energy, and little more.  Spiritual energy is Eden's fourth, secret river, searched for uselessly on land, till at wits end it wells up within.  It is the Christ, faltering up the via dolorosa to the "place of the skull" where the Spirit of the Lord and the voice of honest grief are one, love hangs between worried thieves, and Christ and his devotee are not two.  

However, if we want to be absolutely clear, the energy that is the Spirit of God, (apparent to those who have prayed and purified,) is addressed in the prophet Isaiah.  In what I ultimately think is a description of every human being, it says "The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,  the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might,  the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord."

First, this fabulous piece of lectio divina isn't my own: it comes from a woman named Bonnie Breniser.  It's her contention, and mine, that these seven "spirits" are accurate analogues for Hinduism's 7 Chakras.  The truth of it was shockingly clear, and deserving some examination. 

There's a chakra at the base of the spine, where blocked energy causes feelings of neurotic insecurity.  The "spirit" that our reading of Isaiah would place here is the spirit of fear of the Lord.  Let the reader understand, this is more like awe than terror, and it brings to mind biblical voices like the author of of Proverbs.  "Fear of the Lord," says God's Word "is the beginning of Wisdom."

Creativity and healthy sexuality flourish when the chakra just below the belly button is unblocked.  At this chakra, the spirit of knowledge descends and rests.  Therefore, it became a saying that a man would leave his mother, cleave to his wife, and "know her"--so deeply as to become one flesh.

The chakra just above the belly button regulates ego.  In negotiations with this spirit, we work out our relationship--for good or ill--with power.  So the spirit that hovers over this chakra is the "spirit of might."

At the breastbone, at the heart chakra, we're emptied of all of our resentments and willful angling when we're present to the spirit residing there.  Indeed, just as the conquerors of the temple, expecting riches, were surprised to find the Holy of holies completely empty--just as Jesus's sacred heart was emptied by grief and pierced with a lance--in that same way, we will not find real compassion until our hearts are empty as well.  Only then can the spirit of counsel balance listening and speaking with gentleness.  Only then can I find kindness for others, because I've found that their dark corners and mine are the same.

"I thirst!" To me, this is Jesus at his most basic and honest: stripped, as he is, of all theologies and trappings of a teacher. Speaking personal truths is the throat chakra's job. And that's appropriate, because it's the spirit of understanding that rests at the throat chakra. It's a paradox: he who understands speaks his truth plainly, in few words. So it wasn't "I hunger and thirst for this or that Holy Thing as part of this or that spiritual objective." Jesus said "I thirst," and went back to the business of embracing life's paradoxical nature. Jesus was less and less able to avoid, I think, knowing that every bit of living is also a dying, every bit of vitality and rejoicing calls for a measure of grief as well.

At some point, the beloved either internalizes the lover, or dies tormented by longing for him.  Before disciples become masters, students die, teachers perish, and wisdom passes away.  The Hindu teacher Ram Dass said his teacher maharaj-ji vanished after death "because [guruji] had gone inside."  Jesus says Father, why have you forsaken me!--and it was a sign of the third eye chakra opening to the spirit of wisdom that lives there. Jesus' theological worldview had to die--just as much as he himself did. And the sense that "[the Father] who sent [him] is with [him]" had to die too.

In the end, the whole thing becomes positively eloquent. Crucified at "the place of the skull, Jesus gives up his spirit and cries "It is finished." The Spirit of the Lord descends and remains at the crown chakra, atop a brow encircled with thorns. Scores of Hindu teachers say spiritual energy, when it ascends to the crown chakra, yields an experience that can't be accurately described in words. Thomas Merton's words showed this to be true across religious world views: "sometimes no explanation is sufficient to account for suffering. The only decent thing is silence."

So the truth of it is this: those in whom spiritual energy can move freely will move serenely on the earth: their self knowledge will overflow in compassion for others. To paraphrase Ram Dass, when ordinary people attain wisdom, they become sages. When sages attain wisdom, they become ordinary people. 

Like blood or breath, God's spirit animates from the background. That divine intelligence is the most significant thing ever to consent to living in obscurity. In short, it's no big deal. Neither am I. And when it finishes its work in me, I'll see it plainly.

             

    

        

         

Notes in Winter: Self-Emptying, Surrender and Grief as a Path to Embodiment.

Joni Mitchell wrote "Maybe it's just the time of year, maybe it's the time of man."  It's winter, and I spend less and less time with the news these days.  It's a rare movie that I can sit through from beginning to end.  Romcoms feel too syrupy, dramas too jarring, and in action movies, far too much explodes.  The mantra-like sounds of hindu kirtan or medieval polyphony are the most I can handle musically.  I feel like my senses went off, fought a war, then came back shell-shocked and screaming at each other.

I am at an impasse with myself.  [bxA]I hear the words "search for God," and then attempt it.  I look for God everywhere, and he is nowhere.  I know personally why saints of the past have been driven to the brink of madness by the search, why monks of old needed careful guidance to avoid getting stuck in depression, anxiety and suicidal thinking.  To search for God outside myself is ultimately to allow that search to be compelled by my own insanity, and to see that writ large in the chaos of the world.

Allowing myself to be compelled by chaos--my own or the world's--is the only source of anxiety.  My first forty years have been a carnival of errors here.  All of the wisdom about closing my eyes to withdraw my attachment to the world has been important.  All of the truths about giving up all thought of self, even until I realize the infinite depths of my impermanence--this isn't a spiritual maneuver, it's a way to avoid constant battle with the flow of the universe.  It's the only route that ends in rest.

An old hermit I knew quoted Abraham Joshua Heschel to me once.  I've never been able to vouch for its accuracy, but it stuck with me: "We do not take the Word of God into our mouths," he said. "Rather, we step into the Word, because the Word is bigger than we are."  Evidently, the Logos has a work that it's doing--a work that, once begun, needs to be respected, given space and listened to--and I ignore it only at the cost of my serenity.  The Word is communicating God's intelligence through absolutely everything in the universe.  It forms a single, unified message: that I'm not in charge, that it's safe to give up control, that I have to be gentle to myself and others, walk through life a bit more quietly and reflectively. 

If I want to be free of anxiety, then the only path left for me is introspection, feeling and honesty.  The stream is within, and I've got to follow it to its source.  I don't just think, I have an emotional response to thought.  I'm having one now, about the thought processes involved in writing (it's early, and I'm still crawling inside the secondhand clothes of the new day.)  I don't just have emotions, they point to sensations in the body.  And further, I don't just experience physical sensation: that sensation vibrates and tingles, it's the energy and the sound of simply being.  And I can either listen to that or not, stand outside and examine it or step into its flow.

If I speak to attempt to persuade others, I need something from them: a sense of my own righteousness, a sense of my own appeal--whatever.  It doesn't matter.  The fact remains: if whatever I'm seeking isn't forthcoming, I'm overcome by all kinds of sadness; strong or weak in proportion to my attachment.  Initially, I may run around, saying "I need to be less selfish." But that, too, is an error.  I need to simply be, to notice selfishness causes suffering, to let it "break my heart" and loosen my ego's white-knuckled grasp on its own permanence.  When I am not propping up my ego with affirmation from others, I can encounter them serenely.

At the same time, I can't use "avoiding being a burden" to justify hiding what I'm feeling from people I trust.  The dictum of AA holds true: "You alone can do it, but you cannot do it alone." I have to do my inner work: but I can neither hide from those I trust nor expect them to solve my problems for me.  It's a delicate balance.  I go through long stretches of fouling it up more than I succeed.

It is one thing to talk about these things.  It's another thing to become them.  Only Western cultures recognize a distinction between doing and being.  But "just existing" is an action--it's up to me to do it actively and consciously.  And acting is just a series of "ways of being," a succession of present moments.  This is a truth so infinitesimal and gargantuan and delicate that I can't step into it by willpower.

Surrender is the only destination here, and acceptance the only journey.  But I have to remember that acceptance is the end of a grieving process, and not skip steps, however noble my reasons for doing so are.  The instantaneous breakthroughs that taught me surrender was necessary must yield to a process of being kinder to the parts of my emotional life I'd rather ignore or reject.  Bargaining, Anger, Depression have their day, and they must, if I'm to be thorough.  

I want to mourn more actively: I want to withdraw some of my attention from the constant, chaotic stream of distractions that usually fill each day.  Anger and sadness and depression are more spacious emotions than I would have originally thought, but I have to face how afraid they make me feel, to sit down in them and learn to reclaim my breathing from anxiety.  It's terrible work, but no one's doing it for me and the soul-numbing consequences of neglect are too great.

The fact, in the end, is that I can't complete the process.  But gravity is a wonderful teacher.  If all I can do is throw a snowball off a snowcapped mountain peak, God can turn it into an avalanche.  All Jesus had to do was lay down his life.  Others were responsible for the tomb and the rising.  I don't know the mechanics of this in my own life--not intimately enough to spare me apprehension.  But the beginning and the end are one, as life and death are.  I didn't begin the work--I don't know, maybe I just live in it. And maybe the one who will carry it through to completion is within me, and knowing is a luxury I'm supposed to live without. 

So, what of it? Joni Mitchell would say "I don't know who I am, but life is for learning."  I've long since declared myself a disciple of the logos, but I think I'm just realizing the extent to which that means consciously fasting from stimuli that serve as quick fixes for uncomfortable emotional processes.  Grief is one of those processes, and I've not adequately faced my distaste for the fear that keeps me from making a beginning.  I don't like free fall, and that's precisely how trusting the invisible hits me. 

Ultimately it's about surrendering to the intelligent otherness of a loving deconstruction.  In an attempt to talk about this, I briefly read through some important Zen Koans.  But Torah has plenty of examples for this.  Job most likely ached at the silence, till the whirlwind spoke.  Abraham's son, nearly sacrificed as a boy, spent a good bit of his life afraid--until he faced it and "the fear of Isaac" became a name for God.  I want to ante up to my own, to look straight at it.

When Zechariah heard God's prediction of John's birth, because of his doubt he couldn't speak until they were fulfilled.  I don't know who's supposed to break the silence first.  Maybe God is, maybe I am.  If it's the latter, then these words are a fulfillment.  Let it be so, please God.  Let it be!