Dialogues with Mystery: 6

There's a spot we'll meet in, together, more than once.

You'll admit all of the compulsivities: using relationships, psychedelic chemicals, spirituality, sex and food to self-soothe.  You will cop to being a people pleaser, and realize that you modify your consciousness more to comfort a sore ego than to learn how to use it differently.  You'll fess up to seeking heaven because you can't deal with earth, to looking for God because you shirk personal responsibility.  You'll admit that you use sex to end-run around truly internalizing the teacher's power, and feel bad about subtly asking your lover to cooperate in your self-deception. You will face the fact that you eat your feelings. You'll feel silly and immature and ashamed and simply exhausted.  And you'll ask me to give you the resources to quit the whole business.

But I won't. [bxA]  Listen: you can perhaps hear me speaking.  You have perhaps had spiritual experiences.  You may even have given all that you have, many times over, in an effort to find answers.  But you still have a great deal to learn about how to encounter your needs consciously.  All of the unmet yearnings (for others, for comfort and for egoic transcendence) that those things provide--their deficiencies are a great poverty, and that poverty is neither a problem nor a crisis.  Remember: I am asking you to see what you lack as cause for a kind of "celebratory finding the others"--because the bounty of the infinite cosmos makes beggars of us all.  I'm asking you to treat your suffering with curiosity and fascination rather than dread.  

You are still learning how to notice the dread in the first place.  You need a great deal more work in being able to watch non-judgmentally as that dread changes to opportunity and the energy runs its course.  You are by no means a realized being.  You are a student, and a student works with a curriculum.  Get over yourself.  Of the Teacher, you have heard it said "his yoke is easy and his burden is light."  Asking to bear nothing will simply increase suffering.  But if you work at it patiently, you might perhaps find serenity.  

Celebrating your poverty is a wedding feast of empowerment and joy.   You must wear the festal garment of non-self to enter.  And you keep entering the party and then leaving again--that's okay.  In and of itself, it's not a big issue.  You are in a world of people who wear their egos like winter coats in summer time: you will have to learn to assume your ego when you need to, and to drop it when you can.  But you come and go compulsively, in a way that's driven by fear and insecurity.  Remember the book: it said I will go forth from God's mouth and not return to him empty.  I am teaching you to come and go, to wear your ego and be humble, as God wills, not as you will.

And don't worry: that process is supposed to feel like whirlwinds in your chest and burning coals in your throat.  You are every prophet that was ever martyred in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem is your own body.  I'm asking you to be so attentive to the sensations that, like the teacher before his accusers, you get quiet.

I don't know.  Maybe egos just need to know what "spending all you have fruitlessly" feels like, before the hem of the teacher's garment looks appealing.  Maybe using blame and resentment and defeatedness to cope needs plenty of space to get old before you're willing to try something else.  Maybe there's a yoga to the years of sitting lame before the Teacher tells you to take up your mat and walk.  The patriarch Joseph wasn't given all the power in his prison on the first day.  Before the end, you will realize you love the time you have to practice, and you'll suspect you've spent lifetimes thinking it only just occurred to you.  As the upa-gurus of this generation say, "You didn't need a long time to realize this.  You only needed now."

There it is. First, be here now.  Then, put on some music.  And go clean your messy apartment.

Dialogues with Mystery: 5

Listen: creating a mentally abstracted "self" is not a shortcut to self-discovery.  Ego is psychological sleight of hand: it paints a smile on reality while our thirst for control blows up in our face.  Nothing finite is in a position to control the infinite.  Your life is not a hostage negotiation, and you are not in a position to present Divine Mystery with terms of surrender.  Craving, attachment, attraction and aversion, shame and blame and resentment gain ground every minute you buy into the lie that your will can change reality.  How many of your opinions are simply inward attempts to force, persuade or cajole others into thinking as you do?   Every attempt you make at that kind of control will demand its pound of flesh: anxiety is the cost of consenting to that illusion.  It is like unwittingly mixing ashes in your own food. [bxA]

Somehow, admitting that you're vulnerable has to come first.  After that, understand that the spirit acts in the body as it acts in the world.  Within you, it flows where it meets no resistance; outside you, it blows where it wills.  Wisdom makes every person on earth a hermit; facing your needs without manipulating to get them met is the only real solitude.  You alone can search your heart to know what's holding you back: the work is to become your own remover of obstacles.  You alone know how you have failed to cooperate with and harness the universe's power: the work is to "read the distance" between you and empowerment and take small steps toward whatever's more manageable.  Be wary of cycles of desire and fulfillment.  They never have, and never will adequately address your needs.   And they can distract the attention and sap the energy you might otherwise use to help yourself.

I am not here, nor are you, so that you'll start desiring spiritual things. Calling out for divine help will not gain you support.  The Teacher is a sign of contradiction--crucified so that the inner thoughts of many will be laid bare.  In the beginning, thought and emotion and sensation and energy were a free flowing stream within you, and it would slake your thirst as often as you drank it with remembrance.  But God help us, we forget--we forget, and can neither breathe and nor weep as we wish, and we live in such fear of our mortality that the sight of our own blood causes aversion.  The absence of divine assistance can teach the attentive to survey the wreckage, to more effectively distinguish what can be changed from what can't. I am here to restore calmness of breathing, to create openness to the gift of tears, to help you find the power in your own blood.

For the sake of living without anxiety, please be still...poverty is an absolutely miserable spiritual tool, and you will go through a hell of withdrawals as you learn to live with fewer stimuli, as you let go of your own petty manipulations.  But for the sake of your own serenity, identify what's worth more to you than stillness and let go of it.  If you are not able to sit in the center of your own body, the whole world will confine you.  If, even for a moment, you can calm the inner impulses seeking to chase one shiny object after another--if you can do that, the world will open inside you like the lilies of the field.   Then you will see: you are splendor within splendor within splendor.  But it will be no big deal--because you will be free, and that will be enough.

Dialogues with Mystery: 4

This isn't my message.  It's what the crumbs on your dirty coffee table are telling you.  It's the voice of your own numbness.  I know you're tired--but so long as you're seeking to be excused from weariness, you'll find no relief.  The Teacher first bore the Cross, then he died on it: rest is found on the other side of acceptance.  

I am asking you to hit bottom. [bxA]

If you're any kind of intellectual being, know that mind, in the end, is ego.  It's extremely helpful, until it's not.  A vulture is Christ.  One hand claps.   This will seem contradictory, and will shake (to its core) the part of you that's addicted to logic.  The Teacher lived Isaiah's words: he gave his back to those who beat him, his cheek to those who plucked out the beard.  He turned to you and said "if anyone strikes you on the one cheek, turn and offer him the other."  This isn't an instruction manual in being a push-over.  When you are actively trying to accept sensations you're viscerally averse to, there's very little room for self, for preference, for finely tuned opinions.  It's true, you are immensely valuable: you're a member of God's people, and you share his name.  But you are also impermanent.  God said "You are not my people and I am not your God" through some fairly loud prophets.  When the legion is cast out of you, when sitting finds you fully clothed and in your right mind, it will be because you have ascended the cross within you--the one that brings reality out of the tension between who you are, and who you are not.  The day on which that happens will be as all days are: great and terrible.

Beware the false bottom, the "lowest point possible."  Explanations about how it couldn't get any worse often have an implied "you" at their core.  Whoever this "you" is, it's not who you are. 

If you're any kind of a spiritual being, know that your superego will co-opt everything you value, and every bit of wisdom it's yielded.  A time will come--and it may be today-- when looking for God won't work.  Listening for God won't work.  The quantity of ego in seeing and hearing make it inevitable.  The Father asks the prophets: "Make the mind of this people dull, and stop their ears, and shut their eyes, so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.’"  When superego uses religion to reengage our attachments, aversions, attractions and cravings, it's building a tower that not only risks collapse, but is inevitably bound for destruction.

Remember: Job, having been deprived of everything, demanded explanations.  Elijah, facing the threat of death, talked about his own zeal and complained that his life was at risk.  Neither received a fantastic and blinding divine manifestation.  Both were rendered silent.  In a whirlwind, God told Job: the reason for suffering none of your business.  Elijah heard the still small voice of sheer silence.  In other words, the two men had their egos reduced.  All incidents of non-self are spiritual experiences, but not all spiritual experiences have non-self at their core.

Humility is an important movement.  Non-self is the muscle you'll use to rise, take up your mats and walk.  Don't ask me how to do this.  Don't ask me what this looks like.  The mind's unable help with the question or supply the answer.  I am unwilling to help.  God cannot do for you what you're unwilling to do for yourself.  Jesus ascended, and I know how hard his absence is.  I know that leaves you crucified between two sides of a paradox.  It's okay.  First, breathe.  Then, clean your home.  When you see the sunlight on the walls, and hear the room's quiet, rejoice: you have become the teacher.

  

Dialogues with Mystery: 3

I am here to tell you that, like the teacher, you are Word made flesh.  Sound and substance mirror each other, and your body is an echo chamber.  Ego has left you addicted to pleasure and wholly unable to accept pain.  You may only see contradiction--selfishness blinds even the sighted--but existence is a paradox: you are the infinite cosmos, learning the curriculum of limitation.  [bxA]  The Teacher was crucified and died, descended and rose and ascended inside you so that you would see--with your own eyes--that you are crucified as well.  The pain of the nails is tolerable if you don't run from it, and an agony if you struggle against it.  You can access neither heaven nor earth: but even if you could have your fill of both, you would be anxious: repeated patterns of desire and fulfillment don't suffice your needs.  You have heard it said: you longed to fill your stomach with what the world feeds the pigs, but no one gave you anything.  The teacher is much simpler.  He simply returned to the Father and said "I thirst."

God is silent so that you will hear your own voice.  Each of your words is an emotion, each emotion comes with physical sensation, and each physical sensation is an energy.  All incarnate beings are seers, speaking flesh to dry bones.  You alone know that you have not heard with the ear of your heart until the silence of things-as-they-are speaks.  Listen: every breath is the name of God, coming from your mouth.

God is mental stillness so that you will see your thoughts move.  Mentally rehearsing interactions with others--whether they be past or potential exchanges--will not give you control of your emotions and it won't force others to do as you wish. I want you to know that I get it.  I get the whole thing and I feel for you.  I have seen tables flipped in holy places because of how difficult it is.  Tears of blood have fallen on me.  I was, I am, and I will be powerless.  So are you.  But powerlessness is an exemption for absolutely no one.  It's a terrible mess--the whole thing--I'd say it's unbearable, but for the fact that we who find it intolerable are still breathing.  Read that again.  We are still.  And breathing.  And, though we are alone in the work of being, we are doing it together.  

From a position of stillness, the desire and grasping for control become apparent.  Let me say from the start: for desire and control, no remedy's to be found in any form of pushing, pulling or manipulating.  Satan cannot cast out Satan.  Those who solve illusion with illusion come to grief, before the end. (That is why you and I suffer.)  It is only the finger of God that cleans house as it's needed, and only by prayer do we learn the whys and the wherefores, and which finger is God's.  Suffice to say--if a tree bears no fruit, don't take issue with the leaves.  For surface-level problems, we've got to dig down to the roots.  Let me speak plainly: sometimes giving up self is the only solution for the self's cravings and attachments.

Next to the teacher, we are all thieves.  But when we find him in ourselves, we share in his last moments.  Every moment of life is also a dying.  Every moment of dying is also a birth.  The one that's inside us, who's bitter and crying--that's you. What did the younger son look like, before the firstborn son came into the world?  

Dialogues with Mystery: 2

Listen...I am saying this to you so that you can become "one without a second."  I am saying this to you so that you'll relax--not "stop being attentive" but instead "stop being willful."  Work, attention, and even the very thoughts that pop into our head--these are all laced with force.  You exhaust yourselves by peddling the primordial lie--that you are your thoughts--as if it were true.  Never, more than now, has it been important to rest.  Past and future, after all, only exist in the mind.

I want to tell you that the universe is alive. [bxA]  I want to tell you that hearing the Father's voice is completely possible.  Most do not hear with their ears, but rather they hear with their egos.  They still think a quiet room sounds like nothing.  You have heard it said "to the pure of heart, all things are pure." And now I say to you: only to the quiet will quiet speak.  Only a routine of prayer, fasting, meditation--medicine to match the illness--will open the ears.  Only a descent from the mind to the heart will cause the right dispositions and words and actions to arise spontaneously.  

From the first, forever and always: word becomes flesh. Of teachers, you have heard it said "apart from him not one thing came into being."  Each moment is made of benevolent, creative tensions.  Your agitation comes from constantly wiggling free of this part, from always dodging that part of it.  Before students become teachers, students die, teachers die and teachings die.  In order to find serenity: mount the cross.  Be suspended on the tension.  Become a student of your own scattered pride.  Strike your chest in contrition and you will find the teacher there: he seeks out your own lostness, so that you can face the parts of yourself hidden in shadow.  From the first, forever and always, he has been you: now become him, and find your Self.

I want to tell you that darkness and absence of God: these are both completely kind.  For lifetimes, the wise have felt it as they watched the pleasure and pain of the world dance in front of them. For lifetimes they've either clung or pushed away.  All sentient beings are connected: If the world seems like a prison it is of your own making, only confining until you sit still at its center.  Freedom from consequences comes only by enduring them: we ascend by descending. Become all people, and you will see through one thousand eyes. Become a thousand eyes, and you will see yourself--in all people as in a mirror.  The darkness and the light are one, and absence that you are present to will smile with your own mouth.

So, what of it?  Work and eat, grieve and rest, laugh and let go.  Everything matters, but more importantly, everything matters to you.  If, just once, you die before you die, you'll see you're not who you think you are.  And then you will take up "what matters" and put it down as one does an axe.  You will not be happy. You will be both happy and sad, because life includes both.  You will be, (no, you are) alive.  Bow deeply to the four directions till it loosens you up.  Breathe!

My name is Legion: Introductions on Returning to School

I have been leaving parts of myself out of the spiritual journey.  It represents bits of the curriculum that I've got to go back and spend more time with.  If my life lacks peace, it's because there's some small instance of neglect in my own formation.  Each chakra has a toxic "persona" that it creates and stores inside me.  At times, I've identified, totally and haphazardly, with every one. The Chakras have vulnerable personas, and often I've bypassed those entirely for lack of knowing how to defend them.  Any self that ignores those different bits of masquerade etiquette will, at best, see through a darkened lens. [bxA]

The root chakra, where the spirit of fear of the Lord lives, is also where my wounded inner child is constantly screaming, and where my healthy inner child looks on the world with fascination.  My dysfunctional background means that, for years, I've been able to focus only on the wounded inner child.  It helps me see where my own impairment comes from.  Fear and defensiveness are often the emotions I have easiest access to, but feelings of humor and serenity are possible too--if I would only allow for a softening of heart.

The sacral chakra, where the spirit of knowledge is, is also where my growing inner child either stifled his potential, or allowed it to flourish.  The cynicism I've looked at the world with--the part of me that thinks playing is "dumb"--makes me think I've payed more attention to the stifling than the flourishing.  This has wounded my ability to be basically intuitive.  Creativity is about waiting for the answer to occur to me, and waiting for realization is something I really struggle with.  I'd rather supply a series of my own answers, so that getting by happens by process of elimination.  I need to learn to wait.

The solar plexus, where the spirit of might descends and remains, is where I've either learned or neglected the gentle and focused use of power.  Of course, I can see the dysfunction more than the healing.  I feel deficient in my ability to call forth positive intentions, to rouse gentle attention.  I feel impaired in my ability to work for the sake of working, without ego supplying a really drastic narrative that makes the whole thing seem more risky than it is.  It's never just "go to work."  It's always "go to work, try not to get fired, or else you'll be homeless and that'll be terrible."  It's never "feel all your feelings, and let them go."  It's always, "feel the feelings that don't threaten high functioning.  Neglect the rest, you don't have time for them."  Developing the ability to more carefully use intention and attention is part of the class I was mentally absent for.

The heart chakra, where the spirit of counsel is--this is where I negotiate taking responsibility. The spirit of counsel assumes I've already taken that responsibility, that I've so completely crawled into problematic and uncomfortable situations that I've learned to see them as spacious and inhabitable, learned to sit still at their center.  A "problem" is just an echo chamber, off of whose walls my own voice eventually echoes until I hear myself talking.  When Jesus said things like "Father, why have you forsaken me" and "I thirst", when he said "forgive them, they know not what they're doing" and "today you'll be with me in paradise" he was reflecting this process: first, taking responsibility to feel his own pain and naming his own vulnerabilities instead of running from them.  Second, reaching out to those similarly afflicted with compassion.  

The two thieves crucified with Jesus give voice to degrees of "not taking responsibility."  The one cynically questioned Jesus' status as the messiah and wanted to be saved from the cross entirely, the other accepted Jesus as the messiah, but thought he'd be saved later.  Jesus corrected both by saying "Today you will be with me in paradise."  It's as if he was saying "when your eyes shift from someone else's cross to your own, the cross transforms.  You're not a few moments away from the kingdom, you are a few degrees of responsibility away from it."

This is a long way of saying that I can give voice, and I have given voice to the different degrees of shirking responsibility.  The more I dodged, the more anxious I became.  Those liabilities took on, in a metaphorical but very real sense, lives of their own.  Calmly learning to take responsibility is a part of the curriculum that I missed, and serenity's to be found only in relearning the lesson.

The throat chakra, where the spirit of understanding works, is the spiritual muscle of straight talk.  Wisdom faces us with problems like sin, suffering, death, and moral choices--all of which we negotiate in a solitude so drastic God seems absent from it.  Ego layers blame and resentment and shame over those problems, and it keeps us from naming the problem, or working with it. Remember that, in a spirit of understanding, Jesus said "I thirst."  Not "I thirst for affection or acceptance, this or that spiritual goal."  Our difficulty isn't an inability to configure the world as we wish it to be, or in a way that would make us less vulnerable.  The trouble is we can't even be honest about our vulnerability in the first place.  The problem is within, not out in the world.

Every human alive, including myself, has missed the boat in terms of being honest.  We've all seen others and situations as problems when our own habits escape our notice.  I have blamed others, God, fate and the weather for my lack of ability to sit with discomfort and take responsibility.  Maneuvers like those aren't free.  They come at a cost we don't know we're paying.  Learning to straight talk is important: the voice is the first indicator of the serenity, or lack thereof, that fills the heart.  And the "person that I am" when I speak dishonestly is part of the whole crowd inside me--exuberant one minute, calling for blood another--and always needing redemption.

The part of me that stands distant as I write this has a real problem with the third eye chakra.  This is where the spirit of wisdom lives.   But the question I have is "what's the wisdom for?"  Know this for certain: when I am flashing spiritual insight around like it's cash that I won in some high stakes spiritual lottery, that's ego and it's toxic.  Ennobling such a display of spiritual wealth by saying things like "this will help others" only makes it more problematic.  And I need to admit that I am the guy who has done all that.  I may be doing it as type right now.  Grief: a mourning as deep as my broken heart can manage, is the only solution here.  Only grief is rooted in the truth: wisdom is impermanent, and the world is passing away, and all that I know of myself is dying.  Accepting this is the only route to peace.

In the crown chakra, where the spirit of the Lord is, everything that is my "self" has the opportunity to finally dive into restful silence.  If the toxic self creates a persona, claims to have spent lifetimes as a god or a devil, claims to be living all possible incarnations at once (in invisible dimensions, of course), then the flow of divine energy gets obstructed.  (Full disclosure, the examples in the last sentence are all things I've wondered, and sometimes voiced aloud, about myself.)  The fact is, whether our "selves" are many or they're one, they're impermanent.  Impermanence is the truth of divine revelation, the greatest gift of God's Word.  

Life's learning is in coaching the masks we wear to accept impermanence.  Dorothy Day, quoting Charles Peguy, said that when we get to heaven, God will ask us "where are the others."  It certainly applies to heaven and social existence, but it also applies to the movement of the holy spirit up the body's central channel.  In other words, it's true of the voices in our psyche as well. The infant showing fascination, the toddler learning to play, the young person learning to do things for their own sake, they all have a place in the beatific vision.  The young adult learning to take total responsibility for his own burdens, the sufferer learning to access non-defensive emotions,  they all have a role to play in moving gently on the earth.  Both the honest man and the old seer will die.  But God's divinity is eternal.  And eternality is a stillness from which you and I never depart. 

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.