Bridging the Gaps: Recovery, Family and Tantra converging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Body of Christ's 7 Sense Organs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Humble Tenfold Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spirits and Chakras: Making some distinctions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

             

    

        

         

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God, the Shadow, and the Four Humble Truths

I need to answer the "why I have skin in the Tantric game" question.  I'm fascinated with Tantra because it helps me answer existential questions, ones that seem perilous to neglect.   Call it a midlife crisis if you must, but my entire life seems like one ego trip after another.  My spare hours are a procession of one shiny object after another.  The working world, seeing my discontent at the procession of 40 hour weeks, suggests more 40 hour weeks will calm things, if I'd only add evenings of internet (and weekends of alcohol when it all gets too much.)  And it seems to me that the answer is not simply to spiritualize the ego trip and call the shiny objects holy. [bxA]

Catholic theology is absolutely beautiful, but for me it isn't enough.  Awaiting the bridegroom, I've never had the foresight to bring lamp oil, and can only hope that learning to sit down and count the stars is sufficient alternative to a neurotic grab for what's lacking.  Perhaps the bridegroom has shut the door so I'll finally sit in the otherwise kind outer darkness and ask how much of the wailing and gnashing of teeth comes from my own mouth.  If I'd have known, in the beginning, what I know now, I'd have asked "what's the cost involved" sooner.  What's the cost of success in a professional world driven by ego?  What's the cost of satisfying desire when the reward is a discount for your next purchase?  And most importantly, what corners of my own awareness have I left obscured and messy by denial's benign neglect?  One thing is certain: our theology casts a shadow, and it is psychology.

It's one thing to say that I'm sinful and need God's grace.  Catholic theology has answered that question.  What it hasn't adequately done is unpack the pandora's box of concupiscence, to ask why my ego gets so clingy, why desire is so intolerable that I'll give it the worst of what it wants so it'll go the hell away, and why satisfaction is so terrible that I'll layer blame upon blame to forget it.  I needed to deal more thoroughly with theology's psychological underpinnings, if only in pursuit of a kinder relationship to my own mind.  That, in short, is the purpose of this post.

This next little section is going to borrow its structure from the Dharma--because Buddhists have, since their inception, been more than competently dealing with mind.  I have summed up the primary psychological effect of original sin in something I call the "Four Humble Truths."

The First Humble Truth is "All life is abstraction."  Original sin did a number of harmful things.  One of them was taking the set of ideas we'd begun to form about everything, granting it permanence and substituting it for the thing itself.  For the rest of human history, we've been interacting with our ideas about creation instead of creation itself.  We do this with God, with self and others, with mini-mart hot dogs and porches: nothing is exempt from abstraction.  And the biggest consequence of Abstraction is "othering."  In the beginning, we were part of God.  And God is one.  I suppose it wasn't too terrible when we were brought to the animals and began to call them things like "wildebeest" and "hippopotamus;" when we encountered Eve and said "flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone."  In other words, we "othered" everything.  At least at first, I'd bet this was innocent enough.  But I wouldn't fault HaShem if he was taken aback that we didn't just say "God, God, God" over and over.

The Second Humble Truth is "All is in need of recapitulation."  In other words, we share in Christ's work of "remaking" all things.  This involves facing the way we're at fault for perpetuating sin, facing the brokenness of all things, and gradually witnessing and cooperating with the ways grace and the energy of the spirit conspires to change them.  Absolutely everything is in need of recapitulation: our religious ideas, our relationship to our emotions, the way we get stuck in our head when we could be facing the reality.  Reality is tastier.  It has peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  Idealized PBJ's fill no stomachs.

The Third Humble Truth is "The vehicle of recapitulation is the Body of Christ."  Christ incarnated in the "fullness of time."  That means he's a paradigm, and we project onto Christ what we think of ourselves.  In a sense Christ was history's first mirror.  And when Christ taught his disciples that he was in each and every person and thing (by appearing as a stranger and saying plainly "I am the gate for the sheep") he turned all of our othering into a mirror as well.  In Christ, all you ever see is yourself, until you live your own reality fully.  When Christ "ascended" he was hidden from their view.  Another way to say that is that he so deeply identified with us that we only find him by finding ourselves.  So finding him feels like we've lost him, because he is us.

The Fourth Humble Truth is "The way of the Body of Christ is the Humble Tenfold Way."  It should be noted that "humble" in this case doesn't mean "self-deprecating."  Instead it means "totally accepting."  We've been taught that we're good. Becoming humble means eventually accepting that we're also evil.  The Humble Tenfold Way is humble prayer, humble practice, humble intention, humble action, humble effort, humble speech, humble work, humble knowing, humble thinking and humble belief.  All of these things involve either accepting something we'd rather reject, or refusing to kowtow to ego.  So followers of the way pray "have mercy on me, a sinner" because accepting that is rough.  They work without thinking their work makes them better than others.  They speak plainly, knowing that all forms of judgment create suffering.  I've gone into detail about the Four Humble Truths elsewhere.  That's the gist of it: growth in the humble tenfold way invites Christ into deeper and more intimate levels of daily life.  Eventually the distinction between us and Christ disappears entirely.

To be humble is to do shadow work.  It means remembering we can get ideas about ourselves that distort reality.   It's a device so simple we almost thought it novel when alcoholics, by the hundreds, admitted they'd made their lives unmanageable, and were powerless. It seems, for me, that the way to protect or reclaim Eden's innocence is to remember that I'm also its serpent.  The way for God's people to be who they are is to remember that they can conduct themselves in a way that makes God call them "not my people." The way to become a rock on which Christ can build his Church is to remember that I am also a satan.

But the law told me that plainly.  Deuteronomy said "You shall not add to, or subtract from what I command you."  Glorifying myself, or forgetting my liabilities--I'm on the hook to avoid both, and now that I know, my actions are willful.  And to whatever degree that's universal: maybe, now, when the law says "Hear O Israel," we know the cost of covering our ears.

 

The Four Gospel Seals

His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, my upa-guru
and the14th Dalai Lama

In the monastery, I had a dried leaf on my desk for years.  It was blessed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.  To make a long story short, I'd been sent to a monastic conference, where I met a buddhist monk named Tsering.  He was on a speaking tour, in hopes of raising money for a building project at his monastery.  I gave him a bit of the travel money my monastery had given me, and he fished the leaf from his backpack.  But our interactions stuck with me for reasons unconnected to foliage. During a Q&A with a group of simply professed monks--monks in training, of whom I was one--someone asked Tsering to give them a piece of advice, to help them live as better monks. [bxA]

Counting on his fingers, Tsering had outlined the central tenets of Buddhism: the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Four Dharma Seals.  I've always remembered that.  The way Tsering encapsulated his tradition was crisp, clean and efficient--a method for which Catholicism had no equal.  We had a catechism. But even that concise statement of Catholic belief was a 500 page book.

Later, when I got into teaching Catholic High School students the finer points of theology and religious history, they'd often ask "what's the bare minimum Jesus taught" or "what's the least we have to do in order to be Catholic."  It took me about 4 years, but I began developing answers for those questions that fit a high school attention span.  Some of it was difficult to do--the Catholic Church had spent hundreds of years coming up with its first creed--but even that fell short of "a short version of what Jesus taught." Instead it was a short version of "what the church taught about Jesus."

So I found myself remembering Tsering.  I needed, in short, an equivalent to the four dharma seals, teachings I could count on my fingers.  As I understand it, the dharma seals are teachings with which all teaching must agree in order to be buddhist.  I needed teachings so central to Jesus' message that whatever was contrary to that ceased to be Christian. 

Eventually, between my reminders to stop drawing on desks and my students' requests that I solve their boredom with restroom passes, this is what I passed on:  in order to be Christian, a teaching had to agree with these four central principles of Jesus teaching.

Jesus, my sat-guru, rendered a bit differently 
than history remembers him.

The first is impermanence.  The point to make about this one is that impermanence goes side by side with dignity.  Jesus said "Consider the lilies, how they grow.  They do not toil or spin...even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these."  In saying this, Jesus was taking his place in a tradition that believed "All people are grass, and their constancy is like the flower of the field."  Jesus knows "that he'd come from God, and was going back to God." But that's a  reason for compassion--the quote just mentioned preceded the mandatum, the washing of the feet that, in John's Gospel, takes the place of "this is my body"--the famous words instituting the Eucharist.  In the end, early Christians understood even even heaven and the entirety of Jesus ministry is impermanent.  Corinthians said "then comes the end, when [Jesus] hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every authority and power."  We are all, in the end, consciousnesses merging back into divine consciousness.

The second teaching all Christian doctrine has to agree with is non-self.  Jesus says "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow."  A great deal of how non-self is talked about is overshadowed by the importance of bearing the cross's difficulties.  The point remains: "self" is malleable, and Jesus asks for its renunciation.  Early Christianity doesn't quite figure out what substantive thing is left after self renunciation.  St. Paul comes closest.  He says his "true self is hidden with Christ in God."  He says "I live, but no longer I--Christ lives in me."  I suppose the larger point is to be made here is that Christ has totally accepted his own impermanence, so whatever non-self consists of, it is comfortable letting go of all that is.  In the larger  atmosphere of Christian mysticism, where unknowing is used as a tool to return all we know to God's mystery, I'd be comfortable saying that, ultimately, what I am is the "nada" John of the Cross found on the mountain.  Life doesn't always have to be about self: and our life can only be about diving to God's mystery and serving others to the degree that we've given it up.

The third teaching all Christian doctrine has to agree with is acceptance.  Jesus freely accepted the limits of an incarnation.  He accepted people fully, and healed those with the willingness to be healed.  He fully took the sins of the world on himself, accepting the role of the suffering servant.  He carried the cross.  He may have displayed some of the emotions common to a grieving process--anger that the temple was being used as a marketplace, sadness at the death of Lazarus.  But ultimately, in Gethsemani, the emotional turmoil of finding willingness ended in acceptance of a violent death.  And that acceptance was the foundation of a work in which the Father and the Spirit were much, much more active.

The fourth teaching all Christian doctrine has to agree with is interbeing.  This is a buddhist term, but it's very much something Jesus taught.  It means "everything is in everything else."  Jesus said "whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me."  In prayer to the Father, he said "I [am] in them and you [are] in me...so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.  Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, where he was a stranger till he was suddenly familiar were designed to teach that whomever we come in contact with is Jesus, though they don't resemble him in the least.  Given all of this, it's even reasonable to assume that when Jesus said "I am the sheep gate" he wasn't speaking metaphorically.  It seems he meant to make himself literally present in physical objects other than bread.  It's on the basis of things like this that folks as reputable as Richard Rohr name their conferences "The Universal Christ: Another Name for Every Thing."  After Christ, when the scales fall from our eyes, God is all things, and is in all things.  Full stop.

Impermanence, Non-Self, Acceptance, Interbeing.  It seems as if playing fast and loose with these teachings renders the gospel hollow and rotting from the inside. Not only that, backing down from some of the positive affirmations attached to these causes a great deal of suffering.  Impermanence and dignity must live together.  Non-Self and the safety of total surrender must go hand in hand.  Acceptance and the importance of death are rarely separate.  Interbeing actually quotes the Baltimore catechism when it asks "Where is God?" Nothing less than a full throated Everywhere will suffice.

Theologians will argue.  But I am a theologian who says these four things are the most important teachings of Jesus.  In my theological training, we were taught the centrality of the "elevator pitch."  If you can't sum something up, it says, in the time it takes to ride an elevator, you haven't assimilated your subject matter.

I love a great elevator pitch.  But to me, a dry leaf does the same thing.  When I departed from the monastery, I returned the Dalai Lama's blessed leaf to the earth.  Something about forever preserving an object blessed by a man who has, himself, taught impermanence for 13 previous lifetimes--it just didn't sit right with me.  Something about clinging to a leaf when my teacher didn't cling to his own life seemed blasphemous.  I was clingy and I still am.  It's a huge frustration.  But the frustration diminishes when I leave the "I" who is frustrated behind.  After all, bearing the cross is impossible for one whose hands are full of, well, anything.

So: breathe, feel, let go.  Nothing could be safer, friends.

Keeping Skin in the Game: What I've Got (To Lose)

This is a more personal post than I'm used to writing.  Only rarely would I presume to make my own, big dumb face the artwork for a post.  Scrutiny might reveal my art choices to be a steaming pile of my own narcissism.  Be that as it may: the post needed to be written--as a way of keeping on top of my emotional health--because it seems to me that spiritual work has involved consistent loss, and losses too-long-ungrieved have a history of catching up with me.  It seems, too, that I might have focused too exclusively on shedding ego, not enough on using it as a tool for positive change. [bxA]

The gospel figures who are important to me don't have that status because they make me feel good.  The folks I figure I'd hang out with are often the darker ones.  I hear a lot of myself in the healed demoniac, whose desire to accompany Jesus is refused and redirected.  Jesus says "Go home to your family and friends, and tell them all that the Lord, in his mercy, has done for you." Vocations that are mandates from (instead of accompaniment of) Jesus--they were always a bit uncomfortable to me.  But I might just be living in one of them, so I've got to claim that discomfort gently.  I hear a lot of myself in Bartimaeus, who is blind as he tells Jesus he wants to see.  There's a tension in having the mercy of God right in front of me, and being unable to see it...my history with long term, low grade depression has ensured this hits me palpably.  I empathize with the blind fellow whom Jesus has to touch twice--because when Jesus touches him once, he can see people, but they look like trees.  Accurate seeing, and not seeing people as potential crosses to bear-- has always been a challenge for me.

More than the rest, though, I empathize with the bloke who said "I believe, help my unbelief," because faith isn't the hard part for me.  The hard part is the way faith is limited by wisdom.  I'm the only one who can do my round of living and dying, sinning and repenting, suffering and coming to acceptance. Whether I like it or not--and let me assure you, I don't--taking responsibility is a sharing in Christ's cross, a total consent to the ways life energy and death energy are the same.  Unwillingness can sneak in all over the place.  I might take responsibility but then be resentful, as Gesmas (the "wicked thief") was.  I might take responsibility, but look for a future time that's better than this one, again seeking to abdicate my responsibilities, as Dismas (the good thief) did.  The point is to become the Christ who takes those voices as they are, and treats both of them compassionately--either with loving quiet or with consolation.  And to realize that none of the voices--of unwillingness or hope or acceptance--are coming from outside me: they're just mirrors of what happening within.  That kind of "expanded agency in adversity" is common only to those who've exhausted their questioning of the whirlwind.  When the Romans conquered the temple, the holy of holies--the temple's inner sanctum they thought would be full of treasure--it lay utterly empty.  And the brokenness of an open heart chakra is empty as well.  The paradox of mercy is: that void is a ministry and a healing, one that witnesses to the Spirit's energy.

I thought it would be easy to be a good human.  Sources like Aquinas say "just do it, it gets easier."  Blokes like Aquinas never met addicts, or abuse victims, or anyone whose unconfronted subconscious defensiveness short circuits conscious choosing.  It also turns out that the ability to be a good human is proportionate to one's willingness to admit they're a bad one.  In other words, attachment to "not being bad" can't solve your issues.  But it will always be true that virtue produces substantially less of the anxiety, remorse and blame that makes life unmanageable.

I didn't know what I expected from the Church, when I consciously chose to remain a part of it.  I know that, over time, parish life seemed hollow.  Charity isn't reducible to volunteerism, what you put in the poor box, or the number of parish committees in which you hold down a chair.  In other words, an initial experience of Jesus doesn't imply an ongoing program of transformation.  Care of others doesn't imply self care.  Intimacy with Jesus doesn't imply "feeling at home" in a parish full of people who may be simply spiritualizing their flaws rather than confronting them.  I have had to formulate my own program of transformation, out of bits and pieces pulled from various snap shots of Catholic thought throughout history (as well as from other religions that, quite frankly, have more fully developed programs of transformation than Catholicism.)  I've had to give myself permission to avoid those parts of parish life that aren't life giving, surrounding myself, instead, with a  group of like minded people who love me enough to gently call shenanigans on my bullshit.  Whoever can mutually refrain from bolting while honesty grows, those are my people.

After 7 years in a monastery, I thought something as simple as paying attention would come naturally to me.  Turns out I come from a long line of creative folks, who spend a great deal of time in their heads.  Any shiny object, in my psyche or in the world, can get in the way of what's right in front of me.  And we're living in an age of shiny objects--the internet, and advertisements exploit what we find pleasurable.  Our work obligations play on fear of sitting still, fear of "failure," fear of poverty. The dopamine fasts en vogue for the last few years aren't a terrible place to start--taking breaks from internet and other such pleasures.  The bottom line is, at some point I had to stop willfully forcing myself to "pay attention" and be conservative and mindful about where I willingly pointed my focus.

I don't know God's will.  Some days I'm just too exhausted to care.  Neurotic overwork taints my spirituality more than I'd like it to.  The three part Zen dictum "Quit trying, quit trying not to try, quit quitting" is gospel to me because of it.  I only know that, no matter how much I spiritualize it--and I've done so, with gross abandon-- my way hasn't worked.  So I'm suspicious of all strains of the spiritual life that boil down to "I've got to do something about this."  Because I don't know how to avoid being hoodwinked by the blinding light of my own angelic egotism.  My record isn't stellar.  Much as I might dislike it, though, pointing out to the world that religion isn't about sick misuses of spiritualized self-will might just be my corner of the Dharma.  Because I've tried to stop talking about it, and it never seems to work.    

Self-emptying comes for everything on earth, and makes paupers of us all.  Before students become teachers, all students die, all teachers die, all teachings lose meaning.  I didn't know this in the fascination phase, when the whole spiritual life was a devotional trip and no internalization of mystery or self-discovery had yet begun.  The "death" bit got snuck in towards the end, when I was already hooked.  In the end my only consolation is, as Ram Dass put it, the fact that "those who die before they die do not die when they die."  But to those of us who were surprised and incredulous: the reality of death was there the whole time.  The fact is, I had eyes but couldn't see.  I had ears, but couldn't hear.  Not till I descended with the mind to the heart.  The heart, see--the heart hears everything.  And it remembers: followers of the Way are no greater than their teacher.

Redemption isn't what I thought it would be.  Whenever I went looking for it to come from others, it hid inside me.  And it involved work and responsibility.  When I was not looking for it, it revealed itself in others.  And it was totally effortless.  How it manifests, and where--it defies both description and my efforts at control.

In any case, most egos are little shits.  Getting any particular ego to do constructive work is a dance, and my feet are coordination-poor.  All of the theological rules end up getting broken when dealing with the psychological demands of surrender and rebirth.  Hitting bottom is easy only for those whose face has never hit concrete because they found the bottom of a bottle first.  Suffice to say, surrender earns one zero gold stars, and it only happens once trying has become too much of a trial.  The reward is relief--which is no small potatoes--though relief is under no obligation to be exciting.

To be clear: the "I" that I'm working with--I'm learning that it's more elastic than I once thought.  There's more room to part with my defensive mental default mode than I'd anticipated.  There's more room to balance my nervous system.  But my mental pathways are ingrained enough that doing so takes substantial hustle.  I had to learn about Kundalini Yoga, and apply it. In other words, I had to mind my own energies.  I had to learn about Pranayam, and apply it.  Anxiety had literally changed my ability to breathe, and I had to make a decision to turn that around.  I had to learn about reframing, and make peace with all of the continuous-play mental-messages my family of origin left me with.

It's difficult, because however true it is that we'll need to forsake ego in the end, there are lessons to be learned in the meantime. However loud my sanctimonious cries of "how long, O Lord--" maybe God hasn't permitted me to shed my selfishness because I've thus far refused to learn its lessons.  Maybe the work of "accepting the things I can't change" is more ongoing than I anticipated.  And maybe getting comfy with spirituality's limits is more important work than mining its depths for insight.

Thea Bowman, that powerhouse of an African American nun who died of cancer in 1990, said "I've always asked God for the grace to live until I die."  Ram Dass put it just as simply.  Referring to life as a school, he said "take the curriculum!"  My willingness has never been that enduring, nor my words that concise.  Being a student of wisdom, if it allows me words at all, certainly proves me much less eloquent. But further denial is fruitless.  I am here.  And if I am here, then I'll work with willingness till I'm open, and here to learn.

All that's Lost and Found: a Diary of Drowning

Anthony de Mello passed on a nice little poem, that's become a bit of a spiritual fairy tale.  It may have been originally by Sadhguru--as with any fairy tale, the attribution's insignificant.  The story talked about a salt doll, who went to the sea to measure its depth.  As the salt doll waded into the sea, he called out to the sea "who are you," and the sea responded "come and see."  With each call and response, he gets deeper in.  First up to his waist, then up to his chest, then his neck, and each time the question: who are you? Come and see.  And because he's made of salt, each time he asks the question, a bit of him dissolves.  When he wades in up to his neck, just as he's about to drown, just as he's almost totally dissolved, he exclaims "Now I know who I am!"

As I said, it's a nice little poem. [bxA]  It conveys a truth: that mapping out who we are leads to an immersion in the truth. And the deepest level might look something like this: we've always been here, but we can't remember our other forms.  All of our other forms are here and now, but we can't access them.  We amnesiacs took this form before learning how to use it skillfully.  That's traumatic.  We created an ego in a last ditch effort to figure out existence before befouling it entirely.  Subject/Object distancing is actually a symptom of that egoic abstraction.  In other words, it's a symptom of the flaw, but the flaw is the route of return.   In other words, there's a way to map out that movement, but it's most important that we frame it correctly.

Because if you're like me, your attraction to the destination will lead to skipped steps.  Even if we can manage to face ourselves completely, only those who cease to exist from comfortable, objective, philosophical remove will truly be united to Christ.  Whatever part of life we're talking about--traumatic memories, the pain of deferred  the Kundalini energy of whose existence most Westerners are still uncertain--we can't unite with Christ until we fully accept and unite with all that our own incarnation consists of.  It seems like a tall order.  

I hope to lay it out in a bit of a different roadmap: its neither a map of who we are, nor a map of where we're going.  Instead, it just names the bits that I've discovered to be an illusion, but also the ways the illusion is important.  If I can map out my illusory thinking, what's real will take care of itself.  If I can just take honest steps, I'll arrive when I'm meant to arrive.  And, inshallah, a good bit of it might prove true for you, too.

Though I've talked about these before: allow me to re-introduce the theonoias.  The theonoias are units of mental energy.  The first theonoia is actually mental stillness.  St. Paul called it "the mind of Christ" and john's gospel calls it "Remaining with Jesus"  Contemplation is a temporary taste of the first theonoia.  Obedience is the first theonoia acted out. (It's what allows us to take the kids to soccer, change jobs and convincingly pretend jello salads aren't atrocious.)  Humility is a permanent, voluntary abiding in the first theonoia.

The second theonoia gives a name and a label to everything.  The trouble with the second theonoia is that we end up creating a version of ourselves that's removed from reality.  It's here that humanity gets its sense that opposites and distinctions are relevant. Good isn't bad, rest isn't work, one of those things is better than the other.  All ego needs is to be granted the kind of permanence that comes from choosing to act, and we have a problem that becomes unhealthy indeed.

The third theonoia takes the separate names and labels and weaves them into theories of how the world works.  Thomas Merton, in one of his most enduring moments, said "suffer without imposing on others a theory of suffering, without weaving a new philosophy of life from your own material pain, without proclaiming yourself a martyr, without counting out the price of your courage, without disdaining sympathy and without seeking too much of it."  All of these are mistakes of the third theonoia.  A Christian Tantrika should actively engage with identifying and abandoning the different narratives that rule egoic life.  

The theonoias don't just apply to thought.  They apply to many other areas of life as well. Remember: "I think therefore I am," Descartes's famous phrase with serious problems.  More accurately, thinking is part of mapping who you're not, a persona you first need to care for and then desperately need to let go of.  We are, all of us, like nested Russian dolls: we're impermanent beings, wearing multiple permanence costumes.

Thoughts, at the first theonoia, open us to emotions, but before we get there, our thoughts shift from what others can change to what we, ourselves can change.  There's a movement of the energy up the chakras. Compulsive thought, if it arises, can be more quickly accepted, nurtured and let go of. 

Emotions, at the first theonoia, open us to sensation, but before we get there, our emotions have shifted from egoic emotions like resentment and blame, rage and gluttony and lust and pride--they've become the basic emotions of a grieving process--anger sadness depression and acceptance--and we've come in contact with the brokenheartedness that Characterizes an encounter with the Word.

Sensations, at the first theonoia, open us to energy.  But before we get there, we have to see the stored pain of our history.  The body, as the psychologist Tian Dayton said, is the unconscious.  So trauma, and all of our inadequate habitual responses to it--all of that tension gets stored in the body.  This can accumulate from many lifetimes.  (Some day we'll have a conversation about reincarnation vs. 

Energy, at the first theonoia, is something to be experienced, not seen from an objective distance or analyzed.  It is present in everything and drives all life.  The point is to visit al the chakras and make sure its paths are unblocked.  A lot of westerners are unable to feel it because they only feel things that touch them.  Clothes, other people, etc.  Feeling kundalini certainly involves seeing the hollowness of all forms of acquisition. It may also involve simplifying diet, and making sure our sex lives don't cause harm.  It may involve developing a prayer practice.   Feeling kundalini involves becoming quiet enough to stop listening to noise and begin listening for it.  It involves not just feeling what's touching us, but being mindful enough of the body to realize that, when nothing is touching us, and we aren't touching anything, having a body comes with definite sensations.  In other words, being feels like something--without the external stimuli that we usually use to convince ourselves we're here.

Some key principles to remember: though the theonoias apply to thought, emotion, sensation  and energy, they're ultimately talking about things that you and I are not.  If you're thinking about existing, you're a step removed from doing so.  If you think you've achieved the ideal, you haven't.  The greater point to remember is that the theonoias are morally neutral.  They sketch out the path that flaws like abstraction, ego and sin follow as they develop, but they also show the way by which we can return to God.  The problem becomes the solution.

See, there's one thing the salt doll poem doesn't convey.  An experience of the Trinity coaxes us into stepwise renunciation.  Those who carry the cross hold no toys.  In the end, all theories are false.  In the end, no concept are is reality.   Union with Kundalini produces non-self, and lasts as long as our karma permits.  So ultimately "who and where we are" will entirely cease to matter. And that might be scary, but the fear will be okay...because we'll have been learning to work with the medicine of fear all along.  Suspended between being and non-being, and having developed both, we'll become part of what Jesus hands over to the Father.  And in the whole, warm and safe and great and terrible mystery, God will be all, and in all.