Spirit, Grace, Tantra and the Bliss of Identity

Joy is prayer--joy is strength--joy is love. --Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Bliss of Identity

All nature is taught in radiant ways to move
All beings are in myself embraced
O fiery boundless heart of joy and love,
How are you beating in a mortal's breast!

It is your rapture flaming through my nerves
and my cells and atoms thrill with You;
My body your vessel is and only serves
As a living wine-cup of Your ecstasy.

I am a center of your golden light
And I its vast and vague circumference;
You are my soul great, luminous and white
And Yours, my mind and will, and glowing sense.

Your spirit's infinite breath I feel in me;
My life is a throb of your eternity. 

--Sri Aurobindo, Collected Poems
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Idea of Tantra 

When you are alone and in your own place, you are dancing for the god and identifying with it. This whole idea is basic to Tantra: to worship a god, you must become that god. No matter what you call the god or think it is, the god you worship is the god you are capable of becoming.
The power of a deity is that it personifies a power that is in Nature and in your nature. When you find that level, then you are in play. That is the work of art in general, because art is really worship.
 

--Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Does God Exist? 

Perceptible and yet not perceptible; invisible and yet powerful, real like the energy--charged air, wind, storm, as important for life as the air we breathe: this is how in ancient times people imagined the Spirit, and God's "invisible" workings... Spirit as understood in the Bible, means--as opposed to flesh, the force or power moving from God. An "invisible" force that is effective, powerful, creative, or destructive for life in judgement, in creation, in history, in Israel and later in the [Christian] Church. It comes upon one powerfully or gently, stirring up love, ecstasy, often producing extraordinary phenomenon, active in great minds of courage, of Moses, warriors, singers, prophets and prophetesses.
The Spirit is not--as the word itself might suggest--the spirit of mankind. This is the Spirit of God, who in the [oneness] Holy Spirit is the light of all creation and the world. He is not any sort of magic, supernatural aura, or magical being of an animistic kind. The Spirit is the One, the God himself. He is God close to mankind and the world... comprehending, bestowing, but not bestowable, free, not controllable; he is life giving love, power and force. A wind blowing through all of Creation by divine will, but not by any force."
He comes where he is willed and stays afar from where he is not, in a sort of Divine wisdom, the Spirit waits to be called.
 

--Hans Kung, Does God Exist?

 

Myth and Society

"Myth is not the same as history."
--Joseph Campbell

Writing in his book Pathways to Bliss, renowned Mythologist Joseph Campbell, makes note of several salient points applicable to modern thinkers. He states "myths are not inspiring stories of people who lived notable lives....Myth is transcendent; it goes beyond the visible, known world. Seen as true guides, myths are highly instructive to today's thinker. They not only act as a guide to the moon and the stars, but to the heart, to artists, and thinkers of all stripes. "In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal."

While some manage their everyday existence without the benefit of images, others see this a necessity. To them, without myth, the world is a painful, flat, plane of sameness without the spark of image. Fire seeking ground, "we are all manifestations of mystic power," writes psychiatrist, Karlfried Durckheim. Shaped in our mother's womb, then, myth is a function of this mystic, powerful, life wisdom. Borne to us, alive within us, the symbols of eternal mankind pour into the fields of time and space. An energy that originates beyond the realm of powers of knowledge, of intellect, the energy of myth flows, bound within each of us--in this body, in this person.

In the modern, critical, scientific world, the mind, the power, the transcendent can become bound up in concept, temporal tasks, even to the extent that illness is the result. We are out of center, if we even knew it at first, and illness is sometimes the result. Blocked from this source, life-force, you are left with a final, factual world view. A view that doubts, that does not believe what it cannot now see, what it cannot now hear. Myths point to something beyond themselves; myth is not allegorical, rather it transcends the known to the unknown. It is the place of dreaming, the world of muse. "Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his or her name is." When you have done so, you realize the inspiration of a god or goddess.

Myth means to live for all time, not in the name of material goods, achievement or status in the known world. In a fast moving, modern world, myth which thrives on a slower paced lifestyle is exchanged for everything moving fast, very fast. Technology propels forward, an ever increasing consumerism. It knows no bounds; swallowed up whole, we find ourselves without myth, the valuable guide of the collective wisdom throughout the ages. Writes Campbell interestingly, "Roman Catholic monks and Buddhist monks had[ve] no trouble understanding each other." They recognize the transcendent; that the best, most important thing can't be told. It must be experienced. Jesus, the Christ said that to find the Way, it is necessary to give up [material things] what you own and follow, because things, he knew, don't last.

Anthony Gittens, a monk of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, writes in his book, Come Follow Me, about this new, transcendent way which Jesus and others before him proposed:

The Jesus Society

Leave everything behind, take nothing for the journey; risk, trust onto other people, respect them, find acceptance, seek out community, say yes to the kingdom--

Jesus, the Christ, says in his society, there is a new way to live.

You show wisdom, by trusting people;
you handle leadership, by serving;
you handle offenders, by forgiving;
you handle money, by sharing;
you handle enemies, by loving;
and you handle violence, by suffering;

In fact, you have a new attitude toward everything,
toward everybody.

Because this is a Jesus society, and you repent,
not by feeling bad, but by thinking differently.
--written by Rudy Wiebe

The I, the Me, Meets the West

"We have the concept of a "two story" psyche in the west."
--Joseph Campbell

In the view of Joseph Campbell, there is a very divergence of thinking between the East and the West. The thought of a 'Self,' or its absence in the East is possibly the heart of the matter in his view. The subconscious and the unconscious is what Campbell asserts constitutes the idea of the psyche, or the self in the Western mind. "Down below lies the unconscious, while the conscious individual is above." According to others, the I or the Ego is that function which relates an individual to reality as an empirical measure. Ego relates in terms of personal judgments and opinions.

In terms of spirit, traditional churches in the West emphasize personal responsibility for one's own actions; in the East, the focus of Asian religious training tells the adherent to cancel the ego. Why? In simple terms of a society, Asians are to behave in ways dictated to them; there is a strong sense of a dharma, or doing what is one's life work or destiny. "When you turn to Asian systems, and read law books, from India or China for example, it is startling to the Western reader what is proscribed for those who don't follow the rules. Sun-Tzu in The Art of War said, for small faults, there should be great penalties; then there will be no great faults."

Thus the idea of a punishment " fitting the crime" is largely lacking. Since the development of an Ego, or an I is not encouraged, Asians come to adulthood often with a different sense of responsibility. The value of the community is ever important, and individuals often wish not to be singled out for either praise or punishment since this differentiates them from their group.

Like many Asian faith ideals, the Judeo-Christian instruction is towards canceling out the ego, the I. The Christ exhorts his followers to give up all of their personal possessions to come follow him. In doing so, they join into a community that likening to Asian ideals, demands and values obedience to a authority outside of, and higher than the individual self.

The fundamental ideas of a Heavenly Order should be the model for what is life on earth, and that the society is to reflect that same celestial design, may be thought of as the "Great Harmony." If this organization, this society, is successful, then all comes together in one great unit of wholeness. In this system says Campbell, "the sun should not wish to be the moon."

Each person born into the heavenly design has a role, and should not wish to be anything else. His birth is the determining factor for his character, his role, his duty and all other social actions which he may undertake as a member of the community which sustains him. On this point, Asians are often told, ordered, commanded; education is to train one to his proper role.

Alternatively in the West, there are thought to be moments of personal discovery, personal choice and learning. These make conditions for choices which individually and collectively affect individuals in many of life's most intimate moments such as choice of housing, marriage, child bearing, or leisure. Asians do not always make these choices as mature adults. "Responsible citizens in these places are those who perform their jobs perfectly." The society is already defined for them. The ego is erased.

When the buddha said to cancel the ego to cancel suffering, when the Christ exhorted his disciples to believe as he did about the rightness of your Father in Heaven, both are pointing towards an absolute truth, an absolute, transcendent reality based not upon values of the everyday, realities of the world--East or West.

Thus the mere accident of a self, an ego or a psyche is secondary and quite incidental. All that matters is that which supports the Kingdom as the community sees it. "Identity with the transcendent is one's essence."