The following is excerpted from Tantric Jesus: The Erotic Heart of Early Christianity by James Hughes Reho, PhD, published by Inner Traditions.
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
Meister Eckhart
Dive into that sea which is full of glory. Plunge into these languid eyes.
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi (Rumi)
A Chance Encounter
Several years ago I traveled to a Christian Cistercian ashram (Indian monastery) of the Syrian rite, high up in the hills above the tea plantations and forests of Kerala, India. It was a simple and unassuming place, filled with fragrant flowers, and from every turn beautiful vistas of the green mountains and valleys below greeted you. In the tradition of Indian renunciants, these monks live lives of radical (and freeing) poverty, possessing little more than two squares of cloth for their clothing and a metal dish for food. Meals are taken without utensils, sitting on the floor in a long line, backs against the wall, gazing out onto a beautiful natural vista through floor-to-ceiling windows in the dining corridor. We would eat in silence as one brother reads from the Malayalam collection of the lives of the saints. Spiritual food, bodily food, and aesthetic food are all taken in together, as it should be.
During my time there, I experienced what externally was a nonevent but on a spiritual level changed my life forever: I met Father N., one of the resident monks. I was walking outside near the monastery dairy, the sun was shining, and there was a slight breeze, which carried the scent of garden flowers and incense through the warm air. I came face-to-face with Father N., wearing his two squares of cloth, and greeted him. He looked at me and asked, “You are a priest, yes?” His was that lovely lilting English particular to speakers of Malayalam and Tamil in South India.
“Yes,” I responded, “I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, in the United States.”
“Is that the church that ordains . . . women?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, “we are one of the churches that does.” Where was this headed?
“How does that go? I mean, how does that work out?”
Not quite sure what he meant, I simply said, “It works out just fine,” and smiled.
“Good,” he said, seemingly relieved. “Good.” He smiled, tilted his head a few times as a mark of friendliness, and walked on past me, swept back into his silence. And that was it, on the physical level. I never saw Father N. again, except during the daily cycle of community prayers, and we never spoke further. During that conversation, however, something powerful happened: he gazed into me, and I let myself be seen. And this changed forever how I would understand myself.
During our small and fairly uninteresting verbal exchange, Father N. seemed to look right into me. His eyes were like streams of sweetness that opened up in me a bottomless experience of being seen. He did not look at me the way I was used to being looked at, even by those who love me deeply; he looked at me the way I imagine Christ looked at people: he looked into me, deep into me. His eyes seemed to swell and filled my entire frame of vision.
His eyes carried a bright light, but not a harsh light; a deep glow that seemed to shoot through everything, including me. In a split second, there was nothing left but his eyes, this powerful sense of light around and in them, and a barely locatable sense of myself. At first I became frightened—he was seeing me! All my hidden nooks and crannies, beyond and behind the levels of persona I fabricate so well for myself and others, beyond and under even my own narrative and self-understanding and identity. There was hidden shame, deep sadness, repressed memories, deeds, and emotions: it was all available to his gaze. I thought I would burn up, that all that would be left of me under the fire of his gaze would be my necklace and my ring lying on top of a smoking, crispy french fry that marked where I had been standing.
I felt as if God’s own self were gazing deep into me, seeing all that I had swept under the carpet from my own vision and certainly from that of others. I thought to myself, “My God! I am the worst of all human beings; there is so much that is foul and sick inside of me! I am of no value; I am broken, ignorant, terrible.” In later reflection, this part of the experience reminded me of how the prophets first react in the Hebrew scriptures when God gazes on and into them and calls them. The prophet Isaiah, for example, tells us that
[i]n the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.” The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
Yet almost immediately upon feeling this fear, something else happened. I saw, felt, tasted that this all-penetrating gaze was a gaze of love. Whether from the deep spiritual wells of Father N. himself or from Christ the param-guru looking out through his eyes, I do not know. But I do know that just as I began to think, like Isaiah, “Woe is me! I am lost!” I realized that through this gaze I was being loved. In spite of, or because of, the ability of Father N. to penetrate into all of my life and self, I was being loved—not my persona, not my list of good deeds and accomplishments, but me—all of me was being loved. Even the content of the inner closets of shame, even the repressed material accumulated over a lifetime, even the unavoidable evil that I participated in as part of a human community and nation, all of it was being loved. Tears came to my eyes, and my heart boiled with gladness. It seemed as if a lifetime of healing work was accomplished in those few seconds that I spoke with Father N. Large swaths of shame and fear had been replanted with love, acceptance, and a sense of value.
This, too, seems to be congruent with the experience of Isaiah (among others) who experienced the presence of God, the gaze of the Holy One. After feeling he is doomed, Isaiah not only becomes cleansed of his deep anxiety and sense of impurity but is fired with courage for the work he is invited to take on. He tells us:
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: “Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”
When I met Father N., I was in a particularly open and clear space, having been walking through the fragrant and peaceful gardens of the ashram saying my mantra and with nothing on the immediate horizon to worry about. If I had been locked into my own agenda, my own head, would I have been able to experience God through his gaze as I did? I do not know. Certainly some component of such an experience has to do with the openness of the receiver. There have been saints and tantric masters, to be sure, who have been able to find God’s gaze of love in all of creation (including all of humanity), even in its most broken elements. Yet these very masters—saints like Francis of Assisi, Seraphim of Sarov, Teresa of Ávila—would be the first to assert that God is the primary actor. They simply cooperate to allow God’s gaze entrance into them. And from the inside, God’s gaze works to find the cracks in our inner walls and shines through them, breaking through a lifetime of fortifications and enlivening our hearts. Let us now explore how we can craft a practice that can help open us to the living power of that gaze.
The Holy Gaze
There are many ways to gaze. We can use our eyes as Father N. did, and catalyze an experience of holiness, or we can turn our gaze into a stare, burning into another human being, objectifying them, reducing them to a smoking grease spot. Anger, lust, jealousy, and other perversions of our holy and deep eros can turn a holy gaze into a burning and violating stare. The experience of the stare is the opposite of the experience of the Divine. The brilliant 20th-century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre well described the stare (le regard) in human terms, the experience of two dueling subjectivities that fought through their eyes to see which would reduce the other to an object through their gaze.3
Sartre’s deep sensitivity to the experience of human freedom led him to understand that there is nothing worse than for the human person, the free subjectivity that is “for-itself” (pour soi), to be falsely reduced to a determined material object, an “in-itself” (en soi). Such a false reduction can come about through the stares of others. It is no surprise, then, that in his play No Exit, we hear, “L’enfer. C’est les autres” (“Hell is other people”). If even a human stare could temporarily reduce a free human person to an in-itself object, imagine the result of a divine stare, should one exist! We would be crushed and fully objectified, turned into rubble in more ways than one, with no escape. The divine stare would be everywhere, bludgeoning every human for-itself subjectivity into an in-itself object. Simply put, if the only Divine gaze were the Sartrean stare, God and human subjectivity could not coexist.
The good news is that there are many ways to gaze. The gaze I experienced from Father N. was not a Sartrean stare: it was quite the opposite. My initial response of fear did not come from the experience of being objectified but of being deeply known in my subjectivity. Such a holy gaze invites us to become more, not less, human. The stare is a perversion of the holy gaze. The gaze of two people in love is a better human analog for the divine gaze than the master-slave dialectic* that takes place in the Sartrean stare. It is through the divine gaze that we become truly real and come to know who we are. It is not solely through self-exploration but also through divine gazing—through holy seeing and through being seen in holiness—that we come to know ourselves as selves and come to know ourselves as divine. The poet Rumi points up the distinctions in seeing:
The eye of the sea is one thing, the eye of the foam another.
Leave the foam aside. See with the eye of the sea.
*In Phenomenology of Spirit Friedrich Hegel explores the evolution of self-consciousness through a subject learning to engage another subject. The master-slave (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft) dialectic taken to its extreme brings about a “struggle to the death” between the two subjectivities. However, Hegel saw this phenomenon not as a necessity but as one possibility in the encounter of two subjectivities.
Seeing, and the light by which we see, are two related metaphors for divine knowledge and self-knowledge in Christian and non-Christian schools of Tantra. We have seen that in the physiology of Eastern Tantra the ajna chakra located between the brows and serving as a “command center” of the chakras4 is called the third eye or spiritual eye. It is an organ of a type of perception most easily described as a form of seeing. Gazing, when practiced masterfully with an open heart, can lead through the eyes to a direct experience of seeing from the ajna chakra and experiencing the ajna chakra of your partner.
In Indian spirituality gazing can be a means of communication from a divine teacher to a student. This form of gazing is called darshan in Sanskrit. True darshan between guru and disciple can have a powerful and lasting effect, though the student must be in a state open enough to receive the transmission or little will happen. The Christian monk and sannyasin Abhishiktananda wrote about the life-changing darshan he received from Ramana Maharshi, one of the great Indian gurus of the 20th century. Ramana Maharshi himself had this to say about darshan: “When the eyes of the student meet the gaze of the teacher, words of instruction are no longer necessary.” Similarly, Meher Baba (1894–1969), the great modern Indian spiritual teacher and proclaimed avatar, taught that
[t]he ancient Rishis have attached great importance to having the darshana of saints and masters, because they are the source of the constant flow of love and light which emanates from them and makes an irresistible appeal to the inner feeling of the aspirant even when he receives no verbal instruction from them. . . . Having had the darshana of the supreme Beloved, the aspirant naturally desires nothing except to have more of his darshana, and is thus impelled by his inner spiritual urge to seek the sahavasa (company) of the Master as often as possible.
We find darshan in the ancient Indian literature as well, even outside patently tantric sources. In the Bhagavad-Gita, usually considered part of the Vedantic scriptures, the great warrior and ruler Arjuna experiences the darshan of Krishna, who has been serving as his chariot driver. Being in close quarters, we can imagine Arjuna being drawn into the eyes of Krishna, the Lord of Lords, also called Hari (the thief of hearts):
Hari, the great lord of yoga, then revealed to Pārtha (Arjuna) his Supreme and Divine form. Of many mouths and eyes, of many visions of marvel, of many divine ornaments, of many divine uplifted weapons. Wearing divine garlands and raiments, with divine perfumes and ointments, made up of all wonders, resplendent, boundless, with face turned everywhere. If the light of a thousand suns were to blaze forth all at once in the sky, that might resemble the splendour of that exalted Being. There the Pandava (Arjuna) beheld the whole universe, with its manifold divisions gathered into one, in the body of the God of gods.
[Arjuna said:] “In Thy body, O God, I see all the gods and the varied hosts of beings as well, Brahma, the Lord seated on the lotus throne and all the sages and heavenly nagas. I behold Thee, infinite in form on all sides, with numberless arms, bellies, faces and eyes, but I see not Thy end or Thy middle or Thy beginning, O Lord of the universe, O Form Universal. I behold Thee with Thy crown, mace and discus, glowing everywhere as a mass of light, hard to discern, dazzling on all sides with the radiance of the flaming fire and sun, incomparable. Thou art the Imperishable, the Supreme to be realized. Thou art the ultimate resting-place of the universe; Thou art the undying guardian of the eternal law. Thou art the Primal Person, I think.”
This darshan experience bears great similarity to the experience of Jesus’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor, experienced by Peter, James, and John. In both stories, the theophany occurs in a small, intimate setting. In both stories, there is already a great affection and bond between guru and disciple. In both stories, theophany occurs through the transmission of higher seeing through the gaze, through darshan.
When we read through the gospels we find a strong focus on light and seeing. There are multiple stories in the gospels of Jesus bringing sight to those who cannot see. One of these is the story of blind Bartimaeus:
They came to Jericho. As [Jesus] and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
While not necessarily apparent to a modern reader, this is a story about the call to discipleship. For Bartimaeus to be able to “see again” and regain his birthright of wholeness or “honor” (his name means “Son of Honor”), he must be given sight—again. Being made in the image and likeness of God, the mystical sight that he is given brings his true nature to life within him. It is not something “supernatural” or against nature but rather is of his own original blessed nature, something to be regained. Seeing again sets Bartimaeus on the tantric path of Christian discipleship. Following Jesus “on the way” was gospel language for becoming a disciple. We have seen that before Christians were first called Christians in Antioch, they called themselves “followers of the way.” And as we have seen, that way is a tantric way. Whatever may have happened to Bartimaeus physically, it is clear that he receives divine clarity as to the path and destiny of his life, the form his “honor” would take, and that this mystical knowledge is wrapped up with seeing and looking—and therefore with light.
First century physiology explained sight as light entering into the body through the aperture of the eye. Thus, to receive sight and be able to see was to have light resident in your body; to be unable to see was to be in darkness. Jesus speaks to this understanding when he says, “The lamp of the body is the eye. If, then, your eye is single, your whole body shall be light-filled. But if your eye is evil, your whole body will be dark-filled. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!”8 This inner light and inner darkness may have been used to understand physical sight, but the experience of the inner light and the inner darkness extends beyond physical blindness and sightedness. In our own times, we can see this in the autobiography of Jacques Lusseyran, a hero of the French Resistance during World War II who had been blind from a young age. Lusseyran tells us what he learned about this inner light through having to maneuver as a blinded youth:
Without my eyes light was much more stable than it had been with them. Light was my whole reason for living. I let it rise in me like water in a well, and I rejoiced. . . . If, instead of letting myself be carried along by confidence and throwing myself into things, I hesitated, calculated, thought about the wall, the half-open door, the key in the lock; if I said to myself that all these things were hostile. . . . I hit or wounded myself. . . . Anger and impatience had the same effect. . . . I could no longer afford to be jealous or unfriendly because, as soon as I was, a bandage came down over my eyes, and I was bound hand and foot. All at once a black hole opened, and I was helpless. But when I was happy and serene, approached people with confidence and thought well of them, I was rewarded with light. . . . Armed with such a tool, why should I need a moral code? For me this tool took the place of red and green lights.
Jesus above contrasts the unfolded or single eye (ophthalmos haplous) not with its natural opposite (ophthalmos diplous, the folded or doubled eye), but with the evil eye (ophthalmos poneros), a 1st-century ancestor to the Sartrean stare, rooted in envy. According to Jesus, light and looking have to do with the opposite of the Sartrean stare and of the evil eye, which seek to curse, crush, and objectify the other. The single eye then must be that which lifts, humanizes, and helps divinize the other. The single eye is the human experience of the gaze of God.
The gaze of God has two meanings, and we mean both of them here. The gaze of God is “God’s gaze,” the way Isaiah was seen by God, the way I was seen by Father N., the way each of us has hopefully been gazed upon by someone deeply in love with us who mediated God’s light for us. This gaze, God’s gaze, is the loving gaze of God as Divine Mother (Shakti-Christ-Kali), who gazes upon us so as to reflect back into the eyes of each of us a sense of our own identity and ultimate value.
This process, really part of the ever-creating nature of the Divine, parallels the human phenomenon of “mirroring.” As explored in the seminal work of developmental psychologist D. W. Winnicott,10 “mirroring” occurs through the knowledge we receive through our mother gazing into our infant eyes with empathy and love. Famed psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut affirms the importance of the “confirming/mirroring process” for healthy development.11 Psychotherapist Corinne Taylor says that “for an infant to develop optimally, he needs the foundational experience of an authentically mirroring mother.”12 She explains the developmental benefits of this mirroring process clearly:
If mother mirrors [the infant], he sees himself in her face and gets to know himself. Mother’s mirroring gaze upon her infant is thus a founding experience as it establishes a template in the infant’s ego as a site for something good and confirms the infant’s place in the world; moreover, how we have been looked at in early life may determine what we see in other people later.
God’s gaze then helps us come to know ourselves and to develop along the tantric path of theosis. God’s gaze helps us grow. It is the visual corollary to God’s voice that says to Jesus at his baptism (spiritual birth) and thus to us as well, “You are my child, my beloved; with you I am well pleased.” It is part of the constant act of creating that is the nature of Shakti, of Christ.
This gaze in its purest form is celebrated in the icon of the Eye of God. We may, however, feel more drawn to God’s gaze through icons of the gazing Christ or of the gazing Mother of God. In these latter icons, the Mother of God gazes at us while holding the infant Jesus who gazes at her, clearly drawing upon our human experience of mirroring to invite us into God’s creative gaze. Some icons of the Eye of God include both the Mother and the Infant Christ together with a stylized representation of the “unmediated” experience of God’s loving and mirroring gaze. There is an old Orthodox saying that is pertinent here: “In the icon, the body is simply the support of the face, the face but a setting for the gaze.”
In addition to being God’s gaze, the gaze of God is also “the act of gazing on God,” such as the disciples James, John, and Peter experienced in seeing Christ transfigured on Mount Tabor. We have already looked into the Transfiguration a bit in the first part of this book (chapter 4) from the perspective of the human person being the temple of the Divine. Let us add that the ability to really see into the deep reality of our world—that is, the world transfigured—is an outcome of learning to lovingly gaze. We cannot peer into the temple of the human person or look into the sanctuary of the elements of the world without being able to gaze. Only in this loving act do we learn to accomplish “the act of gazing on God” when we look out from ourselves into the world, a world filled with the uncreated light of the Holy Trinity.
We note, too, that the 19th-century report of Nikolay Motovilov of his experience of the transfiguration of Seraphim of Sarov, which we looked at in an earlier chapter, involves gazing. Notice how their dialogue, recounted by Motovilov, focuses on the injunction to see:
Fr. Seraphim said: “Don’t be alarmed, your Godliness! Now you yourself have become as bright as I am. You are now in the fullness of the Spirit of God yourself; otherwise you would not be able to see me as I am. . . . But why, my dear, do you not look me in the eyes? Just look, and don’t be afraid! The Lord is with us!”
After these words I glanced at his face and there came over me an even greater reverent awe. Imagine in the center of the sun, in the dazzling light of its midday rays, the face of a man talking to you. You see the movement of his lips and the changing expression of his eyes . . . [yet] you do not even see yourself or his figure, but only a blinding light spreading far around.
Motovilov’s senses become suffused with the experience of transfigured reality—and all through the experience of gazing, lovingly we must imagine, into the eyes of one of the great Christian masters and teachers of the modern era. Seraphim says above that Motovilov has come to “see me as I am.” Motovilov has learned to see with the single eye. His body is light filled, just as is Seraphim’s. In deep loving gazing with another person, Motovilov discovers his own nature. He encounters reality—his own and Seraphim’s—perhaps for the first time.
We see that the gaze of God can be mediated through human persons. This is why mutual gazing is an important tantric practice. The need for mirroring from the Divine Mother does not end in infancy. Through partnering with an appropriate person, a couple can broker this experience for one another in a way that not only leads to powerful self-knowledge but also to an experience of the Divine alive in and through the partner. Loving one’s neighbor as oneself, then, moves from the sphere of codified moral injunction into the experiential. As a moral “command,” loving one’s neighbor as oneself is likely not possible. I cannot simply decide that I will no longer be egotistical or fearful of others. The realm of decision and moral choice is the realm in which the ability to love one’s neighbor as oneself plays out. However, it is not the realm in which this ability is first discovered or impressed into the heart. Such discovery comes from the actual experience of the Divine. One channel through which this living knowledge can come is through engaging another person in the practice of tantric gazing.
Through gazing we can develop the ability to love in the deeply tantric way of Jesus, in which there is no exception or “outside” in regard to whom or what is loved. Through gazing we can gain the experience of another person mediating the Divine and mirroring our own potential divinity. Through gazing we can then learn to generalize this experience and see the entire world and all beings in it as mediators of the Divine and mirrors of our own potential divinity. Our identity becomes less and less localized, and our protective ego is ousted from the driver’s seat of our consciousness. As we make progress along the arc of deification, loving our neighbor as ourselves is no longer a moral struggle; we find that loving our neighbor as ourselves is the natural inclination of our deep eros. Loving our neighbors as ourselves simply becomes what makes sense and what brings us (and others) joy. It is what increases the light that is life.
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