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And this is very serious. As a
psychotherapist, this holds so true for so many of my clients. At a
deeper level, their problems are not just about not having enough
money or not having a ‘good relationship’; they are about an absence
of any connection to that inner gold that lies deep inside all of
us. As such, I believe that only the urgent birthing of what is best
and noblest about us, only a radical change of consciousness and
awakening of heart, and thus a re- linking once more with that
richness, with our deeper enlightened self, is going to be able to
address this cosmological hole and thus pull us back from the brink.
Put simply, the solutions to the problems of the world do not lie in
our discovering ever more ingenious ways to use technology, but in
our hearts. (It was our ingeniousness that created the atomic bomb.)
So long as our hearts are small and our soul-life underdeveloped ,
we will continue to project our imbalances and deficiencies upon our
world and further twist it out of shape. As our hearts grow bigger,
we will learn to use our many resources in a wise manner.
So how is this re-birthing to take place? How are we to recover our
lost humanity? Ideally, this should be the task of religion, the
word coming from the Latin meaning to re-connect. Ideally, the role
of religion ought to be to inspire us to re-connect to our heart and
soul, to our capacity to experience love, inspiration, awe and
compassion, and thus to the realization of our interconnectedness
with all of life and most especially, to our shared human unity. If
we can be helped to find the part inside us that is courageous and
wise and full and juicy and that truly desires justice, we can be
moved to engage in activities that are life enhancing as opposed to
life-negating, and we will thus spontaneously wish to take stands on
behalf of peace and truth and creating a world that works. Indeed, I
believe that the deeper our mystical imprint, the shallower our
carbon one becomes .
One of the great tragedies of our times, however, is that many of
our religious institutions suffer from the same malaise of
soullessness that pervades our society as a whole. In my experience,
much of religion today is dry and joyless, lacks imagination,
creativity and mindfulness and places more emphasis on knowing about
God(knowing the scriptures well) than helping people find ways and
means directly to experience the divine. Many believe that
Christianity has lost its mystical face which Jung saw as the only
way that religion might have creativity, and has degenerated into
what the Tibetan Master Dwaj Khul called ‘churchianity’. As Gregory
Bateson once put it: ‘The human race today is rotting from a slowly
deteriorating religion?’
So if the purpose of religion is to help reconnect us to a deeper,
fuller and more ‘ sacred us’, in order that we might have some kind
of antidote against civilisation and its discontents, all too often
what happens is that it becomes hijacked by those discontents and
becomes another instrument of them. Or, put another way, if one of
the intentions of religion is to help us move in the direction of
embracing a self that is more loving and inclusive than that defined
by our ego identity, it often ends up being seduced by that
identity. And as ego is the ‘great reducer’ , the ageless wisdom
teachings become watered down accordingly, scrubbed clean of their
sanctity. Indeed, if we think back over the last two thousand years
of our history and remember how much religion has been used as an
instrument of violence, with more people dying in its name than
through any other cause, we realise that it has been because
religion has been denuded of its spirituality. People who feel moved
to kill others because they have different beliefs about God, are in
no way connected with their deeper ground of being.
And indeed, today, if we look around our planet, we see these same
‘religious wars’ still being fought out. If not between the
Catholics and Protestants, then between the Sunnis and Shiites in
Iraq or between the Muslims and Christians, or the Christians and
the Jews. The Indian Spiritual Master Osho once said that ‘If a man
does not know how to love and has lost the art of play, he will use
a bayonet to kill another man.’
One of the problems with Christianity today is that it is still
attached to the worldview of the eighteenth-century ‘Age of
Enlightenment’(what a misnomer!). This basically told us that the
only thing that is important is our reason, and that what cannot be
seen, felt and heard therefore does not exist. Thus, the legacy of
Newton and Descartes hangs over it today like a dark angel.
I say this because one of the problems of subscribing to a rational
worldview is that heart and soul are not permitted entry, and
without these, there is little space for genuine spirit to dance,
and therefore for spiritual evolution to take place. And this is
what is so urgently needed today. As I said earlier, we need to
evolve, to work at awakening a deeper awareness. This lack of spirit
is why the atmosphere of so many churches today is arid and why the
young of today tend to flee them; this is why those who truly wish
to grow spiritually, go elsewhere for nourishment and inspiration.
One might also say that a not-dissimilar atmosphere also pervades
many mosques today, and that many Imans are failing in their mission
to inspire the young to embrace the true teachings of the Prophet,
which are about peace, love and the brotherhood of man, and instead
are feeding them the rhetoric of violence and jihad.
Of course, there are many notable exceptions. I have been privileged
to have encountered truly holy religious people who have deeply
inspired me. But I have had to seek them out. And they are the
exception, not the rule. I have also met with many priests who I
felt were in no way connected to the source about which they spoke
and thus their words lacked the power to heal or inspire! Despite
their sincerity, it would seem that their seminaries never trained
them in the art of fruity mysticism or made them realise that so
long as their hearts remain small, that their ability to know God is
greatly compromised.
At its most dysfunctional and patriarchal worst, we have the cancer
of Fundamentalism: Christofascism in the West and Islamofascism in
the East, where, out of very wounded and fearful egos, fanatics aim
to reduce the divine mystery to a literal interpretation of sacred
scripts, and where all who disagree, are condemned as wrong , for
‘Only we know the ‘true way’ and thus are the only ones ‘chosen by
God! Unable to deal with a complex, ever-changing world and fearful
of the future, many Islamists are attempting to return to some
imagined ideal of a medieval and patriarchal caliphate in which
women are once more enslaved. It has been suggested, for example,
that one of the reasons why many Fundamentalists seem to care so
little for the well being of their planet, is because they are
eagerly awaiting Judgement Day, when they alone will be ‘ lifted up
, saved and resurrected’, while the rest of us poor, ignorant
sinners, can be left to burn in hell! And this is nasty, scary
stuff. And there is a lot of this pseudo mysticism about in our
world today and it is mighty dangerous.
Perhaps it might be for some of the above reason that, in a recent
lecture, the Dalai Lama made the following comments:
‘Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the
human spirit – such as love, compassion, patience, tolerance,
forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of
harmony – which brings happiness to both self and others…
There is no reason why the individual should not develop these, even
to a high degree, without recourse to any religious or metaphysical
belief system. This is why I sometimes say that religion is
something we can perhaps do without. What we cannot do without are
these basic human qualities.’
Indeed, having travelled a great deal in my life, my experience
confirms these words. Indeed, my experience is that today there are
many extraordinary people in every country on earth, who are very
heart centred and courageous , wise and mystically aware. And these
men and women who see their fellow human beings as brothers and
sisters in spirit, and who are also doing incredible things to ‘make
a difference’ to our planet, have primarily become like this without
any adherence to a particular religion . In saying this, I am again
not suggesting that our deeper humanity cannot emerge through being
part of a religion - yes, of course one can find many religious
people, especially in the Latin nations, who are also deeply
spiritual and doing important work – and one hopes that in the
future, if religion undergoes a transformation, which it may well
do, there will be many, many more. But, this is not necessarily
always the case today . Indeed, I would like to suggest that more
and more people today appear to be by-passing spiritless religion
and are learning to attune directly to their source. They are
increasingly realising that God’s grace is available everywhere and
to all people, and that what is primarily required is a
determination to discover how best to embrace , savour and share it.
When people attend my spiritual retreats, I tell them that the way
to God is through listening to their hearts and engaging in
activities that are right for their soul. I tell them that they
don’t need to be a Buddhist to do good meditation, any more than
they need to be a Christian or a Muslim to do good prayer. Put
simply, one can, if one works at it, come close to God without being
part of any organisation or institution. If we put genuine effort
into these two activities that together conspire to quieten the mind
and open the heart , our capacity to hear that still small voice
that is always wanting to communicate with us, (only which we tend
ordinarily not to hear because there is so much noise or static
going on inside us) becomes enhanced. And if, on top of this, we
engage in activities such as attuning to nature, feeding ourselves
with beautiful music or beautiful art or literature, choosing the
company of those we love and who love us, doing work we love,
practising being kind to others, letting ourselves feel awe as we
open to the great mystery of life, and finding our own unique way of
serving or making a difference, our spiritual muscles will become
ever stronger and more resilient.
NEW SPIRITUAL RENAISSANCE
So it is for all these reasons and because I believe our world is
now ripe for a depth (trans egoic) spirituality which many religions
do not offer, that I make a strong plea for spirituality above
religion, for substance not surface. Yes, if religion is important
to us and if it leads to depth, and if we can manage to extract that
deeper spirituality lying at its core, all well and good, and let us
‘go for it’. But if we can not, then let us let religion go. Perhaps
this is easier to understand if we appreciate another dimension of
the times we are living in, and realise that today, in response to
our soullessness, we are also seeing a powerful rebirth of soul the
world over, a great renaissance of the sacred, especially of the
great sacred feminine. Today, the Goddess energy, which for so long
has been pushed underground, is beginning to return from the
Shadows. And one of the consequences of this is that it is becoming
increasingly easier for us to connect in to our spirituality, most
especially to the gentler, more loving aspects of it.
This ‘second Copernican Revolution’, as Willis Harman saw it, then,
is ever growing in strength. We could say that a whole new universal
zeitgeist is being powerfully birthed. Many spiritual teachers
suggest that ‘ urgent world need’ has evoked enormous assistance
from the higher dimensions of life , and that what they refer to as
the ‘spiritual helping forces’ have come much closer to us than they
have ever done before and as a result, we are able to make inner
progress in ways that were simply not possible in the past. The
Bulgarian Spiritual Master, Peter Deunov expressed our challenge as
follows:
We find ourselves at the end of one culture and at the dawn of
another which is rising, developing and rapidly imposing itself…From
now on a radical transformation is progressively occurring in human
consciousness, in man’s thoughts, feelings and actions as well as in
the organisation of human society. In this way the whole of humanity
is rapidly rising to a higher level in order to enter a new life…
The only thing to do now is to know how to put oneself in harmony
with this new wave of life, which is descending on earth. Every
conscious and sensible man and woman must raise the vibration of
their thought and refine their feelings by a constant union with
God’.
Note that Deunov did not say that we must join a religion to have
what he says come about , but rather that we should devote our
efforts to discovering how best to align ourselves to God. I
emphasise again: if God is in all things and all things dwell in
God, then why should we not be able to connect to the divine in our
own back room, or in the presence of a friend or out in nature or,
for that matter, wherever we are at any time!
My orthodox Christian friends have naturally tended to chide me for
such views and for my eclectic and what they sometimes call my ‘lax
approach’. ‘ How’, they have sometimes said to me, ’Can you be so
spiritually promiscuous? Do religious traditions mean nothing to
you; have you no respect? Actually, I do have respect, but only for
that which is authentic and which is relevant to and which serves
new life . If certain forms are no longer appropriate, I say ‘Ditch
them!’ I recognise that life needs to move on and that this means
that we need new teachings and new teachers. Didn’t Jesus himself
tell us that ‘We need new bottles for the new wine’? This means
letting go of those aspects of our past which have become
anachronistic. To give two examples: I think we need to move away
from our attachment to the notion of ourselves as ‘sinful’ and
‘fallen’ ( I think Adam’s ‘sin’ was that he didn’t enjoy the garden
sufficiently)and rather envision ourselves as blessed and
resurrecting. I always find Christianity’s strong emphasis on Jesus’
crucifixion and on the bleeding Christ to be rather macabre. Perhaps
this is because the egoic mind is too terrified of the transcendent!
Also, it is time we let go all that sexual guilt which has flowed
into Christianity just because St Augustine felt so bad about his
‘lower urges!’ And let us also move away from this terrible duality
between high and low and our damning of the low. Where churches need
to be helping the young, is in recognising and celebrating the
sacred dimensions of their sexuality. Indeed, one of the reasons why
our sexuality has become so perverse today, is because we are still
attached to our Judeo-Christian guilt about it, and, of course,
where there is repression, there is always obsession and perversion.
In my own spiritual journey, I have been deeply touched by many
different sources, especially by the traditions of the Native
peoples, who , over the centuries, have been so horrendously
decimated by the white people, yet whose religions are a) far older
than the ‘great religions’ of Christianity , Buddhism and Islam etc,
b) are full of integrity, and c) have never lost their reverence for
Mother Earth and her fruitfulness, and therefore for me, are so full
of spirituality. ( I often think that if our planet was in their
hands, we’d never be having global warming today !)
I have also learned from the wisdom traditions of the East as well
as from many newly emerging sources, as I believe that today, many
new awakening methodologies are ‘entering the market’, reflecting
our new soul needs as citizens of the twenty-first century. Indeed,
above all, I need my spiritual life to be fruity and celebratory,
not ponderous and intellectual, and I have recognised that one of
the most important things for this to happen, is that I don’t take
myself too seriously, that I laugh a lot and move about lightly,
and, most importantly, continually allow my heart, soul, imagination
and creativity to be fed with delicious sacred titbits. And I don’t
mind where these titbits come from so long as they are right for me
and are genuine. They could include engaging in activities such as
attending a festival to celebrate some sacred occasion, listening to
music that touches my heart, or going on a Buddhist meditation
weekend. Personally, I find these activities more soul sustaining
than sitting in a church where one gets preached at, often made to
feel inadequate for not being more like Jesus, yet not being given
any tools to help move one more in that direction. In all my many
years of regular church all through school, no one ever told me how
to pray or what prayer actually meant. And today, if I meditate on
the quality of Jesus, I tune into a presence of great joy, to
someone who also celebrated life as well as taking on the sins of
the world. After all, he told us that we couldn’t enter the kingdom
of Heaven unless we become again as a little child, that is, learn
to honour the child inside ourselves, that so many of us egoic
adults have long ago learned to reject in the interest of ‘growing
up.’ (That, I feel, has much to do with why we grow up to be so
stiff and mentally identified!) The point is that little children
love to play. And play is so healing; play is also prayer. And so
much creativity is unleashed in the process. The wonderful thing
about little children is that they have not yet learned to grow away
from their core, mystical essence. They have not lost the ability to
delight in little things.
In my own spiritual life, then, I’ve had to work a lot to re-gain my
‘lost freshness’, and in the process, have sometimes been a bit like
a bee hopping from flower to flower to obtain the different
qualities of nectar that I have felt I have needed. For example, at
one stage in my life, I studied a lot in Zen Temples to learn about
emptiness. Once, I travelled half way across Russia to find an
extraordinary cave monastery, so I could learn about prayer at the
hands of monks who did this all day. (It was in this place,
interestingly, that I also became healed of a serious disease.) In
my twenties I was with a Sufi group. I have also worked with certain
sacred substances and have derived enormous benefits, with whole
segments of my psyche being powerfully cleared of old, and dark
patterns.
Again, conventional religion seems to forget that if we wish to be
more holy, we need to work hard at becoming more whole, part of
which requires purifying ourselves so that our channels to the
higher sacred worlds can become more open. In this context, it is
also a myth to believe that we can discover our deeper humanity
without paying attention to our psychological blockages. ( For
example, if we are still angry with our own father, this will be
projected onto God the Father.)Yet the church on the whole, offers
very little in-depth psychological assistance. Today I read, for
example, that the Pope’s ‘weapon’ against paedophilia in the
Catholic church is to be prayer. And while I wholly believe in the
power of prayer , I do not believe that, of itself, it is
sufficient. Paedophile priests are, for most part, deeply disturbed
human beings, who not only need our compassion but also require very
in-depth work with trained experts, if a deeper healing is to take
place.
Another very important dimension to spiritual development (again not
stressed in the church) is sitting at the feet of a genuine, awake,
Spiritual Master, ( who tend on the whole to be singularly
uninterested in religion!)What I have realised from them is that if
we really wish to grow a deeper soul life, we need consciously to
seek out their presence, as their higher vibration rate can begin to
speed up ours.. Indeed, I believe these great men and women need to
be our models for what it means to be authentically human. Better, I
say, to find a great Master who is still alive and kicking, than
read about the great Masters of our past who have long been dead and
buried! The Christ, David Spangler reminds us, is a great unitive,
educative principle of life, not a person, and yes, Jesus became one
with that principle – one could say he was a fully awakened,
compassionate, loving human being, a Christed being. But he has not
been the only one. There have also been other Christed figures and I
believe there are also Christed persons living on our planet today
and thus we should seek them out and learn from them. We must never
forget that just as we are seeking enlightenment, that Enlightenment
is also stalking us!
Towards this end, what is also very important is that we address our
dark side, or our Shadow( another thing that ‘conventional religion’
tends to ignore.) This implies that we need to get off our high
horses, off the illusion of how ‘nice’ and ‘decent’ we are, and
allow ourselves to confront the worst parts of ourselves, the
nastiest, darkest aspects, which we all have, as it is in these
unlit dimensions of our psyches that we will discover the spiritual
juices that will help springboard us up into the realms of our
higher nature. In Jung’s words: ‘We don’t become enlightened by
sitting in the light but by going into our darkness.’
And again, conventional religion has no structures that allow for
this. Indeed, the egoically religious person hates looking deeply
into himself. He prefers believing in a devil outside of himself,
continually tempting him, so his life can be about attacking it,
thus taking no responsibility for his own evil which therefore
becomes projected out onto other people and the world around him.
The more mystically inclined spiritual person, on the other hand,
understands that the devil is actually the sum total of his own
psychological resistance to the light and so is willing to work with
his own darkness and try to own it and so not project it outside of
himself. Wars happen for many reasons, but one is that they reflect
the sum total of our disowned destructive energy, which therefore
continually seeps out of us contaminating our planet.
So if I, and many of my friends and colleagues and many millions of
people all over the planet, are, like me, spiritually ‘promiscuous’
, then I celebrate the fact. Please note: this does not imply we are
anti-religion. ( I am not anti anything!) We are just pro spiritual.
Yes, of course, there are certain limitations to not abiding by a
religious structure. For example, one is not part of a ‘group’; we
are challenged to create our own disciplines and our own structures.
And at times, we may feel quite alone. Also, we may have to
integrate different systems together. In addition, we do not have a
specific code of ethics to live by. But again, what I have found is
that the more we connect to our source, the less alone and the more
abundant we feel, and the more an inner guidance starts to arise up
from deep inside us. Also, I believe that the wherewithal both for
integration and for understanding values, exists inside our heart.
If our hearts are closed, we may know the Ten Commandments by heart,
be able to recite pages and pages of the Koran and the Upanishads,
but something will always be missing.
So what is important to me is how open my heart is, not whether I am
a paid-up card-carrier of any particular religion. If my heart is
functioning at its deeper level, I am connected to a spiritual
energy that I know can sustain me in the hardest of times, and to be
honest, I think God is much more interested in how much space I
allow for this to happen, than whether I am a Jew or a Muslim or
anything else. But to come into such a place does not happen
overnight. It takes a lot of committed inner work. Shadow work; soul
work; heart work; psychological work. Spiritual awakening can be
tough. And we need to be very sincere. And conventional ego man is
just used to earning his outer living, not his inner one!
So if we are to create a better world for ourselves, which I feel
needs to be our main goal in life today, then I think we are also
called to be innovative and resourceful and continually explore what
works for us and what doesn’t.(At different times, we will need
different kinds of help and different kinds and levels of spiritual
teaching.) Our living needs to be daily informed by the question of
what it really means to be more human, for then we can try to bring
our answers into all the many different areas of our lives so that
our daily living itself may eventually become our sacred practice.
So if you, like me, find yourself more interested in spirituality
than religion and if you find being eclectic also seems to be your
path, then embrace it wholeheartedly, together with the many
exciting challenges that go with it. I think it is a wonderful
privilege being alive today at this mid point between the death of
an old regime and the birth of an entirely new one. And we must
remember that it is through us that newness is born. You and I, not
‘them’ (whoever they are) are the midwives of tomorrow and let us
celebrate that. In doing so, we also remember that the great
Masters, the great teachers of all the great world religions, all
transcend religion, and all say basically the same thing. I will
leave the last words with the Sufi Master Hazrat Inayat Khan:
‘When we are face to face with truth, the point of view of Krishna,
Buddha, Christ, or any other prophet is the same. When we look at
life from the top of the mountain, there is no limitation; there is
the same immensity.’
*See my CD on ‘The role of the Spiritual
Master.’
** See my CD on ‘The many paths to God.’
***See my CD ‘Exploring the Shadow of the
Spiritual path.’
**** See my article ‘The Ego and the Heart’. |
