IV. Ways that Christian Tantric Practitioners Nuance Christian belief

We are not naive enough to think that every Christian will look at our practice and automatically be able to accept it as Orthodox.  Here, we hope to outline some of the innovative bits of Christian Tantra--in hopes of illustrating their scriptural and traditional roots.  For what it's worth: [bxA]

1. Keep in mind, we all have a picture of Jesus in our head--one that includes the fact that Jesus lived in the past-- against which comparisons with the people around us fail. When Jesus rose from the dead, he appeared to his disciples as a stranger. This was to wean the disciples off of their dependence on that idealized intellectual paradigm. If we students of Rabbouni get rid of our ideas about him, we can accept that everyone around us can be the Risen Jesus.

2. When Jesus ascended, and disappeared from the sight of the Apostles, he went inside all things, as the true nature of all reality.  Ever after, viewing things as they are is the pre-condition for interaction with Jesus. We are Jesus, our true self, only when we give up self; the sheep gate is Jesus when we see it without ego; strangers are Jesus when we stop judging them "different from how we expected christ to be."  Furthermore, particular instances of holiness--such as the divine presence in the sacraments or a devoutly offered rosary--these must necessarily flow into the holiness of all things.  Ultimately, the Tantric vision is Theistic Monist: we believe God to be revealed in--but not limited by--all things. 

3. Students of Rabbouni are "Abrahamic Monotheists" not "Exilic Monotheists." Abrahamic Monotheists can do as Abraham did with Melchizedek. Melchizedek was a follower of El-elyon, a foreign god at the time Abraham encountered him. But everything that Melchizedek believed about El-elyon--Abraham believed all these things about his own God...so Abraham gave Melchizedek a share with the people, and appropriated his beliefs. Exilic Monotheists are defensive--because they're culturally under threat--so there's an emphasis on saying things like "YHWH is the only God who exists--all other gods are non-existent and toxic to believe in." Unfortunately, the wider Christian Church has inherited an "Exilic Monotheism"--that can't but focus on cultural threat.  We students of Rabbouni know how we must be different.

4. Just as Jesus sat with the scholars in the Temple, asking them questions--so students of Rabbouni sit before all world religions.  We learn about them without judgment, and we don't evangelize.  (Remember the papal encyclical Evangelii Nuntiandi, that permitted testimony about Christ only to those who have first vocally expressed curiosity about our life with him.  Also remember the good witness of Charles de Foucault, who quietly followed Jesus, loved people and gained no disciples till after he was killed by thieves.)  As it seems good to us--paying attention to our intuition--we participate in other traditions' religious rites.  We do not worry: we focus on speaking with a pure heart, and listening to ourselves.  The God who exists, (who can be called by many names if he wishes) will hear us.

5. Students of Rabouni have an experiential relationship with the indwelling spirit, which is united to the Holy Spirit, and is one in the same. (The Holy Spirit might act differently when it transcends us, but we don't, for the moment, wish to digress.)  We believe everything Hindus have said about Kundalini energy and the chakra system is accurate, without modification.  The first thing the indwelling Spirit does is highlight mixed motivations and thought content that's unsavory...we have to see our shadow and endure our purgatorial predicament.  We see the layers of our psyche in thought, emotion, sensation and energy.  This is all due to the light of the indwelling spirit--it's a privilege to see, even if it's difficult.  Where our attention is drawn, there also the Spirit is.  If I have a difficult thought, I sit with it.  I ask what emotions I'm feeling.  I ask what part of the body I might be feeling sensation in.  I ask what judgments I might be subtly making about the energy that underlies the sensation, and I abandon it.

6. Students of Rabouni believe that the Seven Chakras are referenced in Scripture as the "Seven Spirits of God" referenced in Isaiah (Assuming, of course, that the content of our lectio divina can inform our living as much, in this instance, as Tradition. If time proves us presumptuous, we will bear our purgatories and hells as we already do, and as we must).  Like our basic needs, the Spirit manifests like autonomous parts of our personality that have their own intelligence--which we can either use harmoniously, or not, depending on whether we're being willing or willful.  As stated in scripture, they are "The spirit of fear of the Lord (at the muladhara chakra), the spirit of Knowledge (at the Svadhishthana Chakra), The Spirit of might (at the Manipura Chakra), the spirit of counsel (at the Anahata Chakra,) the spirit of understanding (at the Vishuddha Chakra), the spirit of wisdom (at the Ajna Chakra) , and the spirit of the Lord (at the Sahasrara Chakra).

7. Students of Rabbouni do "inner family work that leads to deity meditation"--they familiarize themselves with the unhealthy child within them and with the healthy child, with the unhealthy adolescent and the healthy one, with the unhealthy adult and the healthy one.  We also possess unhealthy and healthy voices in us that correspond to roles: so I can be an unhealthy son or a healthy one.  I can speak as an unhealthy father or a healthy one.  Slowly we come to know how our family experience and psychological conditioning makes all of this manifest.  But that is only the beginning.  As we learn to voluntarily be the healthiest version of ourselves, we come to realize that by noticing what we're drawn to, we can follow the Spirit within.  We aren't just working to be healthy infants, adolescents, adults, children or parents.  We are working to answer the question "how would the God the Father and the Christ the Son speak, if they had to speak to us and through us.

8. This "following of the Spirit within" from inner-family work to Trinitarian Deity meditation yields to a new model of Christian Contemplation. Jesus bandied about torah with the Tempter for a while, but eventually told him to be gone.  Jesus will draw all people to himself, and will lose nothing of what the Father has given him except the ego that was destined for loss--but in the end, the Lord will hand all things over to the Father.  This is a yielding of meaning and thought--and ultimately, this yielding of dualism entirely and the drive for control it relies on.  When can sit with the purgative process of divinization, clothed and in our right mind, we will, in our own flesh, see God.

9.  Students of Rabbouni do not wish to indulge in theological thought at the expense of more embodied experience.  That is spiritual bypassing: the tendency to use positive content of faith to end-run around belief's more challenging bits.  Students of Rabbouni do not wish to claim spiritual experience as a means of claiming they're different or better than others.  That is spiritual materialism: the tendency to use spiritual content as a means of self-exaltation or division from others.  By our following of Jesus, we become what all people are: poor, asking that our basic needs be met, hoping to find that we're not the only ones at odds with ourselves.  This, to us, is a primary grace of the Eucharist: we learn to celebrate poverty, and in that poverty, we find the others.

10. Just as Ezekiel prophesied to the dry bones--just as that proclamation knitted them together with flesh and breathed God's spirit into them--so our own silence must be, on every level, an internalization of the scriptural narrative.  Just as our bodies store trauma, they also store revelation.  (It takes consistent lectio divina practice to awaken the ways our bodies preach, but they do.) As an additional caution: we must remember to be honest.  We are the crowds that shouted hosanna, and the crowds that called for our teacher's crucifixion. Our story is represented in both the evil characters of scripture and the good ones.  We are everything, everywhere always, and it's all a part of us: we do not get to pick and choose.  The God who is within us is using the messy story of salvation to make us admit what we'd rather deny: "Tat Tvam Asi" as he says in the Upanishads: "Thou art that."

11. We accept traditional renderings of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, also strive for "orthomorphosis." That's a high brow way of saying we believe there's a right way to practice, we believe there's a right set of first principles: but we also believe there's a "right way to be transformed."  To a great extent, this is traditional--not one jot or tittle could be modified in Benedict's ladder of humility, for instance, and it would still produce saints.  We've made bold to find our own way. It's a way based on radical recollection: the following of thoughts to emotions, to sensations to energy--all as the Spirit wills, with willingness and serenity instead of willfulness and ego. 

12. Students of Rabouni endure their purgatory on earth.  This thing that was once presumed to be the provenance solely of great saints--it is revealed to be the task of every incarnation.  We must look at ego, attachment, attraction, aversion, craving, desire and fulfillment--to bring it into the light of conscious awareness, to work with the Spirit within as Christ recapitulates it.  We must see how and where we careen toward gluttony, greed, sloth, sorrow, lust, wrath, vanity and pride to avoid feelings of insecurity.  On the level of ego, learning to see this process, in ourselves, with compassion--it's key to extending compassion to others.  Psychologically, we have to make a habit of voluntary encountering what we're averse to with as much willingness as we encounter what we're attracted to with non-attachment.  Behaviorally, we have to interrupt loops of stimulus and response that reinforce compulsivity.

13. We learn, in particular, from the living paradox of the logos--the silent music to which the Trinity's inner life dances.  We are made in the image of the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God; and yet the vast majority of us are ignorant weaklings that can't be in two places at once.  We allow the world's brokenness to reduce ego, to break our hearts.  This happens alongside work for justice, when we're working at something we can change, but in lieu of work for justice when something we can't change is working on us.  Therefore, it's said "broken-heartedness is the bride of the logos."  We try to lift, not just our corner of systemic evil, but a little more besides--we know, you see, that our actions have echoes, consequences that reach beyond our own sphere of influence.  We try to do more than we should, while avoiding the feeling that it's all up to us.  Students should become like the teacher, but self-care is important: and long-haul self-emptying is a marathon, not a race.

14.  We believe that, in terms of "becoming" and the "end times," all is as it needs to be, right here, right now.  Inequities, injustices, sins, attachments--these all exist so that we can give up self and train in the Way.  We learn self-care and self renunciation simultaneously, but giving up self is the end.  Other people have changed: they're simultaneously mirrors of ourselves, and so vastly different from us that attentive compromise is indispensable--but ultimately all consciousness is One. Therefore, we don't really see a difference between resurrection and reincarnation--if resurrection is true, we're dying and being reborn, simultaneously and always.  If reincarnation is true, we are living all our incarnations at once.  The transmigration of souls, the pre-existence of souls, the myriad Church councils that have conjectured about them--these are highly important, but only on the level of dualism. We're unequal to those kind of intellectual questions, and will leave them to the theologians.  And anyway, dualism is meant to yield to oneness: not at the end of the age, but in this moment; not when we become who we're meant to be, but even today, as we work to properly accept and share Christ's work of recapitulating who we are.

VIII. The Four Gospel Seals

For Jesus, the passion wasn't metaphor or allegory.  It was reality.  Ever after, we who follow Jesus can't enter his passion without entering into reality. Therefore, look at what's in front of you.  It could be a coffee table, the clock on the wall, the crumbs on the kitchen counter, a stranger in a cafe--whatever you're currently seeing with your own eyes.  Everything you're about to read can be experienced there.

We students of the Logos, who walk the way of Christian tantra with Jesus as our exemplar, do not experience the gospel as happening in the past, to someone else.  It is happening now, to us.  We are like blind men who experience the touch of Jesus twice.  First, we can see people, but they look like trees.  Later, when we see things as they are, the teaching makes itself plain.  We call it the "Four Gospel Seals" and to us, these are the teachings with which all Christian Teaching must agree. [bxA]

In order to hear the crowds, first shouting hosanna, then calling for crucifixion, we need look no further than our choices and preferences.  When we look intently, we see impermanence.  Jesus' teaching conveyed it, and so did his life: Jesus compared the grandeur of the tiniest lily to Solomon--to remind us of our dignity, but then tells us it's "alive today and tomorrow [it is] thrown into the oven."  Even Jesus, glorified in the Trinity till the end of the age, will hand all things over to the Father, and God will be all, and in all.  It's not only from all creation, but from the very life of Christ himself that "you, too, are impermanent" is a message we hear, clear as cathedral bells.

In order to find the veil that was torn in the temple, we need look no further than our own ego.  When we look intently, we see non-self.  Jesus said "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me."  Interiorly, we are always including and transcending parts of ourselves that we've repressed.  We face it because we don't want to pretend our egotism hasn't, by turns, protected us and caused a great deal of harm to others.  By "transcending," we mean we're conscious of the need to gently elevate the energy we're working with.  Faced-insecurity becomes blame we chose to forego, blame becomes a radical taking responsibility.  This is what Christ did, and as we meditate on that we are swept up in different kinds of thought about our share in divine life.  Ultimately we become one with God's consciousness.  We look down at the workings of ego only after facing it and thanking it for bearing the burden of our sinfulness for us.

In order to find the garden of olives, we need look no further than our own unwillingness.  When we look intently, we find acceptance.  Every day, every minute, every transition we experience initiates us into a grieving process.  We grieve the loss of Jesus' historical body, and it makes us face our own bodily death.  That, in its turn, allows us to echo St. Paul: of our egos, we said "I died daily."  Grieving became, for us, a practice as daily necessary as prayer.  We familiarize ourselves with its stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  And we begin to allow them to happen.  When we experience anger, if we can figure out what, in particular, we are grieving, we do.  But we are not in the business of picking apart the process.  Our job is "limit setting and self care."  First, we decide where we will, and won't express our grief, and who we'll allow to see us at our most vulnerable.  Then, we exercise, we take walks and drink tea.  We make time to be in the woods.  We pay attention to the basic obligations of job and family and friendships.  We are not in charge of the process, it moves on its own. When we care for ourselves deeply, we become more skillful in helping others.

In order to find Christ's tomb, we need look no further than our dualistic minds.  When we look intently, we see interbeing.  Interbeing is an acknowledgement that everything is part of everything else, and each thing contains its opposite.  Dualism is part of manifestation, and not to be demonized.  In the Christian prayer teaching, vocal prayer and meditation should not be scorned when we're given the gift of contemplation.   However, in what's often referred to as the "the figure-ground reversal," those experiences of unity flip our perspective. Every death is a rebirth.  All of God's glory is given, according to the Teacher, "so that they may be one, as [the father and I] are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be completely one."  

Interbeing is akin, in many ways, to transubstantiation.  Jesus said "I am the gate for the sheep."  We don't believe he was speaking any less truly, nor any more metaphorically, than when he said "I am the bread of life." Interbeing is the capacity to see the interconnectedness of opposites.  Jesus was a sheep gate.  He is the doorway to all things being as they are, and all things being as they are, are Jesus.  

We could not have seen God's presence in all things if not for his presence in the sacraments.  And we could not have seen interbeing without transubstantiation.  The sacramental presence that required particular elements led to God's presence in everything, visible to those who give up self.  The change that happened regardless of the sins of the priest hinted at a perspective shift available to those who have faced their purgatorial predicament: the wheat is in the bread, the sunlight in the wheat, the energy in the light is both inside us and outside us. 

Many of us use the Four Gospel Seals as a filter for belief.  Permanence, self, denial and dualism, we know that, held too tightly, these all increase suffering exponentially.  Ego and all of its works are too much of an energy drain: they take a toll too subtle to notice, and too costly to afford.  Impermanence, non-self, acceptance and interbeing are the remedy and relief.  The teacher says "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens."  We pray to hear with the ear of our hearts, to take the yoke and learn.  We are all students, learning from one teacher.  Over everything, we've put on love; and when love is all that remains, it's the oneness that's his greatest lesson.

VII. The Two realms

Because our egos are wounded--as every ego is--our track record with giving up self was spotty.  The Teacher called us to forsake ego, and yet our woundedness made us go back to it like dogs to vomit.  There were benefits, on the one hand: this led us to the internalization of the Trinity, and a whole new way of working through the layers of the interior life.  On the other hand, dabbling with self was still clinging to something impermanent: it was still, ultimately, a source of suffering.

We were like Job, sitting with our own empty-handedness amidst a torrent of our own objections and a cacophony of well-meaning, but unhelpful advice. The undeserved nature of our suffering was as unchanging as the climate of loss it took place in.  And the press of its weight was unremitting.

Suffering requires self care.  If we were going to follow the teacher's advice and give up self, we needed a way to account for this dual responsibility of "self care and self renunciation."  Some catalyst was necessary, to re-infuse our hyperlogical existence with paradox.  As in a Koan, or on a Cross, something needed to suspend us between two opposites--so that the Spirit could well up within and do its work.  When we looked, we saw it had been there the whole time. [bxA]

The Church says words cannot fully describe the ineffable.  It says there is a perichoresis--an existence that the Trinity has "in and of itself."  The mystery of God, we decided, wasn't given enough credit for working in the world.  And the benevolent tension between mystery and revelation--the very paradox of the logos--this was not given its due as a creative force.

It's become a teaching, among us students of Rabbouni, that we are suspended, in the present moment, between mystery and revelation.  These two realms break the façade of permanence wide open.   As a framework, it has helped us recapitulate and reframe what we once saw negatively: anxiety became "creative tension." Sorrow became "grief." Desire became "vulnerable admission of need."  With apologies to Buddhism and the Heart Sutra, followers of the Logos say: first, mystery is revelation and revelation is mystery, then mystery is mystery, and revelation is revelation.  "Except," we said sheepishly "when mystery is revelation, and vice versa."

In the realm of mystery, ego has no authority.  Embrace of impermanence and the emptiness of all things, the lack of rules: attention and loving spontaneity are the universe's only mandates.  Our failures at virtue lay bare things we haven't yet even thought about: attachment, aversion, attraction, the thirst for being and nonbeing and satiation.  Cause and effect are interdependent, happening together yet separate as they arise.  Others do not cause us anger.  Solitude is as full of reasons for rage as community: and we have thoroughly failed to see what God knows is in our hearts.  It's a relational abyss in which the Almighty eventually speaks, collapsing all time into the now, rendering all potential realized, nestling our sense of place firmly wherever we "come to ourselves", and making all others simply mirrors of ourselves.

In the realm of revelation, ego renders our entire existence palliative care. When St. Paul admitted that he "died daily," he said it of every Christian.  We live carrying crosses.  In a climate of loss, we make Christ's passion our own: the only escape from causation is full submission to it.  In the realm of revelation, we're beset by finitude and limitation.  Others are a quite-real training in letting go of what we can't control.  Time is linear, and we wear out shoes traversing distances.  We learn from experience, build virtue, and see cause and effect as especially linked in the suffering our vices cause.  Ever increasing unity with Christ, it turns out, also entails being all the more nose-to-nose with our "purgatorial predicament:" the view of our sins, except this time our ego is fully engaged in self-care instead of denial. Our dead-time, when it comes, awaits the third day, and the rising it promises.

In any incarnation, we are like students taking two classes at once, developing two opposite skillsets. Besides waiting, we need to know when to let go and when to hold fast.  When we let go, we're dabble in the realm of mystery and employing the same skills addicts use when they admit they're powerless.  We're admitting that thought and maneuvering and trial only led to error--and we stop ourselves in advance.  We see paradox instead of contradiction: indeed every moment of living is also a dying.  When we hold fast, we play in the realm of revelation. Our empowerment grows hands and feet, sees gains in muscles that aren't just emotional.  We admit the accumulated pain of our past, and let it go.  Taking an active role in Christ's recapitulation, we face our wounds thoroughly enough, gradually learning to converse with the parts of ourself as a compassionate parent to a responsible child--no, further, as God the Father to a compassionate Divine Son. We don't do this willfully-- our encounter with the sensations of the body is a willing one, underneath which courses the energy of the Spirit. It ascends the spine like angels did Jacob's ladder. Rabbouni's students awake to find the "ground on which they're standing"--that is, the body itself--has been holy the whole time.

Here's where the learning curve is: we don't always know when it's time to let our wills rest, when it's time to put them to work. That takes years of sustained attention, years of breathing and listening at the expense of thought, years of recollection.  As the Pilgrim with his Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodox renown, we too "descend with the mind into the heart." The AA promise is fulfilled that says "we will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves." The miracle is this: the Son of Man's day is today, and the teacher is telling us " go and tell my students the kingdom of heaven is within them. There, they will see me."

Remember: theologians will argue about which side of the end-times paradox is is truer. "Yes, the kingdom is already here. But it's true as well that the kingdom is not yet here." For Rabbouni's students, all is realized. God's presence in the world is whole and entire and complete. When the Teacher said "it is finished," he meant it. The ego is the only veil left between us and the holy place, where God's name laces each breath. The veil will be rent, and the Spirit will dwell with us, turning our very spines simultaneously into a Via Dolorosa and a Ladder of Humility.

In the meantime, we will look upon him whom we have pierced. His face and ours are one. We are crucified with Christ, and we will spend time as both good and wicked thieves before we realize we have it in us to say "I thirst" and "forgive them, they know not what they do." When it comes from our mouth, we will indeed be talking about the mindless voices of our own psyche still desperate to be heard, cared for, protected.

When the veil of ego is torn, it is torn between mystery and revelation. When we're stretched to the breaking point, we're stretched between the unmanifest and the manifest. It's a paradox, not a contradiction: nothing is false except the parts of us that have yet to rest in emptiness. If seeds fall to the earth and die simply because the wind blows as it wills, how much more important must it be to attend to the Spirit in that place where death and rebirth are one? 

We are suspended, in this life, whether we like it or not: the question is, between which two poles do we hang, and with what disposition? We have given up, become willing: in scriptural terms, we have either withstood the loss of everything or learned that, in every moment, we stood to lose it. Like Job: between what we know and what's concealed from us, we were confronted by the fruitlessness of knowledge. With minds full of the wisdom figures of old, we opened our mouths to speak of despising our lives--but the Lord made us quiet and empty. "Your life," said the Logos "is itself your penance." We asked what the Lord would give as dust and ashes, and what he'd make our sackcloth. Almost too softly to hear, over and over, he said "Everything. Everywhere. Always." 

   

VI. The Theonoias

We're made in the image and likeness of God: seen healthily, our portrayals of God are a map of our own mind. God formed us from the dust of the earth, breathed the breath of life into our nostrils. We were asked to live on every word that came from the mouth of God, but instead we indulged desire. Our mind rehearses the steps constantly: the steps which, in light of sin, have hardened into ego. We were given every fruit bearing tree, now we hide behind its leaves. We remember naming the animals. Now--however inaccurately, in the end--we can't stop naming and labeling everything. We remember reaching for one who fit the hole in our side. One minute we said "this alone is flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bone;" and now we can't stop theorizing connections between things, accurate or not. God created us and called us good. We created desire and craving and sin, interacted with thought instead of reality, and whether we called our surroundings good or bad, we related to them by the sweat of our brow. [bxA]

The flaw we called "abstraction." It was an exercise in bypassing "things as they are" for the sake of what we wished them to be. No sooner had we labeled than we blamed. First we said "This one shall be called woman; out of her man this one was taken" and then, on its heels we pointed fingers: "the woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate." No one--not even the serpent--told us we were naked: that judgment was ours, and we covered ourselves with mental pictures of our own being, concealing ourselves as with sewn-together fig leaves. Desire and craving, fulfillment and ego played naming and labeling and theorizing on continuous loop. Blame and remorse, othering and exile were just the cost of our indulgence.

But we wondered, if we mapped out the flaw and retraced our steps--even if it meant carrying a cross--could we follow the way back to oneness? Could we find the still mind of Christ just by owning our missteps down the turns of our own? We'd been taught that a quiet mind was a gift from God--and this is true--but in our worse moments this kept us from claiming whatever quiet we, with humble and persistent work, could have laid hold of. Students of the Logos searched the traditions of the world, trying to find a method--as Ram Dass called it--of "using the mind to beat the mind." We worked at it, learned how to use the tool we were creating, and gave it a name. Borrowing a structure from Buddhism, we called it "the theonoias."

Like wattage in electricity, the Theonoias are units of mental force. In and of themselves, they are morally neutral--they can express either straying from or returning to oneness. The first theonoia is total mental rest. In the Christian Tradition, contemplation is a temporary experience of the first theonoia, and humility is the first theonoia carried into action. A mind at the first theonoia is the "mind of Christ" St. Paul described. To stay in this quiet state is to "remain in Jesus" as the Gospel of John referred to it. 

The second theonoia is naming and labelling: the mind divides the world into this and that. Everything has its own name, its own characteristics. An arm is not a fish, and neither are a sports arena full of people. Noting differences, judging and dividing the world--these become the constant work of an ego too unwilling to admit to its own vulnerability, much less sit with it patiently. 

The third theonoia is theorizing: the mind supposes connections between what it has just labelled. This is hard when we're not focusing on ourselves--it can lead to every manner of insecurity and egotistical angling--and it's hard when we, in fact, are focusing on ourselves--a few modest successes and our ego gets clingy again, this time narrating a string of spiritual successes to distract us from the emptiness within and without.

Here's the trick: the theonias are nothing but an expression of the flaw if we get caught in thinking they're permanent. We got ourselves into a terrible mess by failing to admit that the mind's compulsive workings aren't a problem and don't need care and attention. We had to learn the saying "sometimes, things that aren't your fault might still be your problem."

But, rooted in impermanence, with the right amount of letting go, the theonoias help us realize that our mind's grasping for control won't make our lives better. if we focus on the small things we're able to change and admit we're powerless over the things that make us anxious--then we can use the theonoias as a road map to the solution, following them backwards to mental quiet. Let's take a look at a scriptural example of how this works.

Once, while fleeing conflict, Elijah asked God to end his life. God directed him to self-care: "get up and eat." This moved the prophet's focus from threats he couldn't control to the self-care he could control. Elijah travelled to the mount of God and took shelter in a cave: there, the Lord spoke to him. God simply asked "what are you doing here, Elijah?" The prophet offered an explanation full of how zealous he'd been, how shocked he was at the life-threatening nature of the whole thing. Elijah was working with the third theonoia. He had to let go of his theories--about himself, and how the world worked. Then he had to get past some distractions. There was an earthquake, a strong wind and a fire--but Elijah intuited that "the Lord was not in" any of what he was experiencing. The Scripture mentions nothing but what the different phenomena were called. To the student of Rabbouni, this points to the second theonoia--the need to let go of names and labels. 

Only after letting go did Elijah hear the sound of sheer silence-and he covers his face and walks to the mouth of the cave, ready to meet God. For followers of the Logos, this is the first theonoia. It's rest in God, the mind of Christ, and the height of humility. In terms of practice, here's the the take-away: if we simply continue to ask "what is my mind doing here," --so long as we're grounded in impermanence--then we turn naturally away from what we're powerless over and toward self-care. We let go of theories, let go of labels, and eventually rest in silence.

Sometimes the help of grace is a call to work. Sometimes God appears absent in order to tease out a deeper hustle from his people. Sometimes all God does is lay the steps out in front of us till we wait in quiet. Then the scriptures ring in our own silent ears: you shall hear a voice behind you saying "this is the way, walk in it." And all creation will mirror the path back to us. Our eyes will, indeed, see our teacher. But his face will look like our own.

V. Where we're going

Being constantly nose-to-nose with human frailty and our own ingrained faults caused us suffering--even in the context of tantric practice. Leaving desires routinely unfulfilled was consistently disquieting--even with the expectation that the energy underneath them would shift, that it would get easier. Facing our vulnerabilities without egoic defense mechanisms was was absolutely painful--despite the fact that we saw the real-time work of the Spirit, giving us the resources to handle it. We were like the blind man, after the Teacher first touched his eyes: we could see people, but they looked like trees. We could see change, but it seemed a trading of one kind of suffering for another. [bxA]

But we were still caught up in seeing suffering with our egos instead of our eyes. We'd not yet learned to focus our attention and intention. We were not using our bodies to keep us grounded in what's real. We asked Jesus to touch the eyes of our hearts. He did not do, on our behalf, what we were unwilling to do for ourselves. In other words: he obliged--but that, in itself was an invitation to work.

We prayed, "I lift my eyes to the mountains, from where shall come my help?" Rabbouni told us to set our attention on place, but to disengage our wills. We sat, we waited. we watched. Slowly the question clarified. To have mountains on our mind was to be internally elsewhere. Inside ourselves, we corrected, and the words leapt up from the silence of our hearts "Here I am, O God." No sooner had the words been spoken than Hashem appeared within.

"How long O Lord?" we asked, "Will you forget me forever?" The Teacher told us to focus intention on time but to make no demands. We quieted, listened and prayed. To fill our minds with better or different times is to judge the one we're living in. In our hearts we heard the words "do not judge, or you will be judged." When we admitted the problem was ours, in this moment, God appeared.

We prayed "Why do the wicked prosper?" Jesus told us to focus on "selves" but to avoid blame. We took responsibility, shouldered our burdens, adjusted expectations. To cling internally to a self of our own making turns the whole world into an Other, keeps us morbidly focused on the big empty hole in our own chest. The Spirit whispered "This alone is flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone" and we saw, in the teacher's side, the marks of the lance. The wickedness was our own: others just mirrored it back to us. We donned the sackcloth and sat in ashes, and God was with us.

We said "What do people get for all the toil they work with under the sun? Their days are full of pain and their work is a vexation. Even at night their minds to not rest." Rabbouni told us to focus on opposites without withdrawing willingness. We saw our own feelings of attraction and aversion: that we withheld our willingness when life got difficult, only to see our resentments multiply. As soon as we admitted our impairment, the still, small voice within said "why have you come here?" There were lessons in both pain and pleasure, we asked that life might not change until we learned them.

When the teacher disappeared from our sight, people kept saying "here he is" and we ran after him, "there he is" and we searched feverishly. The teacher told us to "pay attention to direction" but to leave no stone unturned. We searched the ten directions, only to find him absent each time. The sadness we felt disclosed the one place we had not looked. In overturning the stone of our heart, and in facing ourselves, we found the Teacher.

To the Father, we prayed "Your kingdom come, your will be done." Rabbouni told us to pay attention to potential without spiritualizing the journey to become ourselves. For the teacher, the height of self-renunciation was not the garden, but the cross; not "your will be done" when God seems present but "into your hands I commend my spirit" when psychologically the Teacher was asking "why have you forsaken me?" When we see reality with vision unobstructed by ego, we simply stop asking whether it's God or "things as they are" that we're looking at. Using the Spirit's energy to just "be" strikes us as far more important than using it to separate reality into "this and that".

In the end, searching the heavens for divinity becomes futile, given our great need to follow the Spirit within. We are never anywhere but here, and there is no time other than now. Learning to be compassionate towards ourselves changed how we saw others. It transformed what, of ourselves, others mirrored back to us. We are all a collection of legitimate needs and this incarnation crucifies us amidst both willful desire and willing cooperation with providence. We lose track of ourselves somewhere between ego and the boundless consciousness of the divine within, but only if we're lucky: and only, ever, as the Spirit leads.

Tantra is just this: prayer, practice, and purification--a training of the mind, body and soul in conscious pursuit of paraclete's vagabond meanderings. In the sins and the graces of generations, God sees our own purgatorial predicament--he will not leave us before it becomes a sword to pierce our own souls, too. The prayer "if you are willing, you can make me clean" turns to dust in our mouths awaiting the Teacher's answer.  You have heard it said "no one can say 'Jesus is Lord' except in the Spirit." What's true of speaking applies to deep silence as well. Amen, we say to you: not a word falls from our mouths unless God knows it, and not a single urge goes calm unless by the Spirit's promptings. The Triune God sees it all together: the whole time, our own denial was the only source of suffering. Even suffering transforms when we look deeply at it.  If the task of today were to see the world with our eyes instead of our egos, would we be willing? Only when Rabbouni's words "I am willing" come spontaneously to our own lips: only then will we be completely clean.

II. The Solution

To the general sadness we all felt, we students of Christian Tantra arrived at a solution.  It lay in intuiting the Spirit, in following its promptings, in not bucking our impermanence.  Tantra uses taboos and shadow work, the very stuff other religious visions distance themselves from, to "dig underneath" patterns of sin.  Without simply reacting to our brokenness--although, insofar as we are all learning, we do plenty of that--we began to ask why a part of us didn't wish to be fixed.  Looking deeply, we saw ego, craving, attraction and aversion, all for the impediments to serenity that they were. We began to mine the scriptures, building a toolkit to deal with them. [bxA]

We tackled the curriculum of wisdom: life and death, sin and suffering, getting basic needs met.   We eliminated all efforts to force the hand of providence.  We made ourselves open--not only to good guidance from all religious traditions, but to the judgement of our own and others' worst egoic natures.  Being crucified with Christ, we found, surfaces our own and others' toxicity--bearing witness to this was simply part of the game.  Still, we admitted that, for all the advice in the world and despite the sting of judgment, we remained the only ones who could make decisions for ourselves.  We begged for the help of grace, and worked compassionately with the part of us that assumed God's grace was absent.

We diagnosed and began to treat our sense of permanence.  The desire to be good led to neurotic avoidance of what was bad, and it whittled our range of acceptable actions down way too far.  Both neurosis and the false narrative of ego fueled less and less positive change, and our lives became unmanageably bleak.  In truth, all flesh is like the grass and all will be thrown down in the end: thinking otherwise took subtle, ongoing effort that we could scarce afford.  In many ways, admitting we thought ourselves permanent--and finally acknowledging it was a problem--this was like waking up in a prison.  We sought to increase our range of options within it.  Sometimes, we took an example from the patriarch Joseph, who learned to run the jail he was unjustly held in.  Other times, we empathized with the good thief, crucified next to Jesus, who took responsibility for his faults and declared the Lord innocent.    We hoped for a day when, like the apostles, we would set our minds to hymn singing only to have our chains fall off, and the locked doors of our cells swing open.  Increasingly, we began to intuit that the doors never had locks in the first place--and indeed that there had never been a prison.  

Ultimately we discovered that reality itself was the Body of Christ--this meant that all manifest phenomena were composite--reducible to smaller chunks when we couldn't get a handle on the whole.  Practically, after coming clean about the limits of our own worldview, we were expanding the repertoire of dance moves with which we spun through the cosmic ballet.  If our days seemed an unending march of monotony, we lived in the present moment alone.  If we could not rouse ourselves to self improvement even by fear of hell, we sat in moral quandaries and learned what was holding us back.  Gradually we confronted our fears, deep desires and attachments: one by one and whenever the Logos and the Spirit colluded to teach us.  These were hard lessons.  When we could pull it off, we would provide ourselves with the help we were seeking, and when we discovered the limits to our strength we would search for empathetic community.    

As old patterns continued to crop up, we didn't deny them; as our practiced deepened, we spent less and less time paralyzed by them.  We learned to treat our defense mechanisms with humor--a task that got easier as we found empathetic community.  We thanked our defense mechanisms for keeping us safe, even reverenced them.  Ultimately, like the disciple who shed his garment to flee at the mount of olives, we had to let them go.  Practitioners more deeply steeped in buddhism would talk about "cutting the cord of the mind"--and although we know the timing has to be right to avoid denial, it was a practice we engaged in too seldom.  Meanwhile, we pay close attention to the words of Jesus: "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as the branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near."  The Son of Man is rising within us at an unexpected hour: were we under threat, we would be constantly vigilant. We wished, at least, to be as watchful for the Lord as we were for the next catastrophe.

We realized we were looking everywhere except ourselves for divinity.  We asked the Teacher to live inside of us, so we could learn to live as he lived.  First, we began to imitate his actions--just for the sake of experimentation.  In one way or another, we fed the hungry, clothed the naked, sheltered the homeless and buried the dead.   When we needed to recharge, we experimented with prayer methods: all manner of mantras, prayers recited on beads,  and contemplative sitting. Simply giving sustained attention to prayer clued us in to the fact that we could do a great deal more to look at our own experiences directly.  Next, we asked the Triune God to share in each of the physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of "being ourselves."  We began to pay more attention to the messages our body was sending us.  What situations were inducing a hyper-vigilant trauma response?  We worked on boundaries, and limited our exposure to those scenarios.  Where were we feeling stored tension?  We brought awareness to the place the tension was stuck, and often, it relaxed.  We asked the Teacher to guide us through the revelation of our own embodied existence.  Eventually, we began to pick up on subtle differences in sensation we never previously had the patience to notice.  We learned to live with our bodies from the inside-out, not the outside-in.  At that point, as at the Ascension, the Lord disappeared from our sight.  What Ram Dass experienced with his teacher Maharaj-ji, we experienced with Christ--the Teacher disappeared, in both cases, because as Ram Dass said, "he had gone inside."

We began to do for ourselves what we had hoped God would do for us.  We, who felt such poverty and who wanted God's attention were either paying attention to other people's situation at the expense of our own, or we were unable to look squarely at ourselves.  We decided to invite the Triune God into absolutely every aspect of our physical and psychological being.  We experimented with showing ourselves the compassion that the Teacher showed the marginalized.  We sought out our own darkness and sat with it until it became familiar and serene instead of fearful.  We observed the working of the ego with empathy, waiting for the Spirit to well up within so that returning to the Father would be a genuine move.  And we waited to settle into the stillpoint, to be stretched on the Cross between attention, sensation, presence and responsibility.  This taught us discernment: it gave us the wisdom to distinguish what we could change from what we could not.  It taught us the difference between insight--which was mostly theory--and obedience--which was love, enacted at thought's expense.  When we hit snags, we were usually caught in our heads without realizing it.  We self-adjusted with increasing ease and speed.  As we took more responsibility, what we asked of God--we saw this had, indeed, changed drastically.

We decided that life didn't need to be fair or logical for us to live it.  After the scandal of the Cross scattered our egos, we began to come to conclusions by realization rather than reason.  By leaving logical tensions unresolved, we were awakening to intuition, paying better attention to our emotional lives, praying from our guts.  As to whether all creation groaned, we were uncertain; what we knew for sure is that deep parts of ourselves were crying out, and it was our job to listen.  As we did this more consciously, answers began to occur to us spontaneously, whenever the Spirit wished them to.  We learned to wait for this, and learned, along the way, to let go of all of the clinging that made the Spirit's timing hard to accept.  We began to approach all phenomena, pleasant or unpleasant, as a means of letting go of self.  Gradually we discovered that our overdependence on logic and fairness had been a subtle bid for control all along.  Control yields anxiety--albeit on a level too subtle for the ego to perceive-- and we wanted to be less anxious.

Where our attention was, there our energy would move also.  We found that tension in different parts of our bodies belied real neglect, but that shifting awareness could improve our prospects for feeling. Acknowledging stored tension might occasion a bit of discomfort, but eventually the discomfort would resolve, to the increase of our calm.  This kind of "body work" had good emotional consequences.  Feeling tightness in the hips, we faced the root chakra's insecurity issues.  It made us less paranoid and reactive, and eventually, we were less physically tense.  Becoming aware of tension in the upper abdomen, we had to deal with how to advocate gently and prudently for  ourselves and others.  As we figured out how to do that, our physical tension decreased.

Though shedding ego was an option, we also saw that we needed to wear an ego just to function in society while we cultivated skills of self-protection.  The Teacher died violently on the Cross, and it centralized our own deaths.  We decided that a certain amount of anger, sadness, depression, bargaining were acceptable and normal--these were all part of a life whose centerpiece was letting go.  And a certain amount of egotistical hypervigilance and impulsiveness were a predictable response to a world with no respect for personal boundaries or the common good. We decided to treat egotism like the terminal illness it was. We exercised, meditated, took hot baths and drank tea as a way of pausing to check in with ourselves.  We treated all manner of physical, mental and spiritual discomfort as cancer patients do when the drugs have stopped working: to wit, we so deeply entered into them that they transformed.  Grief, for us, became as important a discipline as prayer.

Over time, though nothing had changed about how the world works, we, ourselves had changed, and that paid dividends in serenity. Though nothing had changed about desire, we changed whether and how we acted on it, and it allowed us to greet all things magnanimously, then let them go. Though nothing had changed about craving, we no longer wanted the consequences of pursuing our cravings, and it increased our ability to focus. At first blush, it was not the solution we wanted: we would have preferred a solution that kept us in a position of strength. When the Spirit and the Logos collude, we are crucified with the teacher. We are facing facing our fears and being vulnerable because the Teacher did it first, because he is doing it inside of us at this very moment: and that is, we realize, a kind of strength. We work it because it works on us. We say it now because, in union with the spirit, all tongues will eventually be silent: "When I am not two with the three in one within, I am not one."

I. The Problem

We followers of the Logos felt it important, after a great deal of thinking, to describe what impelled us to become disciples of the Word.  But let us, immediately and for a moment, work with the medicine of clarity: we have no wish to set anything in stone.  What Aquinas found at the pinnacle of revelation, we proclaim at the start of our search.  All we have written is straw.  From what little we've practiced, we know impermanence as one of the deep truths the Logos has used our silences to reveal.  To us--in a way we'll explain, by and by-- it's important not to get too hung up on beliefs and believers, teachers or teachings.  We are disciples of one who "was destined for the rise and fall of many...so that the secret thoughts of many will be revealed."  Before the end, everything dies, descends, resurrects, ascends and and goes within.  Our job is to go to our rooms, shut the door, pray in ways we can't speak about, and follow. [bxA]

Living with our own hearts, we found, was unbearable. Something was off, weirdly and genuinely amiss, that none of us could adequately name.  To differing degrees, we were tortured souls, ill-at-ease in our own skin.  We searched endlessly for the language to label the problem, for the words and the skills that form a solution.  It's dismissive to call what we felt "ennui"--because we weren't just bored.  It's incomplete to use psychology's term "dysthymia," because "long term, low grade depression" didn't address the ways "divine intelligences" were, in fact, involved.  Religion's tendency to boil problems down to moral failures--resolvable by "trusting God more"--this had failed a great many before us, and was no more effective in our case.  Still, some of us spent years praying, asking the advice of our priests.  We find it still valuable, but for different reasons.  We spent years talking to psychologists--and perhaps we were eventually told "you seem better" (the only problem being that we didn't feel better.)  Some of us allowed psychiatrists to label our problems and treat them with drugs, only to find neither labels nor drugs to be a complete and magical remedy.  Others sat in self-help groups, only to find that they fell short as both a solution and a source of community.

Even some of the good advice of the age failed us.  It's said that after Zen master Joshu's first experience of an empty mind--his brief glimpse of the epitome of buddha mind--he "felt utterly ruined and homeless."  We weren't sure we wanted the transformation the Logos had to offer, but we had to admit we were in the midst of experiences from which one does not return unchanged.  Even as we realized there were aspects of the search for depth we could easily do without, we saw as well that bells were ringing that could not be un-rung.  All of it we find frustratingly limited, yet for different reasons, still valuable.  We supposed it was all in the nature of wisdom, as it transitioned from a precept to a tool for transformation.  None of the advice of medicine or religion, and none of the proverbial self-help guidance can be wholly discarded, but neither does it seem fully to fit.    

The great minds of our time have given short, sage advice.  "Find the others," they said.  All of the flailing around paid dividends.  We mined happenstance for empathetic community.  Poets warned us "nobodies" to keep it under our hat.  They warned us of banishment.  Jokes on them, we thought, we already feel exiled.  We might as well huddle together for warmth. And as soon as there were two of us, we began to find words for the problem.

Quite basically, we felt trapped by our situation. The Wisdom of Solomon talks about fear being a "giving up of the helps that come from reason" and then it speaks about being "locked up in a prison not made of iron."  While we've evolved a slightly more modern way to describe the problem--which utilizes modern psychology and the wisdom of all the world religions--the end result is the same.  Our feeling of confinement and isolation is in perpetual need of address.

We had problems embracing basic reality. The Gospel of Matthew says "we played the flute for you, and you did not dance, we sang a dirge and you did not mourn." We spent time feeling numb, lacking empathy so severely it was disturbing even to ourselves.  We were having all of the wrong responses to basic human situations.

By Christianity we felt, for lack of a better word, conned.  We experienced problems with Christian truth--places it became illogical--and it felt disingenuous to pretend the heaping piles of platitudes typically thrown at  contradiction were either helpful emotionally, or productive of faith.  We were told that we were made in God's image, and we did not experience ourselves that way.  We were told that God was omnipotent, even as we were confronted with our own unresolved and unresolvable suffering.  We were told that God was omnipresent, and yet we persistently faced the feeling of being divinely abandoned.  Well meaning religious people told us God was omniscient, and we admitted, with frustration, that our knowledge was limited.  There seemed to be something lacking in the God language--and we longed for better, more helpful words.  Nobody knew what that looked like.

We had a sneaking suspicion that we, ourselves, were part of the problem--but we knew the limited help that self-flagellation had been in the past.  We wanted to handle personal responsibility with a more careful eye toward all that's constructive and gentle.

Anxiety--by which we'd been absolutely tormented from the start--slowly became the most precise of indicators.  It accompanied certain thoughts, and was absent from others.  It was attached to certain feelings, but not others.  It emerged when we behaved in certain ways, when we were in certain situations.  As our thirst for serenity grew, our dispositions and behavior began to change, all at the increasingly gentle corralling of anxiety.  As scripture says "though the Lord may give you the bread of affliction and the water of adversity, yet your teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your teacher."  Knowing that the kingdom was within, we focused on the anxious tension at the center of our chests.  "Or when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left," holy writ continues, "your ears shall hear a word behind you saying 'this is the way, walk in it.'"

Our problem dealt with divine intelligences--ones we trusted and ones we were hesitant about.  But we couldn't force the universe to provide a solution.  Our problem wasn't resolvable by "working harder to believe" or "wanting to get better"--it didn't respond to outright manipulation or more subtle game playing.  We had to find a way to deal with an intelligent and unseen source, but not on the basis of effort or desire.  This only brought to the surface our lack of trust, and the pervasiveness of our willfulness.

Silly as it seems, we had a problem with time.  We found ourselves clinging to past emotions, or rehearsing future, theoretical interactions.  Time went slowly when we wanted it to move fast, and fast when we wanted it to slow down.  Our days were filled with blame, resentment, rationalization and compulsion.  It was exhausting.  What's worse, we saw that weariness as increasingly self-imposed.  Vanity of vanities, we thought.  All is vanity.  In the now, we needed the resources for serene personal responsibility.  Too many years had already passed without our seeking them.

Our predicament was one of communication and skillfulness.  We were feeling called to change our relationship with resources the world took for granted.  We were impelled to think, but not compulsively--then explain our solution to those who couldn't empathize with the problem.  We had to work, but not willfully, and to lose none of the effectiveness and focus of those whose fuel is force.  We groped for a way to begin, even as we intuited that something needed to end.  This too was vanity, and a chasing after the wind.

And the problems grew only more complex from there.  We learned we could bypass problems by crawling up into our minds. In crudest form, this creates the self, at its most flowery this "spiritual bypassing" uses religion to end-run around trauma.  All such forms of abstraction, having shielded us from life's harshness once, became a problem so habitual we effectively denied it for years. But we cannot call good evil and evil good: we had to find a way to deal with the reach of sin.  No one acts, desires, craves just for themselves.  Only by facing our own flaws with honesty could we hope to correct the myriad social sins with which people as a whole were burdened.  It was heavy work.  But for reasons we will address, having seen the depths of human error, we could no longer do otherwise. 

Particularly for those of us who play at spiritual games, there was another pitfall.  We may have come at spirituality and made radical changes in our lives.  Many of us had given up all of our possessions and multiple chunks of our lives.  In and of it self, this was humbling, but worse yet was the fact that selfishness was not done with us.  Perhaps we were gifted, along the way with great spiritual experiences.  Each of us, to a degree, fell for the trap of thinking those revelations made us better than others.  It was a malady common to all religions, called "Spiritual Materialism"--to use the the term coined by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The term was Trungpa's; the flaw was ours.  Indeed, he had spoken universal truth.

Slowly, and before we had seen the problem at its very bottom, we began to understand it.  Religion said "be faithful," psychology said "be happy," psychiatry said "be healthy" and self-help said "be serene"--but efforts to be any of these things always fell short in the long-term.  We could not "be" anything in particular when our acceptance of being itself was deficient.

The day of the Lord, it's said, isn't to be sought after.  When it happens, it'll be like lightning, from one end of the sky to the other.  The day of salvation, the acceptable time that St. Paul talked about, is vanity if it's too full of striving.  When the thirst for the past and the future falls off, as he says, "now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation."  For our part, we began, slowly, to experience brief intervals of "being in the now".  They were accompanied by "Aha moments," realizations that began to change the game.  Anxiety became a positive thing, when suddenly we realized it was actually "creative tension."  We had to learn to "just be" and to interact with ourselves, the world, and God more skillfully. We could be "in the now" more often if we gave up our mental efforts to control emotions, situations and people.  Not only did we begin to relax, we began to arrive at conclusions differently.  It was a beginning of the heartfelt descent from intellect to intuition.  Regarding realizations and intuition, serenity fled our attempts to describe or analyze it, even as we became more confident that examination was unneeded--wisdom, it seems, is part of the toolkit available to those who focus on the moment, and listen without agenda.

And then, like lightning, the problem appeared: Ego.  Reality and God, others and ourselves, they're whole and entire and sufficient: the brokenness and broken-heartedness with which all creation groaned  forced us to admit that ego was coloring our view.  We readily admitted that we were powerless over self, that our lives had become unmanageable.  We have only just begun to understand the prattling dishonesty of our own wagging tongues, the silence of all things when we shoulder the Cross. We long for the empty stillness filling the teacher's sacred heart, bouncing off the walls of the holy of holies.

We are students of the Logos; radical recollection is the door that opens within us.  When our mouths were silent, the tension in our own chests cried out.  Along with a great deal of unfaced trauma, we heard the silence of our being preach the scriptures.  This moment is heaven and earth and a hell of our own making all at once.  But we do not bear that purgatorial predicament alone. We live and move and have our being in the Spirit who ascends our own backbones.  We have been thieves, mobs, weeping mothers and adopted sons.  We gave our backs to those who beat us, looked, and saw our own faces.  For our many sins we were lifted up.  For the healing, we remain. 

 

Letter to a Kind Mirror

To Hanuman Dass, my guru brother,

Bhrataji--in order to "keep the game straight on every level" (as Ram Dass says)--I must ask you to consent to being my echo chamber again. Our conversation last time we met has made me think a great deal...and I'd like to bring some of what we talked about into the light of the logos: to clarify some terms, and to make sure I'm dodging the curriculum of this particular moment in as few places as possible. [bxA]

I've asked for the grace many times: not just to know and live out of a deep meditation on Jesus' words and actions, but to share whatever inward realities led Jesus to speak and act as he did.  In other words, I want to share in Jesus' silences and his motivations as much as his words and actions.  In the eyes of most pundits, this desire makes me commit all of the heinous intellectual crimes: I'm psychologizing the gospel, I'm being isogetical, I'm stealing bits from other traditions, then applying them in ways that are completely ignorant of how devotees really use them.  You know I'm not necessarily proud of this.  But sometimes, a bloke's just gotta throw the spaghetti at the wall, and see what sticks.  To over-extend a metaphor: everything that does stick, I'm making a meal of.  Because, well, I'm in the householder phase, I'm TOTALLY unprepared for it internally, and I've got to come to some workable terms with it fairly fast.

This is new, and I can't vouch for its accuracy, but for starters: I've an intuition that, when the engine of my emotional life functions well, my obligations are not to others.  What really compromises my serenity is "not using the energy I've been given skillfully."  Being an overt and intentionally malicious sonovabitch to others is, for both you and me, a problem we largely hashed through in previous stages of this life.  Perhaps you can empathize--but the things I think and do are mostly well intentioned, good and fair--and yet they still manage to piss off those around me.  This is either because I'm not aware of my own motivations, or because others have sensitivities, and I could have stepped more carefully around them.  To carry proactive self-knowledge and empathy into all my interactions, it seems, isn't important because "then the people around me will think I'm a real groove"--it's important because it's a skillful use of my spiritual energies that makes me feel less depleted.  And increasingly, I need that energy to really count, because I work with an energy deficit daily.  To misuse my naturally occurring energy, then complain about being overwhelmed--this is the definition of self-sabotage. 

If I'm beginning to come to real answers, they always start with presence.  Zen talks about koans as "hot coals stuck in our throats, that we can neither swallow, nor spit out."  If I'm going to be intelligent about using my own energies, I have to be present, and I have to anticipate challenges to that presence.  At some point, becoming better at bearing things has to become a more important goal than all that distracts from that effort.  I usually mentally flee tensions.  It's understandable, they're tough to deal with.  But if I'm going to make progress, I have to focus attention and intention wherever the conflict is--it could be, at first, any situation in my work or home life; but it will always, eventually, be something I'm feeling in my body.  It is easier to blame others than it is to face the tension.  To riff off of Jordan Peterson, all choices are hard.  It's hard to bear tension quietly and it's hard to blame others.  But to paraphrase him further, I need to "pick my damn sacrifice, then shoulder it."  (Let all who have ears shut the fuck up, use them, and hear what highly educated Canadian carnivores say to the churches.)  I know that bearing tension quietly is what I'm called to. It's just bloody hard, and I suck at it.  

Sections of chronological time, like entheogens, are going to show me things that are bigger than I am, and setting a wide intention that helps me incorporate it all is important.  I think you were right, Bhratajii, when you suggested that Jesus took a nazarite vow before the crucifixion.  It's fun to use his "not drinking wine" as proof of that, but more importantly, it explains why he was silent before Pilate: he was doing the hard work of "choosing his burden, then shutting up and bearing it."   Fr. M. Louis said something like "sometimes the only proper response to suffering is silence and the sacraments."  Most people talk about real presence like it's an attic window that's painted shut--the stuffiness of it begs for correction.  To put an applicable spin on it, anywhere facing your life's problems is a full use of attention and intention that's grounded in sensation, that's real presence.  It broadens "sacraments" into "sacramental living" in a way that'd fry pundits brains.  But I'm probably a source of scandal to others on a regular basis anyway, so why not give "bowing into it" an honest whirl? 

Every day, the quantity of blame and resentment and remorse and shame I feel puts me through my paces.  But remember: at my best, I'm trying to deal with those to learn serene ways of venting energy, not to gain others' approval.  When I feel insecurity (as at the first chakra), lust (as at the second), and the impulse to blame (as at the third chakra), the others are a distraction.  The real question is: can I treat my own insecurity as a kind Father would, can I utilize the tense energy at the second chakra for creativity, and when I experience feelings of blame, can I rouse a bit of good, old fashioned might  in the service of detachment and say "this is ok, it's just what happens when the energy is in the third chakra--it's just my third-chakra karma running off."  The curriculum of the first three chakras is still making itself clear to me, but I think these are some of its learning goals.

The skillset that the lower chakras are trying to form in me, I still don't have a good grasp of that, either.  Zen talks about "letting go, and holding fast." Though they certainly didn't mean it this way, my ego is a terrifically sensitive thing to have to do palliative care for.  Part of my work is holding fast to egoic boundaries, so that the ego can feel safe in letting go.  It's the equivalent of "restricting visits to dying brothers" like I used to do in the infirmary, but doing it for myself.  Another way to think about it is to hold fast to what you can change, while you let go of what you can't.  I struggle to keep my attention and intention focused on my incarnation's basic insecurity, I fumble around with holding tensions consciously till answers appear, and I find mustering basic might in healthy directions difficult--but this is a great deal of what I've got to do to "pass the course."  It's "turning insights into usable skills, then using them in defense of emotional self-regulation," and I think it's a hump we all have to get over if hoarding our spiritual cash isn't gonna turn our third eye chakra into a miserly old bastard.  Take it from one who's had lots of thoughts about how he might be God: the energy of the upper chakras either gets used to shore up the insecurity of the lower chakras or it becomes narcissistic.   

Do you remember when Ram Dass talked about the "guts way reincarnation made sense to him?"  This "guts way" of knowing is important to me right now.  I think that "praying with my guts" is a skill I need to spend some time on.  Beyond just the need to hold up my corner of the way "all creation groans," praying with my guts means bringing attention and intention and speech in the direction of what's really important.  When I say "I want learning to shoulder tension to be more important to me than blame," that statement really comes out of my guts, at the expense of blame's more comforting tidbits--and I'm trying, in a broad way that includes a bunch of fucking up, to limit what I say to those types of things. 

At some point, do a youtube search for "Katsu shout Zen."  A Katsu shout is a yell, given by a master, to induce presence or enlightenment in the disciple.  They're deep, guttural, and truly terrifying.  I also think a great deal about Ram Dass' accounts of Shabd Yoga--the way "the bodily location where you felt the sensation" of your mantra would dictate its effects.  When I was teaching in South Chicago, my long commute was a chance for a lot of Om practice.  There were times when I felt the mantra deep at the base of my abdomen, times when I felt it in my throat.  That practice taught me that some very basic flexing of the muscles at the base of the abdomen can diminish blame emotions and the feeling of being trapped, if done consistently and with enough attention and intention.  I learned the lesson, then used the ensuing years to quickly forget it all.

Koans terminate in the reality of things, here and now.  If "What were Jesus' silences like" is a Koan, then a great deal of his silences had to do with rousing his power in the direction of bearing the reality of his predicament.  I don't know for certain, but I think that when Jesus was silent before Pilate, he didn't feel the tension in the throat.  I'm sure he had a bunch of stuff he could say to adequately defend himself.  When I feel I'm right, I never lack the words to explain why.  I think Jesus was flexing the base of his abdomen, trying to prepare for what "bearing the cross undeservedly" would require of him.  I'm saying that because "doing the inner work that makes outer work manageable"--and doing it in a climate  of at least "mindful speech" if not silence--this is the direction my life has taken over the last two years, and it's the trajectory I expect to continue.  Until, at least, I learn the lesson.

There's something more.  We can't ignore the quantity of our inner flailing about that DOES bounce off others in unhealthy ways.  Inside a devotee, God's spirit never climbs the bottom rungs of Jacob's ladder without putting his shoe in the faces of a few undeserving people beneath him.  As the energy climbs into the heart chakra, we might have sincere thoughts about how broken we are, how rough other people have it, how inextricably tangled the knots are that we've tied our innards into.  We might have sincere regret for all the blaming we did, all of the energy we spent being defensive and selectively forgetting other's good intention as well as our faults.  This is the realm of broken-heartedness, the kind of wounds that really open a bloke to compassion.  It's pain, and there's a sweetness to it.  

I think the point of the heart chakra's sweetness is this.  It makes praying to and with the rat-bastards who wronged you slightly enjoyable. (Don't pray for them, that's to condescending.  Just take your position as a fellow ne'er-do-well, and let their ratty bastardness be the whirlwind you ante up to till your objections run out and God speaks.)  The Big Book talks about "needing to rework the steps around my home life." For you and I, that might look like saying "I am powerless over ego, and my inner life has made my relationships unmanageable."  When I've been a mean fuck to my fiancee, I just use all the disciplines of guru kripa with her as my object. The fact is, we have to forget our romantic partners have the same good intentions, the same blinders on as we do, in order to make blame stick. To the extent that I can work with the medicine of slow, deliberate gentleness, I sit with her selfishness until it becomes indistinguishable from my own. I assume her good intentions until I remember my own, I sit with the agony of our "two-ness" until it yields to unity. I assume her good intentions until I remember my own, I sit with the agony of our "two-ness" until it yields to unity. And it will, because it does. Adam and Eve's marital spats were just a process of throwing the apple in the air, to remember what empty hands felt like.  Eventually, it falls to the ground, and we, their ancestors, forget that picking it back up is a choice.  It's like a cosmic game of catch between amnesiacs. I'm trying to console myself, to remind myself that it takes lifetimes of playing catch before we catch ourselves doing it, and start doing it consciously.  

I want to close with one more thing.  Any buddhist worth his salt would say "it's all mind."  And part of the "mind game" is learning when to cut the thread of thought.  Years ago, in response to similar concepts in Zen, I started thinking about what "wielding the sword of solomon" would look like.  In other words, how could I cut through my attachment to my own bullshit, so as to let go of it faster?  I held that in my intention for a good while, until one day, I was diddling my inner monologue--and enjoying all the feelings of righteousness it gave me.  The point is, I saw all those cravings and attachments and thought processes working.  I felt the surge of desire.  And a short sentence came hurtling up from the depths.  It was "I can't handle this kind of thought.  It doesn't make anything better."  I said it the way I'd state a limit to another--to a selfish child or a carping spouse.  (I'm recalling the Carthusian who said "sometimes the best way to pray for your family is to forget about them.)  It was an insight about the fruitlessness of my thinking, that came with a diminishment of tensions.  But what I was being taught was that "non-attachment" is nothing more than remembering your track record.  If being right doesn't make things better, I said to myself, maybe I should make it a mantra: as a deployable skill, maybe what began as an insight will help me spend less time with my face buried in the rose scented garbage pile of my own self-righteousness.  That's a long way to say: I need to learn when to be gently stern with myself, as a gently insistent parent would be with a daughter.  

I don't know, bhrataji, maybe "listen here, miss ma'am, you've already watched cocomelon 5 times today, and you need to cut it out" is something you need to be saying to a part of yourself, too?  Is there a part of the parenting that's worth doing for yourself as well?  Tiny darshans of your own small one have been a part of teaching me: at the right times, and in the right ways, I certainly need a good bit of re-parenting.  If a day comes when I can get the balance right, between limit setting and letting go, I will consider myself successful.

Brother, I love you.  The deeper I look, the more I see that the game we're playing is shared-solitude.  As you become Christ, remember you're surrounded by thieves.  To dabble in the trite, I'll remind you that "Today, I will be with you in paradise."  Since we're stuck suspended next to each other, when later yields to now at the wedding banquet of the lamb, I promise to chew quietly.

Peace,

Josh

 

Dialogues with Mystery 13

Rabbouni was awake in a different way than all other teachers on the earth. His awakeness wasn't, in the first place, a freedom from desire, but an inhabiting of it--it was an acknowledgement that revelation, desire and ego take a toll.  It took  a toll on him.  And it is taking a toll on you, now, who are reading this.  Because you are the only person for which all of history could have been written.  And now is the only moment when the cost or the benefits of that teaching could possibly play out.  Night is coming, when no one can work, but to you, who are beginning to awaken: while it is day, sit down and look at this squarely. [bxA]

The hard part is that revelation is a task. It's true of God and it's true of you.  The minute "this" reveals itself, so does "that."  The minute "I" reveal myself, so do "you."  It's all done out of deep, passionate love...but that lays bare a system of obligations that will leave you tired, and needing rest, most of the time.  Don't blame others for this, it's just how dualism works.  But what the prophet said is true: "This is rest: give rest to the weary."  He said "this is repose" in the midst of burden-bearing and work.  Learning the interbeing of opposites is a deep cosmic purpose: it's part of how dualism's separateness begins to collapse.  "The time for every purpose under heaven" is always now--and it's your job to learn the lesson.   Rest happens amidst work, and work happens in rest.  If any of us shirk the heavy lifting or dodge the curriculum, who knows how long this game of chronological time will have to continue?

Everyone on earth likes to say "I am not that" to a huge swath of the human experience.  But HaShem asks this of you: who else could it be?  There are no others.  Upon finding yourself in a human experience, you can't ask to be given just the good parts of it.  God called you "good" and will be with you as you experience the shadow side of that--while you discover the cost of being "bad" as well. You can't leave the crumbs of the children's food for the dogs.  You are the child and the dog, you are the Master whose table it is and you are the even the crumbs from the feast.  None who wish to be good and righteous are allowed to duck the lessons of what's evil and cursed.  You are here to learn Jesus' lessons, and Satan's.  You are here to learn the lessons of good kings and wicked thieves.  You are here to eat cake. You are also here to die from glutting yourself on sickly low-flying quail in the wilderness.  And the God who has revealed himself as I AM will stick with you for as long as it takes.    

To the indulgence of every desire, there is a cost--incarnation is the medium in which that cost is paid.  When the serpent, said "Your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God," he was telling the truth. The unfortunate piece is that God's presence is a burden and sharing his being is a Cross to carry--neither of our first parents were ready for what relating to a revealed God, let alone becoming divinized, would cost them.  Whatever eating the fruit cost Adam and Eve, the Serpent knew that experience was the hidden benefit.  He was quiet about it out of respect for hardship.  Appropriating experience involves the transformation of suffering, and the serpent knew he could not do that on Adam and Eve's behalf.

What incarnating costs is precisely "everything."  Elizabeth said to Mary "Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord." That blessing is heavier than it is pleasant. It was spoken when Mary was pregnant. Even in the spiritual realm, you can have what you want. The downside to desire is, there's no one to pay the cost but you. If Mary wanted spiritual promises to be fulfilled, they could have been fulfilled in no one but her.  Be here, now.  But know that all of the promises of human history can be fulfilled (and all of the costs can be exacted) nowhere but here, from no one but you.

The rough bit is that relationship requires separateness--union individuates, and then "being together" takes work. You will love the connectedness. You will say "The father and I are one," as quickly as you will say "I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine." But you will struggle with abandonment as well. You will think that others exist to share in your work and suffice your needs--you might even find that limitedly true.  But you don't get to decide how they do that, or when, or to what extent, and the loss of control will be an absolute crucifixion.  The words we say aren't free--the emotional cost of saying "why have you forsaken me" can come from no one but you.  Wiggling out of any of this will meet with no success.

Who are you to abandon self? If the Teacher wills that selfishness tarry till he returns within you, what is that to you? You were climbing the hidden ladder to God long before you knew it had a name--but that wasn't unique or special. It was what you were supposed to do anyway.  You only want to know you're doing the work because you long for control, because you long for the credential you can flash around to others.  There's no shame in wanting that.  But be grateful if those longings go unfulfilled.  They would cause immense suffering if it were otherwise.

Who are you to hope that humility be pleasant? If it were God's will that life feel like imprisonment and humility feel like exhaustion and imposition, could you use what you learn to be compassionate to others?  Take a lesson from Siddhartha: in this life or the next, if you find yourself in a hell realm, note your misery and be kind to others who suffer with you.  Make no mistake, becoming Christ is not a way to claim your own excellence.  It is a way to shoulder burdens and empathize.  Becoming God is not a way to being adored by the masses.  It is a way to care for all creation.  Not even the mystery of the Trinity, into which we might be folded after death, provides bliss.  At most it provides serenity and equanimity of the unmanifest divine consciousness.  Longing for spiritual pleasantness is no better than longing to win at children's games.

Don't let statements like "there are no others" make you think there's not a lesson in asking the people around you for help.  I am suggesting that you do that.  But from people with egos, need and dependence will outweigh willingness to help.  Insofar as you act with your ego, you will feel needy and dependent and your generosity will be sluggish if it's there at all.  Just know that ego is a limited tool with which to transact the business of life, and don't be surprised when those limits manifest themselves. 

I want to say this with gentleness and kindness: fairness is an egoic category--it has nothing to do with how life works.  Life doesn't even guarantee the sufficing of needs (you have spent as many lifetimes starving as you have ignoring the needy) so you are certainly not here to get everything you want.  All the same, if you can get what you want, do that for as long as you need to.  Just don't be surprised when that ceases to satisfy you.  And don't be surprised by sudden scarcity.  The prodigal son spent all he had, and only then began to be in need.  The Teacher had the right idea.  Fulfill desires rarely, make it a celebration in which you find all the others who have discovered the blessing of poverty.  Don't even desire gratitude.  Just know that poverty is the downside of gratitude.

I am not saying "Don't give up self" or "don't appreciate the pleasant bits of humility."  I am not saying "don't need others."  I am saying that the muscles you use for that should come from the Spirit, not the ego. If you've ever sat in silence long enough for the absence of noise to become worth listening to, that is the beginning of conversion.  There is more--but like the serpent did with Eve, I will not tell you.  When you experience it, all of the right teaching will come from your own mouth.

To the Father, the Teacher said "While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me.  I guarded them, and not one was lost except the one destined to be lost."  A name was spoken--and if the one who became sin declared his own name vanity, what would that name be?  There was one destined to be lost--and if the betrayed one says "there are no others," who is destined to be  lost?  When you know these things, you will come to yourself, thinking it's hired hands that the Father needs.  You will be wrong, of course.  But as in the beginning, so in the end: realizing exile is the first step in return.