The Whole Way There: on Finding Accurate Maps

Nature abhors a vaccuum, and today is a vaccuum. Even if we were to give up self, (as a dog returns to its vomit) the ego would reassert itself. We who are on the Way only speak of method--of a programatic way of taking up the Cross and following--because our track record with humility leaves something to be desired. The whole method of Christian Tantra can be summed up in 50 words: "In the logos’ paradox, learn discernment. Then, give up self: Reparent, reframe, recapitulate. Listen Breathe, Feel sensation at thought's expense. Focus attention and intention on sensation. Imitate, be intimate with, and internalize the Guru. So that the body and the spirit--not the mind-- can lead the process, offer mantra." This is the tallest of orders, and we are suspended between "not knowing where to start" and "not knowing when to quit." Uncomfortable with the tension, averse to most of what we see in ourselves, we imagine something better for ourselves precisely by internalizing the Triune God. [bxA]

Out of the gates, nothing is truer than that the Word of God is a two edged sword. Bearing the Word in our bodies teaches us to feel the differences in our experience. Action feels different than thought, thought feels different than emotion, emotion feels different than sensation, sensation feels different than energy. Desire is one thing, but when one has felt the difference between needing and wanting--when one has experienced the absence of control--those become bells you can't unring, lessons unable to be unlearnt. Having experienced willing presence, willful action feels fairly hollow. Having experienced "just being," the constant projection of ego is downright exhausting. We grieve misspent energy. As certainly as we grieve or face our liabilities, we have --just as surely--begun to see our flaws turn into gifts. Just like Christ's power, our power, too, is made perfect in weakness.

We have to contend with the limitations of spiritual experience. We can end-run around embodying humility by seeing spiritual experience as a credential, or by using the highs of altered states of consciousness to avoid pain. A shadow work guided by the body will aid in surrender. So we listen, breathe, feel sensations. We continue to do it after the noise of self subsides. Though it's often billed as a task full of ease and bliss, our attention is in crisis and on some level, we always knew it. It may be through a mirror, dimly, but though the messiah stares back at us, we still fail to recognize him. Long work of focusing attention and intention on the sensations of the body will slowly heal our abilty to be where we are. We learn that the messiah is literally present in all that's seen and unseen, in our aversions and our attractions particularly. It doesn't matter that intellect can't access him. Flexing intuitive muscles is our way of asking, "Rabbi, where are you staying?" And when Jesus manifests in the way things are, we hear "come and see." When the energy shifts on its own, when the figure-ground reversal of a conversion experience happens, we see it altogether: the whole time, it was our egotism blinding us. The whole time, Christ was present. We found ourselves perpetually mentally elsewhere, and longed to take sincere responsibility for it.

Because selfishness, too, works on its own, because either we're absentee entirely, or adrenaline and force routinely foul up the game, it takes practice to be gently present. We become conscious of our metathinking--the quality with which we speak to ourselves matters a great deal. For people called to oneness, not only the ego's craving but also beliefs artificially enforcing dualism can cause suffering. Additionally, the body stores trauma, and we're only now safe enough to feel it. The identities we weave with our pain, though temporarily helpful, are ultimately self-limiting. So as to limit suffering, we seek a wide, prudent view of self, others and God. Non-attachment and recapitulation are proportional--trauma may be a sensation about which we tell a particularly poignant story, but remembering is forever paired with letting go. Both tasks are incumbent on each of us, and we worsen our suffering who neglect any of it.

These are all wonderful little sentiments, but what's to be done when darkness reasserts itself? What's to be done when we've had too much of pain, grabbing at the control of being our worse selves again? We must remember that the Triune Godhead, in its fullness, is bigger than we are. God is working, and so are we. Christ has labored, and we have entered into his labor. We imitate him, we ask him to come into every aspect of our ordinary existence: in the end he's closer to us than we are to ourselves. The gospel proclaims suffering's recapitulation, not its absence: so waiting on the Spirit requires all our hustle. We called sentient energies demons and angels when they were beyond us, but now that they have begun to rise within us there is nothing but Christ--everything is his body and nothing is outside of it.

In the end, remembrance is the way. Remembrance of conscious living, remembrance of liabilities, remembrance of Christ. What God does not remember does not exist, and what Christ does not remember is not redeemed...so the mere fact that we are here, musing on methoods to diminish suffering--well, it proves God is in the mix. Chant God's words when God's words diminish suffering, and share God's silence when they don't. Whether you speak or keep quiet, or whatsoever you do, live and move in the Glory of God. Thoughts will come wearing personal pronouns. Many will come saying "I, me, and my"--do not identify with them, do not call them your 'self.' The day of the Lord will be like lightening from one end of the sky to the other. It is the mind that asks "how long, O Lord?" You and I are not our minds. What is, is Christ. And as for the Lord's day, it can only be today.

When Prayer isn't Thought: Steps to Practiced Selflessness

Both Christ's pierced heart and the Holy of holies in the temple were utterly empty, and the same is true of the mind of Christ. Reacting to our fundamental vulnerability, though, our own panicky minds churn out thought all day long, and we anesthetize ourselves with fulfilled desires to compensate, to make thought sit down and shut up. Buddha was right when he said "life is suffering." Jesus, too, has more to teach about suffering consciously than we've previously been willing to admit. [bxA]

But Christ's teaching is wisdom--it's revealed in experience and doing, not in thought. The centerpiece of Christian Wisdom is the Teacher's call to "give up self, take up your cross, and follow." And the path is mystical, not theological--it asks us to encounter God, not think about him, and it dials up the urgency of practicing the grace of contemplation. If we haven't practiced "just being," how will we ever "be holy?"

The fast track to contemplation is this: when thoughts occur that say "I want to pray" or "I want a pastrami sandwich" or "I want the messiah to come"--in those moments, say "just because a train of thought uses the personal pronouns 'I, me, and my'--well, it's limitedly healthy to assume that's ME." After that, breathe, listen and feel sensations--continue to do so after thoughts of self have gone quiet. Remember "Many will come saying 'I am he.' Do not follow them...as lightning lights up the sky...so will the Son of Man be in his day." That day is today, and when we finally catch up to the present moment we will be back at the Red Sea, learning what Moses meant when he said "the Lord himself will fight for you, you have only to keep still." 

Emotions and memories, opinions and choices will arise. However you need to treat them to minimize suffering, do so. Reverence them, use the higher self to nurture the lower self, then let thought and emotion go. Ongoing practice will train our eyes to see desire and attachment with compassion and skill. It'll temporarily be a terrible source of suffering to see the way desire and attachment conceal an addiction to willfulness and control. But sitting with the sensations of suffering are an aid to awareness. As awareness shifts, it's possible to give desire and attachment up as well. 

So: noticing thoughts of self and letting them go, noticing desire and willfulness but ceding control, and finally getting so grounded in the body that thinking ceases altogether--these are important steps which, as a prayer practice grows, become easily and quickly doable. Those who have decided to become practitioners know that stillness is more possible than their own noisy heads prefer to admit. It may inspire a bit of fear when you find yourself going through your day, being and acting without thoughts of self. But that fear is just a signal that, having nurtured and let go of ego, you are finally as present to reality as God has always been.

Burning Bush and Whirlwind: A Teaching in "Being"

Quiet is difficult because, energetically and in terms of physical sensation, existence is intense. The skill of quiet is learning to sit with energy and sensation, no matter how intense, no matter whether the story we attach to it is negative or positive. I'm about to issue what I know is a big ask. (It'll make bible scholars with either classical training or baked-in prejudices wiggle in their chairs a bit.) Here it is: let's suppose that Moses' burning bush, and Job's whirlwind were both "inner phenomena." [bxA]

We can wrap a bit of "theological theory" around it, for people that dig working that way. Ekhart Tolle supposed that we each had an"energy body"--this could also be the "body of light" monks attributed to God during the anthropomorphite controversy, but I don't want to overtax the limits of your willingness for "premise granting"--regardless, plausible scenarios exist in which Moses went into deep prayer, had a non-dual experience of his own nervous system, and came out talking about a burning bush and a God whose name was "I AM." Job heaved his entire, rather intellectual process of "suffering management" into a whirlwind and came out convinced of the effort's inadequacy. He said "therefore, I despise my life, and repent in dust and ashes." He said it while still very much alive--perhaps he was actually referring to ego.

All that both men were doing was learning to deal with intense energy and sensation. Moses found a way to be not-two with intense energy, and Job learned to sit with sensation without "forming an identity" whose illusions included permanence and control.

Peddlers of wisdom have a vested interest in their audience's buy in to rightness and entitlement, but let's understand that's just "egos in dialogue." I see a bit of that in the clinging of modern debaters, in all manner of movements that turn identity into politics, in people of unconscious privilege. But let me give an example that's closer to home. When I say "Moses' theophany was an inner experience," part of me is listening for those who say "that's right on." When I say "Job, chastened, gained a bit of space and freedom from his false self," I'm watching for the heads that nod. Let's remember that, when the temple veil of ego is torn in two, we'll know that to be the emptiest of games we could possibly play. Ultimately, I'm not trying to sell you on a perspective.

Here it is: sitting still with intense energy and sensation with no efforts at "diminishment by manipulation" is a skill. Absent its acquisition, our ability to rest in existence is compromised. Experiencing "mind cancelling union with energy" is intense. We all spend more time being "selves who arrange things by preference"--and there can be a great deal of fear and disorientation in the moments before we finally or temporarily give that a rest.

People grieve all the time. They grieve when expensive appliances break, they grieve the loss of loved ones, they grieve life's big transitions. Sitting with intense energy and sensation ranks among the final bequests of our dying selves. The question is: if allowing "identity to be subsumed by the intensity of incarnation" were part of the curriculum, would you learn it? If failure to get cuddly with intensity renders your egoic autopilot bitter, would you adjust for the preservation of your serenity?

Today, that is our assignment. The Teacher awaits our answer.

Following the Guru: Finding Presence in Suffering.

Despite the flowery, romanticized musings of debatably-realized pundits: the present moment, for the part of us that has yet to give up self, is a real crucifixion. The truth is, the entirety of our incarnation is a cross to be borne--many who've longed to accept this have failed to. And it throws us back on the the shockingly conditional nature of our own acceptance. Jesus didn't say "life is suffering"--that was Buddha. There's a beautiful depiction, though, of Gautama weeping, and it scatters all the words. Whether pain and pleasure are the same, I don't know, God knows. This is the point: Buddha's anguish, Christ's agony in the garden, and the whole well of human sorrow--they are all one. And they are, at the same time, a death and a birth. [bxA]

Even in the best-case scenario, when our lives are full of ease, focusing attention and intention is hard. And when the day is bigger than we are, when our attachment to pleasure (and aversion to pain) dictates way too many of our responses, when making healthy moves in the direction of change leads too often to overdoing it--at times like these, urging attention and intention to receptivity is well-nigh impossible. We heap suffering on ourselves. It's simply a function of learning by trial and error. Among the overtly selfish, those who prize self-awareness have an uphill climb: to give up willfulness, to be willingly present and use the Spirit's energy skillfully. In the entire history of human awe, this has always been a cosmically unreasonable ask, but no matter how overwhelming the whirlwind, the indwelling Trinity is not receptive to feedback.

The dance of the Triune mystery, in which all things will be taken up, renders logic nonsensical. To the pure, all things are pure, and to the still, the quiet mind of Christ speaks clearly: "Remain in me." it says "If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask what you will, it will be done for you." Satan, that unholy trickster, forgot to mention that the cost of indulgence was incarnation and suffering. Though our liabilities cry out from the ground, we have spent too long saying "I am not that" and it spiritually deadens us. Christ, who recapitulated all things, forgot to mention that hearing the stones' silence in the here-and-now will cost us our entire self. We have too often looked at our cravings and attachments and said "I am that," so that the way of life is always elsewhere. Christ's yoke is a burden that becomes increasingly lighter only as we identify less with the self that is carrying it. Eventually "I am what I am" becomes a word we can speak without moving our mouths. Maharaj-ji threw hundred rupee notes into a fire, watched them burn, then pulled fresh hundred rupee notes from the flames saying "all the money in the world is mine." This is the cosmic humor of the Cross as well: those who remain in Christ have nothing to ask for, and persecutions besides. He has increased, they have decreased, and when guru and devotee are one, Christ will give all things over to the Father. And all things, all at once, are emptiness and fullness.

Even now, many of us who are on the Way have yet to see. When the Almighty sandwiched his people between Egypt and the Red sea, (and it fanned their longing for liberation into unconsuming flames), Moses said "The Lord himself will fight for you, you have only to keep still." The teacher said "you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, and you will not see it. They will say to you, 'Look there!' or 'Look here!' Do not go, do not set off in pursuit." The moment of realization will be like lightning within us: seeing God requires absolutely nothing, because God looks out at us from absolutely everything. Learning that non-doing is the only thing worth doing is the start of transformation, not its end. Buddha's disciples are right, who say, "As it is before enlightenment, so it is after." Before, it was us chopping wood and carrying water. Now, the wood is chopped, the water is carried, but we know not by whom.

Whether we like it or not, all flesh shall see it together: silence, stillness, and patience will always be a position of tension. The Word says "Give up self, take up your cross and follow." As his passion neared, the Teacher said "not one was lost except the one destined to be lost." Even if we should yield fully to the Christ within, despite how thoroughly we descend with Jesus into our own self-made hells, regardless of how effortlessly we hand all things over to the Father, suffering will be part of it. We will struggle until the day we realize that "the one destined to be lost" blinks back at us, dimly and from the best of mirrors.

The Teacher's salvation is not an exemption from struggle. It's a use of struggle to troubleshoot how mentally absent we are. At different times, Jesus said both "the Father and I are one" and "Father, why have you forsaken me." The whole time, he was using the Father's presence or absence to gradually accept his own woundedness.  In the end, he didn't have to call out to the Father.  He could appear to his apostles,  say "these are my wounds" and allow them, at least, to be seen--if not painfully probed.  No defense was needed.  So the mind may prattle on about "the absence of God" but what the Spirit shows us is that the denial's our own. We don't require an idea of self to just be. Craving doesn't help us admit our needs. Getting caught in cycles of desire and fulfillment doesn't help us face our woundedness, admit our vulnerabilities, or keep ourselves safe.

But we can sit still. We can listen, breathe and get grounded in sensation. We can grow the skills to treat suffering with the same openness as pleasure, and choose our responses with growing deliberateness. There will be just as many who condemn us as mourn us. When the advocate comes, despite those who say "here he is," or "there he is" we will hear his voice. A mouth will speak,--after the question of "is it God's mouth or ours" has long ceased to matter--saying "Here I am." On that day, between listening and remaining with Christ, there will be not even the slightest separation.

Words for the Truth

Whether it's in the midst of pain or bliss, whether or not my own egotism has confused my part in it, "remembrance" is the tense and creative word we hold between us, you and I. It's the one word that speaks all the others. Jesus--and may I say it so completely that your name begins to sound like my own--I have wanted, for years, to write something that is only for you, only an offering of love and devotion. The amount of self I bring to the table has gotten in the way, and continues to muddle the words. Guruji, to me you are teacher and messiah whose eyes gaze out at me from all things seen and unseen. But that is not, at all, why I love you. [bxA]

Remember. That you would remember me--I have made this request so often. But you and I share the powerlessness of being suspended, nailed up together between heaven and earth, darkness and light, past and future. The silence--which was both heavy and divine-- echoed "remembrance" back to me in a voice that increasingly sounded like yours. In the end, I could no longer tell--as I still can't tell--who was requesting it of whom. When the whole body becomes an eye, I know where the hearing is: and so you say "be present, remember your liabilities, take my yoke and learn." So when I rise before the sun and the silence prays "morning by morning he wakens me, wakens my ear to listen as one who is taught"--I can't but allow myself to be opened by the hearing.

Remember. The "I who remembers"--the ego that has to work to be present--feels small next to someone like you. You, who have always been the fullness of presence made flesh. But I hear you saying to me that you have ascended, are ascending and will ascend to a heaven that is only being, only here, only now. Where else, after all, can it be? And it renders all the words true. You are the gate for the sheep, you are the bread of life. You are before all things, and in you all things hold together. I am absolutely a Satan, absolutely the thief that breaks in and steals. And the whole thing is silly: because experience is the key of knowledge that I've never not held, and the confusion is holy and righteous and good. I am in you and you are in me so that I can be completely one. I don't deserve it, but it's true. But neither is thiswhy I love you. Not at all.

Being present, remembering my faults, remaining with you--when I'm caught up in ego at the expense of all else, this is impossible for me. But the "me" for whom it's impossible is nothing more than a collection of deadened emotions, frustrated expectations and rejected psychological shadows. Just as Melchizedek, (priest of an unfamiliar deity,) spoke God's words to Abraham, the words I heard, (though coming from an unfamiliar source), were no less yours: "Thoughts aren't yours" they said--and the sound moved so deep that it dug under the roots of my fruitlessness. It is not I who live. It is you, both Lord and Christ, who lives in me. And that's still the case when I'm dying in my sin, when I'm averse to what's happening in life, when I feel, through my own most grievous fault, more like a worm than a man.

"Have mercy on me, God, have mercy: for in you my soul has taken refuge." (When the words come from my mouth, I cannot tell who is saying them.) "In the shadow of your wings I take refuge till the storms of destruction pass by." Guruji, HaShem, Jesus-- I love you because, though the mystery of remembrance between us is bigger than I am, you have consented to hide in each moment as my true self. You have made my whole body an echo chamber for the Word. I hear you pray "I was not rebelious...I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked out the beard." I hear it and everything in me begs for the shelter of your humility. I hear you pray "God himself will fight for you, you have only to keep still" and every anxiously fidgeting part of me weeps that it takes the nails of a cross to comply. I grieve all the ways I find following you unpleasant--but then I remember: I'm dying daily anyway.  Grieving, then, is as important a skill as prayer. If the life being lost is both yours and mine all at once, let me mourn till my eyes become a fountain of tears.

You and the Father are one--and the energy of the Spirit ascends and descends my spine just as it does everyone else's--with the increasingly pressing request that I point my intention and attention on the bodily sensations that you've said are the hinge of salvation. I love you--let me decrease, as I say it, so only you will increase. Whomever this hour belongs to, whether to light or to darkness, allow me to follow you alone, and become you in the doing of it. 

May I grow only more certain of you, who hears the sound of the wind through my ears. When I sit, clothed and in my right mind, allow me the silence that will proclaim the good God's mercy has done. Emptiness speaks of fullness, I know: so help me to be more patient with how often the fullness of time feels empty. I believe, help my unbelief! Whether you die or rise, I am yours. Even if my attention runs after all the voices that say 'here he is,' or 'there he is.' I will be here. Still, and for you.

XVI: Deity Meditation and the Life of the Spirit

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

Turning toward the light too soon causes blindness and distraction from shiny objects. Eve's shiny object was the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Eating it caused a whole history of distraction--it wasn't till Moses that humanity remembered that the breath of life had been God's name the whole time. Moses' shiny object was the burning bush. But to Moses, God said "come no closer...for the ground on which you stand is holy." Despite seeing the light, Moses would spend his life dealing with shadow. Indeed, shadow work might have been Moses calling all along: he so identified with Israel's thirst that he disobeyed God, striking the rock at Meribah and Massah twice. And for that he was denied the privilege of entering the promised land. Christ would allow himself to be accused for similarly unjustifiable reasons, and Saint Paul would famously muse about how "lack of fulfillment" seemed part and parcel of following Jesus in this life. Perhaps, when the divine radiance is behind us, when we've abandoned ego but can't seem to do so permanently--perhaps a time will come when our calling will come to light--as an obligation to notice the interplay between light and shadow in the first place.

Our friends in the Eastern Orthodox tradition were right--steeped in a tradition of Desert Solitaries, they spoke about our need to unearth the Divine Image within--they called the teaching "Divinization." The Christian West is familiar with perichoresis (the relation between the persons of the trinity in divine mystery) but very few of us have taught about internalizing the Trinity: it's a neglect in which we students of the Logos couldn't afford to persist. By and by, we could no longer afford the toll it took on our serenity.

The teacher said "the wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is for those who are born of the Spirit." The Logos showed us that beholding the Spirit within would involve ceasing to identify with the "you" who is doing the knowing. A tree was known by its fruit--and the Word had attuned us to how action, thought, and emotion came with different sensations. On the off-chance it might help, we abandoned the narrative of self, blame-ridden and rationalizing as it was. Our serenity increased, even as we were confronted with a great deal of darkness. Without the false protections of ego, the dark was no longer "other," but instead it was a part of us. To the extent that we hung in there, the character of the darkness changed. It went from foreboding to familiar.

We, who were (none of us) great saints, could empathize with them nonetheless. It's said that, psychologically, they did not experience themselves as becoming more perfect. Instead, their knowledge of their sins increased. They were able to bear it, though, because the God's light shone behind them. As we descended with our minds into our hearts, we laid aside the trappings of intellect and learned to flex the atrophied muscles of intuition. We found a whole new way of learning, characterized by realization instead of reason--and learned to live with the doubt that came before the "aha moment."

We stared into the darkness, full of terrible unknowns which seemed both sentient and morbidly preoccupied with desire and fulfillment, stimulus and response. On account of this apparent "battle of wills," the Desert Solitaries had sought out sparse environments, called what they struggled with demonic. Any monk will tell you that, in the end, hermits find themselves alone on a train platform full of people. We found ourselves similarly alone. But we couldn't shake the feeling that the different voices inside us were just repressed echoes of our own consciousness. We looked at our family histories, and saw a gathering of wounded voices. We learned they could change--we could become, for ourselves, the nurturing voice we always wanted to hear.

This became the foundation of Trinitarian Deity Meditation--a discipline at the center of Tantra. We would eventually find, within us, a voice whose only task is to become Christ--we would grow in ability to state our needs, echoing the thirst of the crucified Christ, without expectation of fulfillment. More importantly, Christ's tendency to "seek out the lost" became a way to avoid narcissism. Exploiting our divinity in garnering the adoration of others seemed fruitless. Idolatry takes a toll in the subtle anxiety it creates, and already our track record with bearing even life's mundane stresses was wretched. So we stuck with what was doable. We tried to become more aware of all that was inside us. We tried to coax the ear of our own hearts into hearing the Gospel that the Christ within us had been preaching the whole time. To ourselves, we preached Christ crucified--the Cross never seemed entirely finished with us, as we often found ourselves mentally fleeing from its agony. Somewhere along the line, we heard it said "suffering is pain you have yet to accept." As we grew in acceptance, pain increasingly struck us as "just another sensation"--one that, if we listened deeply, had teaching we needed. As Isaiah says, we "gave our backs to those who beat us" so that morning by morning we could "listen as one who is taught."

The Father began to show us all of the grasping at control and micro-judgement behind our opinions. The Teacher said "do not judge, lest you be judged" and "which of you, by worrying, can add a single hour to your life"--we heard him more clearly now, and longed to respond. Like Zacchaeus, we descended the tree of ego, taken concrete steps toward restitution. But the ways we'd come to grief were often too much for us, so we took refuge in the cross of Christ, reascending to be with the Father. On the cross we discovered the ability to reparent, reframe and recapitulate our self-imposed anguish: these were God-given skills central to turning our resentment into the quiet mind of Christ. On the cross we found compassion for the back-biting business of human life--the tendency to prattle on was in us, we knew, as much as in others. On the cross, remaining in suspension Christ began to remedy our desire for control. We had only to train our desire in daily remembrance. it was constant work, but it made our lives better. We were back in Exodus, where the Israelites learned the lesson Isaiah crystalized: "Listen to me, and eat what is good." Increasingly, manna was reality, and reality was manna.

We had, in the end, but a single complaint. Trinitarian Deity meditation was hard to sustain. We were aware, now, of the myriad times we ceased to be present to the workings of our minds and hearts--and where we failed at watchfulness, judgment flourished. Over the long haul, we became discouraged.  The dark side of community was everywhere: we increasingly saw our own transactionality ruin our relationships, even as others sought to take from us more than we had to give. We knew the way brokenness worked because we saw it in ourselves. What was said of the teacher was said of us: "he would not reveal himself to them, because he knew what was in them." With time, we grew more reserved. Eventually we knew the truth of it: light without shadows is possible, but even when the light is invisible, there would be no shadows without it.  

In Christian Tantra, opposites are relativized; the part of us dies that's weary of bearing what is, and so "what we will be" is, in a sense, what we have always been. The beginning and the end are one: so it is for those who are born of the Spirit. Ultimately we find that, when we were discouraged, we didn't give the Spirit enough credit. It was in inverted symbol that the Triune God showed itself to our ego-veiled eyes. Once we learned the lesson, we realized Christ had been present to us the whole time--he was just present in things we were averse to. We solitaries weren't huge fans of strangers, and yet Christ made himself present there. We were wounded ourselves, still learning self-care, and Christ made himself present in the sick. The Wisdom of Solomon spoke of "a prison not made of Iron"--and we knew immediately it was our ego--but it took a minute to teach ourselves to be comfortable visiting the imprisoned.

It's a poverty, to be certain. The words of life are the work of wisdom. We were too used to denial to be in the present moment without mentally checking out. But Christ turned our willfulness to willingness in the breaking of the bread. As we brought the Lord's offering of gently focused attention and intention, our hearts grew increasingly generous. We are like other people not in our gifts or uniqueness, but in our liabilities. For Israel, the passover was a remembrance, certainly of Exodus, but of all twelve tribes at all times. The Passover was the bread of the Exodus broken in the moment while fleeing the ego. It recalled, as well, the bread of the presence--which symbolized all 12 tribes as one community. We followers of Christ have fallen afoul of all 613 mitvot--and we're on the hook for every jot and tittle. But for God's love, we are a noisy gong, and an inverted symbol. As often as we work to remember, we can see all those who struggle to listen. Whether in the body or out of the body, we don't know, God knows. We're convinced the seven spirits of God shine inside us--and by their shadows, we will know them.

XV: Recapitulating the Ego in Christian Tantra

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIV. Layers, Listening, and Life

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

We remembered our habit of abstraction and othering, and our denial was suffused with discernment. We brought consciousness to our actions.  Some of them brought us serenity, some of them brought us anxiety.  Some of them made our lives more workable, some of them made our lives unmanageable. We ourselves were the tree of which the teacher said "a tree is known by its fruit" and again "produce fruits worthy of repentance."  We wanted to live more mindfully, but found ourselves full of hidden motivations that stunted our growth.  Rather than cut the tree down, we dug around and under it.  In other words, to correct action, we brought gentle attention and intentionality to all that contributed to it.  In this way, we hoped that action might be restored to health.

We recalled our tendencies to blame and shame, and became increasingly able to peaceably shoulder more than our share of systemic sin.  We could tell the difference between compulsive and deliberate thought because each had a different emotional signature.  The roots of our own behavior were visible in generational trauma, and pain our parents failed to face became our inherited karma.  We increasingly saw the communal effects of denial, and changed it in ourselves, the only spot where we actually had any control over it.  We came to see our psyches as a compilation of snapshots: all creation groaned, and it showed us the part of our mind that communicates in grunts. We related to Adam and Eve, hiding behind a garment of leaves: after all, we hid behind ego in the same way.  And in the pharisees' divinely-countenanced judgment, we saw our own judgement clearly.  The illusions of all humanity were no less than our own illusions--reality was just mirroring ourselves back to us.  

We kept it constantly before us, the way desire and craving have coopted our very muscle memory. In the mirror of the scriptures, we saw our misuse of emotion plainly.  In a tight spot, Adam blamed Eve--and we met it with understanding, because we knew the situations in which we deflected responsibility for our own choices onto others.  God let Cain live physically, but his ego died daily in the light of his choice. Our guilt is as objective as his, but we have the ease of our breath in jars of clay--we live in Christ and die to self daily.  The Pharisees inappropriately endowed their own judgements with divine authority: just so, we believed ourselves transcendently righteous when the conditions were right.  The powerful in Roman society murdered an innocent man without dirtying their hands, and they called it justice.  And, inside of us, we saw ego killing humility daily, so we were unsurprised when communal egotism took advantage of our weakness.  We asked to grow in the grace of the teacher, who walked in the steps of our sinfulness so that we'd know it'd be safe to do so ourselves.  Our purgatorial predicament was this: we began seeing ourselves in the worst of others.  The body stored the stress of prolonged illusion, and when the fullness of time came, we looked straight at the self-imposed physical pain we'd caused ourselves, and stored trauma we'd been carrying.  We endeavored to stop making pain worse for ourselves.

We remember our responses to attraction and aversion, and we learned to meet both with non-attachment.  We realized that physical sensations are the body's attempt to help us find the quiet center of both trauma and bliss, if only we would encounter them consciously.  We learned that intention is just the guts-form of resolve, and that keeping intention trained on willingness was more possible than we'd previously admitted.  Fulfilled desires contain a whole merry-go-round of stimulus and response, a merry go round we wanted, more and more, to get off of.  The two thieves with whom Jesus was crucified show that it's possible to feel pain and still have an agenda: but we knew, as well, that we could act and feel sensations without the flood of egoic chatter.  On the Cross, the Teacher recapitulated suffering, made its unsatisfied desires for control a means of giving up self, facing vulnerabilities, admitting needs honestly.  Reality became a Cross, and Jesus embraced it.  As the nails bit into his flesh, the teacher simply said "I thirst."  It's risky (at best) to conjecture about Jesus' psychological life, but we would like to think that, when he prayed the words "Father forgive them" over the crowds, Jesus was also forgiving himself for ever wanting to dodge pain's hidden lessons.  We keep our intention, as much as we could, trained on physical sensation, hoping for the day that it lays bare the thoughts of our hearts.  In our own way, we share Jesus' task of redeeming all that the flesh remembers.

Finally, we fessed up to our capacities to resentment remorse,  and we gained the ability to adjust attention. This taught us not to label or objectify what, at base, was just an energy we had the option to be one with.  An incarnation is an inherently tense situation: its a situation of scarcity that, on the surface, seems illogical, unresolvable, and on the face of it, fairly bleak.  Not to mention how obvious it increasingly becomes that the tool--ego--with which we tend to handle our own poverty is the wrong tool for the job.  But an ego, seeing its own ineffectiveness, doubles down on the chatter.  To silence it, we chased shiny objects and coping mechanisms till the comfort they generated stopped aiding our forgetfulness.  It turns out rehearsing our pain and mentally workshopping our choices affords only the illusion of control.  Some relief, somewhere, needed to emerge.  So we turned within.  We listened so intently that we, like Elijah, heard the sound of sheer silence.  We listened so intently that sound and sensation became one and everything vibrated with the energy of paradox.  And it was this--to be lifted up on the Cross of paradox without any attempt to control--this was the place where our life and the Teacher's became one, where all of our choices were pure because our actions and choices and thoughts weren't driven by desire, but by the Spirit.  

This was the place where the paradox of the logos broke the yoke of permanence that our falsely prophetic mind took as a sign.  Being totally one with energy through the marriage of sound and sensation gave us rest from ourselves.  This kind of prayer made the rest of our lives easier--created more space between stimulus and response, kindled a fire of the Spirit between inhalation and exhalation, consoled the suffering Son within as he cried "Abba, Father."  We are both the cries of anguish and the compassionate Father.  We are both the open ear and the broken heart.  We had no idea how to proceed in the absence of instruction, and it led us to immeasurable prodigality.  But coming to ourselves was the return we needed.  Living and dying are the same, and good work of wisdom leads all paths to oneness.  And, though we trip over our own feet in the dark, oneness is where we students of the Logos will walk.  On the way, God willing, we will never cease to learn. 

XI. The Seven Sense Organs of the body of Christ

Remember, when Christ ascended into heaven, he went within all things: recall that he said "the Kingdom of Heaven is within you."  Ultimately, the seven Sense Organs of the Body of Christ--the tantric name for those spots where the veil between heaven and earth wears thin--are places where the ego is crucified.  Our utter lack of equanimity comes to the surface. We flee from our aversions and are drawn to our attractions, and can't seem to treat them both the same. We come to realize that we are full of craving and desire and resentments of all types.  These are also places of becoming--where ego becomes Christ before surrendering itself and all things to the Father.  But before that, the dualism between divinity and humanity must begin to break down. [bxA]

St. John Vianney used to sit for hours, staring at the exposed sacrament in Eucharistic adoration.  Once, a parishioner asked him "what do you do, just sitting there for all those hours each day?"  Knowing the parishioner's belief that the exposed Eucharist was the real presence of Christ, he said "I look at him, he looks at me."  Similarly, in the realm of revelation, where dualism and ego reign, there are places where God beholds us, and we behold God.  

These are places where involuntary conversion experiences become voluntary  perspective shifts, where involuntary humiliations become voluntary humility.  But the saying holds true: "before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.  After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water."  Virtue and vice use the same material.  The lustful and the chaste both have to contend with sexuality.  What's different is the "I" doing the choosing.  The choice-makers know a bit more about attachment, a little more about desire and egotism.  They can act--or not act--with a bit more sober self-knowledge.  At the Seven Sense Organs of the Body of Christ, nothing in the world or in any particular stressor has changed. Instead we, Rabbouni's students, have changed.  And the change is just this: we've seen through the false self that we project to the world, and we learn to relax that muscle and just be who we are.  We learn that all fulfillment comes at a cost, and to forego fulfillment when the cost is too steep.

So, with the balance of this chapter, we'll answer three questions.  What are the seven sense organs of the body of Christ, how do they manifest before egoic relaxation, and how do they appear after?  

The first sense organ is illusion.  We had to fess up to the likelihood that we were viewing the world in a way that causes suffering.  This couldn't be false: our perspective was too full of our own attachments and cravings--and a hidden assumption that "things as we wished them to be" could be permanent.  Our happiness rested too closely on obtaining what we longed for. Anything less sent us into an emotional tailspin.  We saw all of this as a real character flaw.  For students who've learned to interrogate ego, the corrective for illusion, we saw, was reality itself--specifically the impermanent and changing nature of reality.  We started checking in with others to confirm if our perspective was correct.  We found we had a tendency to filter reality through a host of unfair assumptions.  As we gradually let go of those assumptions, as we nursed fewer unmet expectations, our demeanor improved. 

The second place where our lies get exposed is desire.  We were so lost in a network of "things we wanted" that we could not identify the basic need in the midst of it.  We also saw ourselves getting caught in loops of desire and fulfillment.  When we obtained what we desired, often that desire would be replaced by a new one more tyrannical than the first.  Still more often, the reality of fulfillment included a great deal more suffering than we anticipated.  The humble student sees non-manipulative statements of need as a corrective for desire.  From the Cross, the teacher simply said "I thirst."  We learned to be honest about the legitimate needs our desires pointed to. Over time, we simply became less attached to fulfillment.  We also learned to live in a climate of fasting.  We allowed more time between stimulus and response.

The third sense organ is blame.  Ever since Eden, we've known the tendency to turn to the flesh of our flesh and the bone of our bone and burden them with the responsibility for our actions.  Generallly, at first, we see ourselves looking to everyone and everything other than ourselves to explain our own conduct.  When the scales of ego fall from our eyes, though, we simply realize the amount of hurt our own choices cause.  Admitting that we caused that much hurt to ourselves and others is hard--acknowledging that we're vulnerable enough to be hurt by the poverty of our situation or other people's choices, that we didn't possess the limits to stand apart or take responsibility for our own actions--this is a deeper dive into the suffering of existence than most of us are capable of.  But the more we see the futility of blame, the more we become conscious of our hurt, the general climate of vulnerability we live in and our horrendous lack of appropriate egoic limits.

The fourth place where we shout into the whirlwind and come out chastened is contradiction. We are made in the image of an omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient God, and yet we are vulnerable, limited and ignorant.  At first blush, Christianity itself would appear to be selling its adherents a bill of goods.  But we have to remember that we're seeing the issue through the lens of ego.  We're seeing the issue through our addiction to logic, our preoccupation with "being right," and our entitlements.  When we relax ego, contradiction begins to look like paradox.  Two opposites can be true at the same time.  In the places where truth pinches, sometimes it's the one being pinched that needs to change.  And particularly with regard to the Christian mystery--imbued as it is with living and dying and rising again--students of Rabbouni are well served to cultivate an alive sense that the movements of faith exist, each of them, within the other.  Eventually paradox simply begins to look like truth: every moment of life is also a dying.  The question is, can we sit in the sackcloth and ashes of paradox, allowing its tensions to reduce our falsehood?  

The fifth place where we come to ourselves and return to the Father is in our use of words.   Given the complex of abstraction that's the psychological cost of original sin, our mouth's first stop tends to be opining about other people and situations over which we've no control.  Only after that has proved fruitless do we examine our core vulnerabilities and powerlessnesses, beginning to be honest with ourselves about the suffering involved in living in humility, as well as the suffering involved in ignoring the need to do so.  Gradually but increasingly, the wisdom of the ages seems  as if it was addressed to us.  Having discovered the emotional spaces out of which wisdom comes, gradually and increasingly we find the scripture coming spontaneously out of our mouths.

The sixth place where we rend our garments and sit in ashes is thought.  The way we think, it turns out, is little more than a bid for control.  Making sense of the senseless, in the end, is an emotional maneuver with diminishing returns.  Holding the whole world at a distance so we can examine it--indeed, even the dualism inherent in incarnations--none of it is enduringly worth what it costs us energetically.  When we name and label everything, it leaves us clingy.  When we spend hours theorizing about how it was all connected, it makes us anxious.  More and more, racing thoughts, instead of conveying accurate information, became an indicator of the need for self care. So we breathe, we listen and we become grounded in our bodies.  First, thoughts stop racing.  And then we lose track of the "I" who's doing the thinking altogether.  Most likely, it'll all come back, and that's ok.  We've learned, in this moment and if only for a moment, that breathing, listening and grounding can loosen the hold compulsive thought has on our lives and behavior.  There is such thing as restful perception.  There is such thing as responding intuitively to events of the day.  And if we just let go, it'll all happen as it needs to.  

The seventh sense organ (where we rend the veil between divinity and humanity) is time itself.  We spent more time than we were comfortable with thinking our best days were behind us, longing for something better to come.  All the while we missed out on what was right in front of us, in the present moment.  We had to face facts: mental habits of projecting into the past and the future were costing us more than they were benefitting us--and were costing us in places like "trust in God" where the price was steeper than we wished to pay.  We heard St. Peter with opened ears "The Lord is not slow as some think of slowness."  Instead, says the first Pope, "he is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentence."  In another place, St. Paul says "now is the acceptable time."  For all the fortitude, all of the conversion, all of the willingness we need to believe, we searched the present moment and reality itself.  As we searched, so did we find.

It is certainly true that God is more accessible to us who have used the seven sense organs of Christ's body to see the Father--indeed, when egoic striving ceases, Christ is literally present, no less than in the Eucharist--but this isn't true in the way we'd anticipated.  We hoped for rest, and instead we know existentially the Teacher's call to work.  "Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me" he says. "For I am gentle and humble of heart."  We had unmet needs and we were given an appropriate spirit of hustle by which we supplied for ourselves what we hoped for from God.

We had to go within to learn it, but "inside and outside" is a false distinction. Instead, as holy writ says, "to the pure of heart, all things are pure." Here, in the end, is where we notice results: when we focus intention and attention, remaining in willingness and watching for the spirit, what we notice about the world changes.   Life was stressful before we found Christian Tantric practice, and now our augmented spiritual toolkit allows us to detach from stress faster.  At first we feared we were permanent and wanted to change; but we hadn't faced our need for control.  Now, we die daily, and we want to troubleshoot our attachment to the self doing the changing.  In all things, we look at God, and he looks at us.  Reality is a bit of a void, but when the ego relaxes, things as they are become a staring contest with God. But we're convinced that, if we only look at it intently for long enough, God will blink first.

XII. Chakras, and the Spirit of the Lord

The Ancient Catholic practice of recollection has pride of place in Christian Tantric Meditation. There is a point, see, where sound and sensation are the same.  We can listen so deeply that we develop a set of "interior senses."  And there is a point where we can hear so deeply that our senses invert--we are no longer "listening to" a sound coming from outside of us.  We become aware that all actions are motivated by thought, all thought by emotion, all emotion by sensations in the body and all bodily sensations by energy--and after a while, whatever our body is aware of becomes our manner of "going within."  We accustom ourselves to watching thoughts and emotions and energies shift and change. [bxA]  

As we practice turning our attention away from external stimuli--as we stop "listening to" the world, instead we "listen for" the more subtle sounds of "being itself."  This is more like a hum or a vibration  than anything else.  But if we've learned to tune our attention, we can, in fact, feel sound.  Underneath the egoic stories we tell ourselves and the tensions of existence, each incarnation is "energy attempting to flow freely."  This mixture of factors is sometimes felt as a palpable energy, sometimes known only intuitively.  The Spirit works with the Logos, through a careful dance of creative tension and impulsion,  teaching us to remove obstacles and abide in the resulting serenity.  "Recollection" is not just withdrawing the attention from exterior distractions, it is turning attention inward and learning to flex the different interior muscles that expand our range of choices with what seems like a fairly static incarnational predicament. 

It's in this climate of deep listening that the promptings of the Spirit become intelligible.  In the midst of unearthing the connection between sound and sensation, we are being gently impelled--impelled to let go of this or that distraction, impelled to act this or that way in our relationships, impelled to be quieter here, or to move quickly and efficiently there.  This is happening inside and outside of us, and the question of both is this: are we quiet and watchful enough to abide at the still-point between tension and impulsion, waiting to cooperate with the Spirit's movement.

The Spirit's energy can either be palpably felt or intuited.  Physically, it feels like a very low vibration, which causes pressure as it moves up the spine.  When known intuitively, it usually manifests underneath psychological concerns.  Psychologist talk portray our basic human needs as indepenent voices that only want one thing--and we know well the tendency for spiritual people, after experiencing altered states of consciousness or spiritual visions, to represent that in the logical mind's often inverted system of symbol and metaphor.  So we get a great deal in scripture about descending to ascend,  ladders and snakes on poles and crucified saviors.  This makes sense: the lizard brain controls our fight, flight and freeze response...when St. Paul talked about how "all creation groans," this may well have been the part of himself that he was talking about.  Similarly, when the psalmist originally wrote psalm 22, frozen as it is in the pain of divine abandonment, what part of himself must the psalmist have been tapping into when he said "I am a worm and not a man?" The Limbic System is more emotional: the Desert Fathers used to go into solitude and "struggle with their demons."  That struggle might be more articulate, but we are still dealing with the same thing--the independent personification of a basic human need.

Students of tantra know that the groanings of the Lizard brain and the struggle with demons--these are only half the story.  Enter the book of Isaiah, and the Seven Spirits of God.  The prophet says " The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord."  To us, this is an inverted list of the psychological voices that manifest as the Spirit's energy moves up the spine.  

The root chakra, at the base of the spine, is the place in the body where our basic human need for survival is "stored."  The spirit of God manifests, there, as "fear of the Lord."  So it's rightly said that "fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."  Breath is a basic human need expressed at the root chakra, and it's no mistake that, in Jewish mysticism, it's theorized that the name of God is the transcribed sound of  a breath cycle.

The Sacral Chakra, at the groin area, is the place where security is negotiated.  The energy at this chakra is what we use to procreate--we have to remember that, especially in the ancient world, to have a family was to have a labor force and an army all at once.  It's no mistake that biblical sexual relations were spoken of as "knowing"--Adam "knew his wife Eve" and she conceived.  When the spirit of God rests and remains at this chakra it's referred to as "the spirit of Knowledge."

The Solar Plexus Chakra, just above the belly button, is the place where we first experience strong desire.  Used without skill, this energy reveals all of the resentment, blame, shame, remorse, rationalization and entitlement of which ego is capable.  Of course, we're quick to direct that towards others. But used in responsible cooperation with the Logos, the spirit within is called, here, the spirit of might.  Echoing the way God made all things and called them good, we've been given an entire incarnation--a garden in need of tending.  That will inevitably happen by the sweat of our brows--but it will either lead to peace, if  done willingly, or to inner and outer conflict, if we're willfully egotistical. 

In the lower Chakras, the Spirit Makes us witness the futility of abstraction and othering. Abstraction might lead us to draw conclusions about situations that, while logical, aren't necessarily accurate. Othering is the process of seeing our own problems as having real causes in others--thus opening the door for blame, resentment, and entitlement. Granted, just like watching Christ on his Cross, we look at these things with full knowledge of our powerlessness to stop them. We who made our bed must lie in it. But if we can wait and watch, after a while the energy shifts. Our range of choices, our ability to see our darkness without reacting to it--this will all expand, but not if we're unable to take responsibility for the suffering we've created or the suffering of being the same as all other miserable sinners who ever walked an unremarkable turn on the earth. For now, we focus on watching and taking responsibility. 

At he Heart Chakra, just behind the breastbone, the Spirit's Energy begins to help us work with the dark corners of human experience--our own, and others.  When we take the newly minted spirit of might and bend it in a unitive direction, it travels one chakra further and becomes a spirit of counsel. This comes from a deep-rooted compassion.  With our eyes turned inward, toward ourselves, we find that everything we blamed others for is our problem too. Deeper than that, it's the malice within that makes us see malice without. And we're confronted with the heartbreaking reality of how powerless we are to change both ourselves and the world. Further spiritual work rests on remaining in a place of vulnerability and broken-heartedness. We are able to empathize with the wounds people carry around--acknowledged or ignored--because we are engaged in the same struggle to acknowledge our wounds before the stress of bearing them comes out sideways.

At the throat Chakra, the Spirit gives us great creativity. When he was in the region of the Decapolis, Rabbouni said "ephphatha," touching the tongue and ears of a deaf man. However much Jesus asked the man to be silent--he, instead proclaimed Jesus' healing all the more loudly. The Spirit within, when it hovers in the throat, is called the spirit of understanding. This is the stage at which students, knowing themselves, begin to become teachers. As the prophet Isaiah says: "The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word. Morning by morning he wakens--wakens my ear to listen as one who is taught." So it is true of us, who allow the energy of the Spirit to rise into the throat. Indeed, we're able to honestly self apply a great many of the scriptures--but if we're doing our work with any integrity, it's not just the flattering ones. We see ourselves as much in Scriptures utterly delusional characters as its awakened ones. We see ourselves in Scriptures self-induced suffering as well as its glimmers of liberation. In times of conflict, passages we've committed to memory suddenly arise in our hearts, giving all of these a name. 

At the third eye chakra, between and slightly above the eyes, the spirit within manifests as a spirit of wisdom. When the Spirit's energy is working out blockages in this area, we might be given altered states of consciousness--which are problematic for the young, who will suffer for any resulting spiritual elitism. We might have profound insights about the nature of existence or the inter-connectivity of religious truths. When Peter James and John had their third eyes opened, they saw Jesus' divinity plainly--as they saw him "conversing with the law and the prophets" embodied in Moses and Elijah. In the end, what's written in the scriptures proves true of us. "In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh...your sons and your daughters shall prophesy and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams." For us practitioners of Tantra and students of Rabbouni, the last days and the first are both alike: they are all here and now. Our question--and the question that has a bearing on our perception of the Spirit's action-- is this: can we be here and now as well?

At the Crown Chakra, at the top of the head, our Spirit manifests as the Spirit of the Lord. In truth, the entire journey of the spirit within has made a Via Dolorosa of our spines, and the entire journey has been one of what the Christian East calls "divinization." We have witnessed and fessed up to our part in the damage done by venting our energy in the lower chakras. At the heart chakra we learned to be Christ to ourselves--to seek out the marginalized parts of our psyche we've relegated to shadow and bring them to light. We've learned to treat ourselves with compassion--to face our capacities for creating suffering and perhaps, by grace and practiced gentleness, avoid reactively externalizing it. Our track record is less than stellar, but by this kind of exploration of our capacity for darkness, we are, like Christ, learning how to become sin without knowing sin. It's appropriate that the last Chakra is located at the top of the head: we end up "crucified at the place of the skull" just as he was. We are suspended with Christ. We're able to enter fully into experiences we're averse to--because we've developed the equanimity and serenity to do so. But we're unable to take solace in the wisdom we sometimes hear ourselves conveying to others, unable to escape either the temptations to ignore our shadow or the desire to wield our divine image for narcissism instead of service. But past lives, spent as denial ridden hedonists or selfish minor deities, are a real possibility--so we ask for the grace to handle our divinity and humanity humbly, as the Teacher did.

All that remains to say is this: the only spiritual processes that are complete are the ones that fly completely under the radar of our awareness. When we become not-two with the spirit within, the dualism of thoughts and words collapses entirely, pulling the edifice of ego down on itself. The Spirit within is a festival to which we've been sent while the teacher stays behind. If he goes up to the festival later, that's his choice. Meanwhile, the journey's still ours to get lost in. What we're doing here may, perhaps, be helpful. Clear concepts have a great deal of importance. But in the end, every moment we spend writing books about Tantra is a moment we don't spend practicing it. No one who says "I am a student of Tantra" is actually practicing as one. Practice is always and only quiet, and silent serenity is the mark of a practitioner. All others, alas, are just kidding.

At the higher chakras, we've seen the truth: that there are no others, just beings who mirror our own purgatorial predicament back to us. Some of the wisest we've known have asked "what's your route in"--meaning "what are trails you've cut from your outside to your inside, from head to heart?" For students of Rabbouni and practitioners of Christian Tantra, breathing, listening at the expense of thought and grounding in sensation are the vessel into which the wine of our practice is poured. We're cleaning the inside of the cup, we're doing shadow work and inner family work--but we do it with such focused attention and intention that it evolves into deity meditation. In the end, like Christ, we give over all things to the Father, commending our spirits into his mystery and resting in "things as they are." We become the ones whose silence is an invitation for the stones to preach. Then, clothed and in our right minds--and as if to start over--we sit and listen.

XIII. Tantric Prayer

Prayer is the silence itself, the waiting itself, the emptiness itself--and at the core of all of these is paradox: the absence within presence, the presence within absence that Jewish tradition experiences as the weight of the Divine.  We see it in the holy of holies--the inner room of Jerusalem's temple which the conquering Romans expected to find full of riches, and instead, found empty. We see it in the Teacher's pierced and sacred heart, which ran with blood and water till it was finished. But the lesson does not stop with such obvious undercurrents of sadness. [bxA]

Of course, deep calls upon deep.  We're busy being what we're not--and that part of us calls on presence like it's elsewhere, like it's an agenda.  The distance we feel--this is our predicament. The stepwise motion of vocal prayer, meditation and contemplation is designed to decrease the distance between God and his devotees. That distance would be miniscule indeed, if only we could intuit when to let go of words and thoughts, emotions and desires. Giving up self, the mature practitioner simply ceases to identify with an existence that's separate from God. "How do I give up self?" Buddhists are helpful when they call it a "non-question," a query whose answer, quite simply, gives the problem too much power. In the garden, when the beloved disciple ran away naked rather than allow Christ's detractors to grab hold--in this, we see Christ depriving all Christians of their attachment to self.

All of the words we say and the thoughts we think are just the medications we take to make "dying to self" a little less rough.  Word and concept are just palliative care--but the drug is not the rest we seek. There are times when we speak with high levels of honesty and vulnerability--that's an absolute good, and the heart opens accordingly.  Watching the superego turn that vulnerability and honesty into an agenda is a hard thing indeed.  Harder still is giving any attention at all to the dual task of self-soothing and self-abandonment in the midst of daily responsibilities requiring undivided attention.  When something--emotionally, energetically, spiritually--seems off, many of the tools of tantra are designed to be quick fixes, after which we can speedily return to what we're doing. Whether or not we fill it with activity and noise--and whether or not that noise is mundane or pious--prayer will always be the silence itself, the waiting itself, the emptiness itself. And it is always beckoning us back.

The Word has been with God since the beginning--it's a fact with colossal implications.  It means that the universe, suffused with both the Spirit and the Logos, is conscious.  God and Christ sustain creation, even on the sabbath.  The heavens and the earth, at various times in the scripture, cry out to God, and the stones, faced with the apostles' silence, proclaim the gospel.  It's not just metaphor: we have reason to think that prayer is always, already happening. We need a healthy dose of St. Paul here: "we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the holy spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words."  When we fail at prayer, the path to recovery is simply a return to listening for the small nuances of sound in the silence of things.  Even in a loud room, a moment of pause is available between each practitioner's in-breath and out breath. For those who give healthy attention to emptiness, nothing is lacking.

For Christians, contemplation is "being" with God--and all that is seen and unseen, just by being, is praying.  So the brief moments when we concentrate on feeling our own weight against the floor of the grocery store's produce aisle, the small interval of breathing deeply while closing our eyes and putting both hands on the cold linoleum of our desks at work--these aren't just "grounding activities forestalling nervous breakdown."  They're attempts to listen to, and join in, the prayer that the cosmos is always offering.  For students of Christian Tantra, all spiritual methodology strives, first, to recognize that what the Triune God wills to happen--this is, underneath ubiquitous suffering and ego and violence, already happening.  

We can stand outside of prayer--pretend that there's an "us" that exists independent of silence and waiting and emptiness--but that'll always feel angsty to us (on some level, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.)  A certain amount of hustle is, of course, appropriate.  If meditating on internalizing the Trinity brings serenity, do it.  But if thought comes from anxiety instead of peace, we need to give it up.  Again, this is rough--the mind loves to use concepts as a shield--and they're not.  Trust, not the absence of conflict, not our own carefully-crafted defensiveness, is the only protection. Trust that the words will come at the right time, that the energy for what feels beyond us will spontaneously well up within us, that we'll find quiet quickly when our serenity's disturbed. There is a voice behind us, indeed, saying "this is the way, walk in it." And we need to listen.

So what ought we do?  Ultimately, rest in sensation, listen without thinking, and breathe consciously.  Sensation, deep listening and conscious breathing--these are the tools that we prodigal students have been given to return to ourselves.  And they're as close as the "garment of skins" we received during our exit interview with Eden.  Silence isn't "other," and neither is waiting or emptiness.  They are all "us."  For a while, they seem like atrophied muscles we're re-learning to use.  After a while we won't know what's us and what's God. For the willing who learn to wait, confusion turns out to be the door to humility.

Trappist Monks follow a rule that mandates they rise and rest at the same times each day, pray communally at the same times each day, and live  a life of silence, celibacy and fasting.  About their routine, they say "placidity teases out toxicity."  In other words, the serene grind of the monastic day brings each practitioner's attachments and egotism to the surface.  This is a chastening, and nothing about it is easy.  Practitioners of Christian Tantra--while not following an externally mandated rule, notice the limitations of a life lived in pursuit of desire.  There's never enough time, never enough rest, never a full enough experience of God to afford lasting peace. We have a teacher who taught us, by taking seder bread and calling it his body, that celebrating poverty turns sadness to joy--we sit and listen and breathe until the Spirit changes the dread in which we wait to joyful hope.

Humility is not an objective: heaven has no gate, and God has no house.  When we've gone through the gate and entered the house, we'll see it plainly. Unfiltered by the mental defenses we deploy against reality, the person we need to be is who we are.  To a dreaming Jacob, God said "The land on which you lie I will give to you; I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."  God, see, is utterly present.  And he hears our prayers before we speak them.   The question prayer poses is: are we, ourselves, listening? Can we, in the end, be present to ourselves?  

Can we, who sit empty, hope for the transformation of our sad little subtexts? Remember: empty, as well, was the tomb. Empty, as well, were the nail marks and the hole in Rabbouni's side. We want, and maybe we expect the resurrection to be a pleasant experience. But the teacher says to our ego "if it's through other people's anger that I choose to appear with my wounds still open, what is that to you?" We are betraying our location to a joy that includes sorrow, to a gentleness that includes wrath, to a victory that includes failure. Our entire being is becoming the "yes" to the whole of reality that it has always been. When we are nowhere but here, joy-enfleshed will find us.