III. What is Tantra?

On a world stage, it's a normal thing to acknowledging that devotional religious paths are incomplete. The Bhakti path in Hinduism--with devotion to the guru at its center--remains incomplete without accounting for what happens when the guru dies.  However "God" is conceived of, that conception lacks without envisioning how God acts within each believer.  However much "inner stillness" might be a gratuitous gift of God, it remains un-claimed if the devotee cannot render themselves appropriately receptive. [bxA]

And there is a stage, for believers, where the desire to break down the dualism--between Guru and devotee,  God and the individual worshipper, speech and silence--this desire becomes quite intense.  On a world stage, practitioners who feel such a desire switch spiritual paths.  Breaking down dualism is the modus operandi of the Tantric Path.  Through the study of Tantra, there's a systemic way in which all distant spiritual ideals--whether they're a distant time, a distant place, a distant person or a distant potential--these ideals are rendered immanent.  This happens because the student is encouraged to reduce ego.  Absent ego, all time is now, all places are here, all people teach us lessons about ourselves, and who we are is who we have always been.  And God's entire life, including the teaching of the guru--this is all available inside of us.  It is as close as making the decision to be our true self, and the consistency to remember we were never anything else.

Here is an interesting thing: Christianity is just such a devotional religion. It has all the same shortcomings as the world's other devotional religions.  Jesus even warned us against a sort of imprudent ignorance of earth that our longing for heaven can cultivate.  So he said "The children of this world, in their generation, are wiser than the children of light" and "behold, I am sending you out as sheep among wolves." But a Christian Tantric Path, that's clearly laid out, remains entirely absent from the range of western options.  The type of Christian, therefore, who's possessed of a longing for unity with God and Guru and Self--this believer, while they may begin to read the mystics a bit more, ultimately has nowhere to go.

This is why Christian Tantra is necessary.  It is the umbrella concept under which mystical prayer journeys, the Christian East's Deification process, St. Theresa's "Christian as an other Christ," and St. Paul's claim that "now is the acceptable time"--it's in Christian tantra that all of these (and more) find clear articulation.  If we pay attention to starting on sane footing, (with our earthly existence,) we cannot but think that, when we come to die, God will look at what follows and pronounce it good as well. 

So, we submit that Christian Tantra teaches the following:

Jesus truly was two natures in one person, was the third person of the triune God.  He was born in history, taught, died, was buried, descended into hell, rose and ascended.  When he ascended, he went inside each believer so that the devotee might undergo a process of living, suffering, dying and rising in conscious remembrance of him.  

The logos has always been whole and entire.  There's insufficient evidence to suggest that Jesus went to India or Tibet, but ample evidence to show that paradox is an equal opportunity ego reducer across religious traditions. So we believe the Word is present in riddle so that our intellect might be purified.  It is present in multiple belief systems, so that our own faith might be purified.  It is present in silence and mystery so that proclamation and revelation might be beholden to humility.  Christ is indeed the definitive statement of the truth: and we can't forget that, in the temple, he sat at the feet of the elders and asked questions. We, his followers, do not practice sanely until we sit at the feet of the worlds great teachers, showing Jesus' same curiosity. 

God is present in (but not confined by) his creation.  This is the end game of the sacramental economy.  It would be a tragic missing of the point if Jesus was being literal when he said "I am the bread of life" and "this is my body," and yet his disciples accused him of being metaphorical when he said "I am the gate for the sheep" to a shepherding culture audience, and "whenever you do this for the least of my brothers and sisters you do it to me" to a marginalized crowd.  Christian Tantric practitioners believe God is fully present in everything--and that our sin only hides him when we abandon him long enough to forget that.  

God's Truth rules out neither other truths, nor the existence of other gods.  Though the church inherited a culturally defensive monotheism (typical of Israel and Judah's periods of exile), Christian Tantric practice turns on cooperative, accepting monotheism (typical of Abraham's wholesale adoption of Melchizedek's beliefs in the idol el-elyon).  God placed bits of his wisdom in many different paths, and our belief is incomplete until we've assimilated those truths on someone else's terms.

Resurrection and reincarnation share about the same likelihood of being accurate and inaccurate. Let us remember that, at Pentecost, all heard the Apostles in their own tongue.  Regardless of what is next for us, when we are transfigured with Christ, we believe that hindus will see reincarnation and that Christians will see resurrection.  We believe that there is a strong possibility that, at all times, we are living out all these possibilities at once, and only experiencing a narrowed perspective because of ego and the demands of the "endurance of purgatory on earth" that's the task of every Christian.  It's also quite possible that the choice facing us will be this: are we ready for now to be the end time?  Are we ready to surrender everything impermanent about our minds and bodies, so as to be given the mind of Christ, the glorified body that is a small part of Divine Consciousness? Are we ready to remain in the abiding stillness of mystery, having learned the entire curriculum of the realm of revelation?  Time will tell if we are right.  And when we're ready, that time will be now. 

We're uncertain what heaven and the more abstract aspects of faith may hold for us.  What we know is this: the revelation of God and the scripture call his people to live fully embodied existences in the here and now.  Underneath action, there is thought.  Underneath thought, there is emotion.  Underneath emotion, there is sensation, underneath sensation, there is energy: and becoming one with energy, we can experience a foretaste of what self-abandonment to Divine Mystery will be like when now and the hereafter are one.  Until then, we learn form the limbic system: our psychology is a window into the trauma our bodies have stored, and our spiritual lives are a wind into the fact that it was our own dry bones that preached to us the whole of revelation.  When all creation groans, it is just our own pre-verbal longings coming to the fore within us.  We listen to the silence of the body, and the stones of our hearts cry out.

This involves making a conscious practice of all things.  It means becoming aware of ego and shadow, becoming aware of our attractions and aversions, of our cravings and desires.  It means realizing how highly distractible we are, seeing that we have a limited amount of energy with which to fuel, each day, our intentions to be present.  It means being careful to point our attention and intention toward things that will use that energy skillfully.  For Rabbouni's students, conscious grounding in physical sensation, listening and breathing will always be chief among those things.  Beyond that, we benefit from all manner of yogic practice--by which, if nothing else, we gradually bring the workings of our mind and body into the light of mindfulness--but by which we often find our sense of deliberacy and freedom expanding too.

At the close of this chapter, we are as uncertain of the Way as we imagine we will be at the moment of physical death.  We claim to lay hold of sane, conscious living--nothing more.  We have intuited that this will lead only to blessing.  But if we are wrong--if, indeed, we should find ourselves in a self-made hell--we at least have expanded our capacity for compassionate choices.  We have a bold hope that, when we abandon ourselves to the Father just as Christ did, it will be a humbler self than when we began.  God willing, that is enough.

 

X. The Humble Tenfold Way

Rabbouni said "I have come into this world for judgment. So that those who do not see may see, and [so that] those who see may become blind." For students of the Logos, this is the core of the humble tenfold way. We have been the ones who said "we see" for too many years. And it gradually warped our entire worldview. We were looking all the time, but it fell short of true watchfulness. What we learned is this: the blindness to which we're called isn't a loss of eyesight. And any who want to know what that means need only ask the Teacher. [bxA]

Because the Humble Tenfold Way is dualism seeking unity, we can confidently paraphrase the Tao: the way that can be seen is not the eternal way. The Humble Tenfold Way identifies ten strongholds of egotism, asks us to play with energies deeper than self.  It notes the suffering  we're surrounded by, sees the mental muscles that use compulsive thought to bypass embodiment, then invites us to wonder what "mental rest" would feel like.  The different paths of the Humble Tenfold Way are all deep dives into self-imposed suffering--and having helped us identify and back away from our attachments, they reveal a simpler life than we could have imagined.

Humble prayer is the first path on the way.  Like the publican--who stood at the back of the temple saying "Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner"--we needed a way, morning by morning, to remember our liabilities.  At base, we knew thought to be an effort at control. So--a thousand times a day--we said "I'm powerless over God, self and others."  At the same time, we sought to be self-protective.  As hard as it was, we increasingly took cues from the Teacher's passion.  Just as he remained silent before Pilate, trusting in the impermanence of all things, we sought to take refuge in quiet and patience.  Sure enough, the bits that were challenging two weeks ago seem small compared today's challenges.

Humble presence is important.  We are absolutely certain, at the very least, of this: If our mind were on the past or the future, if we were concerned about things we can't control, if we willfully manipulated people instead of cooperating with them or pushed our way through the world--our energy would be sapped that could have otherwise been used for openness and willingness.  Be here now: this is the advice Bhagavan Dass gave Richard Alpert, who would become Ram Dass and write a book with that title.  We students of the Logos know this isn't just a pithy phrase, it's an entry-point into oneness with the intelligent force that rules the entire cosmos. There is a still point in which the spirit moves as it wills, and serenity rests on remaining there, but bodies in motion tend to stay in motion: it's available to all, but few find it.

Humble intention is necessary if we're to live in the moment.  Rabbouni's students follow the dictum "limit the suffering you cause and do what you will."  In the hands of ego, faith hope and love all become shadows of what they should be.  Even Augustine's "love and do what you will" becomes the banner of all kinds of egotistical relativism.  So followers of the logos start by asking "why are you blocking the light?"  Nothing would make us happier than if troubleshooting our toxicity led to goodness and holiness.  But we don't do it for results.  We do it to find skillful means: to "live into" being more compassionate with the broken parts of ourselves.  Hopefully, efficient work with the right tools will lead to a quality result.

Humble action is.  We wanted to say "humble action is necessary to live a good spiritual life" but then we realized we were just duplicating the problem.  We compromised our peace by getting too hung up on results.  We compromised our relationships by acting with the subtle expectation of being able to influence others.  Now we simply wish to move in the world in a manner less driven by our subtle agendas and attachments.  Too rare were the instances of walking down the street for the sake of walking down the street alone.  We were usually going somewhere.  Too seldom were the instances of giving alms with a pure heart--our left hands always knew what our right hands were doing.  And it was merely a first-step corrective to say "if the Lord wills we will live and do this or that."  Eventually, we had to simply do this or that, putting the details in the Father's hands. 

There can be no serenity without humble effort.  For the ego, there is no in between: it either over-exerts itself, or opts out. Energetically, both cost us dearly. Humble effort is, above all, a yielding of the spirit within to the Holy Spirit transcending all things.  That involves deep attentiveness to things as they are, and gentle movement that's congruous with the Way of all the earth.  Humble effort is a well known thing: religious thinkers have called it "betweenness"--a willing effort that's neither willful nor avoidant.  Martial artists talk about "1000 strikes" with the Katana.  The point is to so exhaust your capacity for added mental effort that the natural gravity of your body drives the strike.  For students of the logos, that's a perfect allegory for exactly half of the spiritual life.  We are disciples of the logos. Isaiah says: "As the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return there until they have watered the earth, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth.  It shall not return to me empty."  We see, in this, a symbol of how the Spirit works within us.  Like a tree that takes root in the crag of a rock, splitting it apart, so does the Spirit break open the stone of our hearts. Both in our non-action and in our action, we train our attention on the empty space.  Within and without, we don't move until something within or outside us does.

This is the malady: an unrestrained tongue will only net anxiety.  Patterns of compliance and defiance establish themselves first in the mouth.  Humble speech--the next step in the Tenfold Path--is simply remembering that the mouth is a liability: that we say things we don't mean, opting instead for what we think will get us what we want.  It not only perpetuates our own delusions, but mindlessly pokes at others' sensitivities.  So we are quiet--excessively, if our life situation and emotional constitution will support it.  We want our speech to be guided by the creative tension between intelligence and intuition.  If we take refuge in quiet, how the tension resolves will be determined by a power greater than ourselves.  We'll hear Jesus' words "When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourself or what you are to say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour."  They'll strike us differently if we know that every hour of life--every moment we could possibly call now--is precisely this kind of trial.  As always, we seek not only to know what the scripture says--we want to know why it was said the way it was.  Perhaps, if we're fully acquainted with the predicaments the scripture talks about, the words will sink into our hearts faster.

With humble work, We students of the logos asked: if our occupations were humanizing, would our lives be more peaceful?  Ecclesiastes asks "What do people get for all the work with which they toil under the sun?  Even at night their minds do not rest."  We spend the majority of our lives working to earn money--that, in itself, causes suffering.  We make it worse if we're involved in an industry that's inherently exploitative.  We ask ourselves: does our work seek unreasonable profit from the needs of others?  Does our work value our own labor enough to survive?  Does our work allow us enough time to rest?  If the answers to those questions falls short of ideal, we make choices that gradually move them as close as possible.

All of the disciplines in the humble tenfold path eliminate a dualism: they gradually unite subject and object.  This is particularly true with humble knowing.  In the realm of revelation, where ego reigns, we don't "know" a thing until we are aware of how little we know.  This can also take the form of mirroring, of "others projecting our own purgatorial predicament back to us": we will see selfishness in others, then realize that it's in us as well.  In the realm of mystery, as the dualism inherent in incarnations diminishes, we don't know something until the knower and the known become one.  In Christian Tantra, this is most clear in the discipline of internalizing the teacher.  After we've done all the external actions he did, we go within.  We imagine every thought to be Christ's thoughts, every sensation to be his sensations.  Our arms are his arms, our feet his feet, our hands his hands.  His depression and ours are one, his anger and ours are one.  Our sin is our own only because we put him out of our mind long enough to do what we wanted.  That doesn't mean he wasn't there and can't incorporate it--the isolationism was ours, and ours alone.

Especially when it's used as a means of control, nothing is more exhausting than thinking.  Thinking enforces a subject-object distinction, holds all creation at a distance so that it can be examined. Humble thinking, which relaxes the objectifying gaze that's part of egotism, is more like perception. Absent from humble thinking are things like craving, desire, clinging to what's attractive or rejecting what we're averse to--and as the force involved diminishes, our general sense of calm increases. Our first forays into this kind of perception occur through realizations and "contemplative experiences"-- they're given to us less frequently as "involuntary, transcendent events" as the emotional tools for ego relaxation become more voluntarily accessible. Humble thinking nets a greater openness to intuition and increased speed at letting go of what we can't change.

Humble belief is trust in the unseen, full stop. It often happens amidst a great struggle with doubt and fear. And it helps us arrive at certain helpful first principles. But this is why we need the "dark nights" of the faith journey: because the superego re-entrenches, names those first principles "our beliefs," then rejects anything other than iron-clad certainty. Perhaps alongside super-egoic "belief-sets" students of Rabouni make shadow work and the facing of doubt a normal practice. Humble belief asks us to face the abyss more often, to remain on the horns of a dilemma until the ego dies and the "new creation" rises again within us. This process often more vulnerable than we wish to be, and certainly more than we can handle. Daily, we ask God to show us how our wounds can be a door to the divine image.

If Jesus came into the world to judge anything, it is judgement itself. If a belief doesn't help us as individuals, we throw it out. If a belief divides us from others or gives us a superiority complex, we get rid of it. Division always creates anxiety, and union always yields serenity. In all these things, we gradually diminish ego's foothold, poke holes in the iron-clad facade of "put together." It's constant work: sometimes it involves gentle effort, sometimes it involves relaxing. We learn to read the subtexts of self-deception and anxiety beneath our steady flow of "self chatter." 

The primary effect of Jesus' teaching, for us, his students, is this: we cease to be a judging subject, objectifying the whole world. He has come to blind those who see. If it had been our eyes that the teacher had blinded, our sin would remain. Instead, he blinded our wills. So while we don't cease to act out our purgatorial predicament--which includes elements of (God willing, ever-decreasing) sinfulness--the "we" who is sinful is harder and harder to locate. 

We looked so deeply that the beholder and the beheld merged. We looked until the whole body became the ego's blinded eye. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? Listen: the entire cosmos is a living question. "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" it asks. We thought him a prophet a prophet at first, and in the thinking, both the ears and the eyes of our heart began to open. We didn't know how, but had to just bow to the one whose silence makes here and now the route to an answer. At all times, in all places, through everything, the one speaking to us is he. No one says "Lord, we believe," except in the Spirit. And in the Spirit, listening and worship are one.

IX. The Four Humble Truths

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.