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As I hope to demonstrate here, the process of genuine spiritual
awakening is not something that is achieved easily. Or not
ordinarily. It takes a lot of inner work, courage and determination.
There aren’t many short cuts; it tends to be a slow process and we
need to discover how to do it by actually doing it. Very often, just
as we think we have some kind of handle on what awakening means, we
discover that the rules of the game will have radically shifted,
because we will have shifted, and therefore nothing we will have
done in the past is going to work for us in the future! Indeed,
making the transition from living our lives literally - not
bothering to see any underlying meaning behind what transpires for
us - to living it symbolically, where we are continually trying to
root after deeper meaning and uncover symbolic significances, is not
something that happens without considerable effort. And further,
there are never any ultimate answers. In Jung’s words: ‘The serious
problems of life are never fully solved. If ever they should appear
to be so, it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The
meaning and purpose of a problem seem to live not in its solution
but in our working at it incessantly….’
So while I want to encourage the seeker to understand that there
really are huge benefits to be reaped as he or she inches closer to
their soul life, I also want them to understand that these gifts do
not come for free and that one must expect to work for it and that
some of that work will be tough.
LIVING WITH ABUNDANCE
However, the fact that this may be the case, is no reason why the
spiritual journey cannot be lived joyfully and abundantly. Indeed,
how each of us experiences our lives is not just about what happens
to us; it is about how we choose to experience what happens to us;
it is about our attitude. So merely because we may be experiencing
difficulties of one form or another, is no reason to hold life as
being burdensome or to give in, say, to feeling victimised. (1)
Indeed, if we can learn to open our heart to our spiritual
unfolding, and let our heart guide and instruct us, even though we
may at times, get lost in dark forests, sink in slimy swamps and
feel abandoned in strange wastelands, abundance and fullness of
being can always be our close companion. Even in our greatest
despair. (.2)
As seekers, then, we need to learn that that space of consciousness
or context, out of which we experience the content of our lives, is
as, if not more, important than what actually happens to us, and
that the more we choose to connect to our hearts and souls, the more
we will have a direct line to a source that can empower us with joy,
fullness of being and love, no matter what may be going on for us
externally. Indeed, it may well be that one of the main purposes of
our lives being problematic at times, is to help us make the effort
to connect more powerfully to that abundant source.
BEING INITIATED
There is no doubt, however, that the Tibetan Buddhist Master
Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche was speaking a truth when he suggested that
being on a path was analogous to ‘Licking honey off a razor’s edge.’
For the Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assigioli:
‘Spiritual development in a person is a long and arduous adventure,
a journey through strange lands, full of wonders, but also beset
with difficulties and dangers. It involves deep purification and
transformation, the awakening of a number of formerly inactive
powers, the raising of the consciousness to levels it has never
reached before and its expansion in a new internal dimension. We
should not be surprised, therefore, that such major change passes
through various critical stages and these are often accompanied by
neuro-psychological and even physical and psychosomatic
disturbances.’
The analogy I would give is that the path has both roses and thorns
on it and that you can’t have the one without the other, that is, we
cannot reach the roses without also having to confront the thorns.
And sometimes they can prick us rather hard. The art is that while
being pricked we take care not to move away from and so lose touch
with, the fragrance from the roses!
My experience is that the more we progress towards the light or the
more we begin opening to the sacred and begin accessing abundant
states of being, the more spirit seems to want to test us, and the
tougher our tests can become. At the start of our spiritual journey,
it hardly seems as if we are being tested at all. We seem to get
away with making mistakes and going down many blind alleyways.
However, the ‘rules of the game’ change quite radically when we
begin to make a little headway, and what in the beginning of our
journey may be a small deviation and therefore not of great
significance, can, if repeated later on, become a big one and with
potentially huge consequences.
What I have also learned is that if we see ourselves as a seeker
after truth, a searcher after the Holy Grail, or as someone engaged
in the’ Hero’s Journey’ (all different names for the same thing)
then we are continually engaging in a process of initiation, which
Mircea Eliade defined in terms of our ‘Becoming another’…Initiation,
he tells us, is ‘ Equivalent to a basic change in our existential
condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally
different being from that which he possesses before his initiation.’
For the Tibetan Master, Dwaj Khul, Initiation is ‘Essentially a
moving out from under ancient controls, into the control of more
spiritual and increasingly higher values.’
We cannot be on a path then, without facing certain ordeals. And
they all evolve around how effectively we are able to embrace our
soul identity and separate ourselves from those ‘ancient controls’
of our egoistically oriented nature. However, towards this end,
spirit doesn’t seem to care much about how uncomfortable we may
feel! (As we will be seeing, if it seems to be appropriate for our
spiritual growth that our egos need to undergo a severe bruising,
then that may be exactly what will happen!)
NO GUARANTEES
Indeed, just because we might be sincere in our aspirations, is
no guarantee that good fortune will always come our way! Tragic
things can happen to lovely people. I think of wonderful Ram Dass,
with whom I had the honour to study with, being ‘stroked’, as he
called it. Having served others all his life, this most
compassionate and wonderful teacher was struck down by a most
debilitating stroke at quite a young age. He talked about his
experience as being a fierce form of grace! This allowed me to
understand that grace not only comes to us as an amazing soother-of-sorrows,
which, as the song tells us, can also ‘Calm our woes and drive away
our fears’. It also has its more savage manifestations. The divine,
we must understand, has a dark as well as a light side, and the
paradox is that it is often through our experience of its darer face
that we are best assisted to awaken to our deeper self!
The reality of this last point came home to me again very poignantly
some years ago, when another man who had also been my teacher and
mentor for many years - again a person of deep humility and wisdom,
and one of the kindest people you could ever imagine - lost his new
wife in a car crash after just a few weeks of marriage (after
telling me how blessed he felt in at last having a soul mate after
so many years of loneliness). Again, I couldn’t believe that such a
terrible thing could happen to such a lovely man, just as I couldn’t
believe that someone like Ram Dass should also have had to endure
such suffering.
’God tests us very strongly’, my old friend told me a little later.
’Being on a spiritual path is a damn tough undertaking, but we have
to surrender to it. And keep our heart open all the time. In fact,
once we are on it, there is no turning back’ (Trungpa said the same
thing), ‘And we have to accept whatever it is that God puts our way.
There is always a higher purpose, a deeper meaning to things, which
we may not ‘get’ for a long time. Often, new understandings take a
long, long time to percolate through. I am going to choose to use my
loss to help me grow, not shrink.
THE CHALLENGE OF THE NEW MILLENIUM
So if being on a path is anyway challenging and requires a lot
of courage on our part (4), I believe it is even more challenging
given that we are doing our spiritual seeking at this particular
time in our human history, where circumstances are asking us to
deepen our soul lives as never before. (33) Today, we are living at
a time where one age is trying to die and a new one is doing its
best to be born, and this makes for a lot of turbulence and
confusion. In part, this is because while many of our old ways of
doing things – and this also includes our spirituality –no longer
work, those innovations that will replace them have not yet come
into being. In a talk entitled ‘The New Heaven and the New Earth’,
the late Bulgarian Spiritual Master Peter Deunov made the following
observations:
‘We find ourselves at the end of the decline of one culture and the
dawn of another, which is rising, developing and already imposing
itself…From now on a radical transformation is progressively
occurring in human consciousness – in their thoughts, feelings and
actions as well as in all the organization of human society…
All earthly beings will be subjected to the great purification of
the Divine Fire in order to become worthy of the new epoch…. A
powerful magnetic current with a force of millions of volts is
already reaching our earth…Those not ready to encounter it will
undergo nervous shock, physical imbalances and different psychic
disorders. The only thing now is to know how to put oneself in
harmony with this wave of new life which is descending on Earth…’
TOWARDS NEW
THINKING
What
also complicates things is that many people with spiritual
aspirations no longer feel attracted by their religious traditions,
which they experience to be more focussed in the past and therefore
no longer relevant to this new current. Many of us today feel called
to be more eclectic in our approach to the sacred and to break loose
from all forms of institutionalised religion. (5)
However, this
means we are challenged to branch out on our own and thus no longer
having the supporting power of thousands of years of tradition
behind us. Also, in the past, many spiritual people would go to
have their initiations outside of society; they would leave the
‘real world’ and go into caves and temples and pyramids to do their
transforming. Today, things could not be more different. Today, we
are being challenged to undergo our initiations within society, that
is, do our ‘spiritual growing’ right in the very middle of
civilisation and all its many turbulences and discontents.
And this is
tough since it implies that our spirituality has to be much more
fully incorporated into all areas of our lives, which in turn means
that we need to be dealing simultaneously with many more
dimensions of being. One could say we are being challenged both to
bring a higher awareness down into our secular culture and at the
same time, to try to raise the vibrational quality of that culture
(or, metaphorically speaking, to bring heaven ‘down’ to Earth, and
Earth ‘up’ to heaven!) And this is a challenging assignment as the
general tone of our society is hardly a quiet and gentle one.
Also, in the
past, the seeker was primarily concerned with his or her own
personal evolution as an end in itself. He could get away with being
an ‘island unto himself’. No longer. Today, we are all much more
interconnected. With the Internet, instantaneous communication from
one end of the world to the other is now possible. Indeed today, man
and planet have grown increasingly close to one another, and hence
the seeker’s agenda has also to include consideration of what will
serve the well being of the larger whole. Put simply, today, the
seeker must realise that how well he fares is very much affected by
how well his society fares and that his own personal development
will actually be curtailed unless he also takes into consideration
the need to honour and respect the well being of those around him as
well as that of his planet as a totality.
ADJUSTING TO
DARK TIMES
And
if all this is not enough, we also need to remember that these
times are singularly dark.(6) We face crisis in almost every single
area of our lives. In part, this is because newness tends
initially to signal its presence by casting its shadow in front of
itself. (For example, the Women’s Movement began by angry
suffragettes throwing bricks through the windows of the Houses of
Parliament!)
And dark times
make people feel afraid. A client of mine in therapy summed up how
many people feel today when she began a session by saying: ‘ I
admit I am scared. I feel we are living in a dangerous world and if
a Tsunami doesn’t get me, then a terrorist or a street mugger will.
All the things which used to be safe in the past, no longer are. I
admit I am scared by the threats posed by the possibility of a total
financial collapse, global warming, biological warfare and the
shortage of water? And what happens when our oil supplies run
out…..’
All this
external insecurity, therefore, makes it very important that the
seeker learns to build a quiet, strong and secure centre within his
being , so that no matter what kind of storms erupt outside of
himself , he may remain calm and unruffled internally and not
succumb to the many fear currents swirling around him, which if he
does, can open the gate to all sorts of other negative mental
states. Erecting such a centre, however, is not easy. In his play
‘The Sleep of Prisoners’ , Christopher Fry expresses the challenge
of our times as follows:
‘The frozen
misery of centuries
Cracks, breaks, begins to thaw.
The thunder is the thunder of the flows.
Thank God our time is now
When wrong comes up to face us
Never to leave us
Till we take the largest stride of soul man ever took….’
All the old
crystallizations of our past, then, all those arenas where humanity
has become rigidified , are beginning to split open, to spill their
contents. And this can be highly disturbing. The spiritual seeker,
therefore, needs to understand the connection between the sum total
of his past karma coming up to stare him in the face - everything
that humanity has never effectively resolved, all the patterns of
hatred, violence, dishonesty, corruption - and the necessity that
he stretch himself further into realms of soul than he has ever
done before. He needs to appreciate the connection between these
two facts and realise that very possibly, without the intensity he
is currently experiencing, he may lack the necessary impetus to make
that required vast soul stride. Thus, we face many tough challenges.
Many today believe that the state of the world is such that we may
not, as a species, survive the next hundred years.
‘ AS WISE AS
SERPANTS AND AS HARMLESS AS DOVES’
Over
two thousand years ago, Jesus was aware that his disciples would
have to confront a lot of resistance and darkness. He therefore
suggested that in order to succeed in their spiritual mission, they
needed to be ‘As wise as serpents and as harmless as doves.’ I
think the same requirement holds true for the seeker of today who,
as he gradually evolves, may well find himself facing not
dissimilar problems. For, like it or not, in our role of trying to
stand for, or pioneer new ways to be more fully human, we seekers
are inevitably an integral part of the process of renewal happening
in the world. Hence, we will inevitably confront a lot of
resistance, not only from inside ourselves, but also from those who
want the world to stay the way it has always been! Unless we are
able to generate a strong spiritual light inside ourselves, and
maintain it steadily in the face of those opposing forces
belonging to the status quo, we may not do especially well in our
initiations.
So what does
being wise and harmless entail? For me, it entails embodying a new
kind of spiritual power as a consequence of embracing contrary
traits inside ourselves. For Martin Luther King, it meant being
tender hearted and tough minded , as opposed to the way most people
are today, which he saw as being soft-minded and hard hearted. For
King, the soft minded/hard hearted person was the rigid person
devoid of intellectual rigour, always opposed to change,
perennially unwilling to question things, and wholly unable to feel
genuine love or compassion, and hence devoid of heart qualities
which our world has so much need of. For King, what was important
was that love and logic would fuse, that the wisdom of the heart
might enter the mind, while at the same time, a person’s mental
strength could serve to toughen their heart. And I agree. Creating
such a synthesis inside ourselves, however, does not just happen
overnight!
I once heard a
story about a snake who wanted to become more spiritual, and who
went to visit a guru for advice, who told him he needed to go out
into the world and send love to everyone he met. This the snake did,
but he got very battered for his efforts, as everyone threw things
at him. He returned to his master rather dejectedly, saying that he
had given love but had got wounded for his efforts. ‘Ah’, the Master
replies, ‘ But I never told you not to hiss’!
TOUGH LOVE
And
this is a very important point. If the seeker is to be effective in
his spiritual journeying today, there can be nothing passive and
gooey about the way he chooses to love. Indeed, there will be times
when we will need to practise what is known as ‘tough love’. This
implies that we be able to take powerful stands for truths we
believe in, yet do so in a tender and gentle way where no one is
harmed in the process. ( Being harmless, we remind ourselves, is not
being ineffective. On the contrary. Things get achieved, yet not at
the expense of anyone or anything being damaged.)
The art,
therefore, is for the seeker to be accepting and loving of himself
. This means not putting himself down for his mistakes and
vulnerabilities – or for not being perfect - a terrible habit which
does nothing to assist his development, yet at the same time, also
be firm and self-disciplined. This means that he does not let
himself ‘get away’ with doing things in an unconscious way , or
that he does not abnegate responsibility for his life or blame
others for his shortcomings. If he can be this way with himself,
then he can relate to others in a similar way. And this in turn
implies his beginning to operate from a very different kind of
power source. In a recent lecture on Spiritual Empowerment, I made
the following observations of this ‘new kind’ of power, which I
would like to quote from here.(XXX)
CELEBRATORY
POWER
‘If
the human race is to survive to the end of the century, we need to
learn to be powerful in a new way…Ordinarily we see power as
something personal, as belonging to us. This is power only at an ego
level. It is power over others…And it is essentially about en-weakenment
not empowerment… as all too often this power is achieved at the
expense of a diminishing or an injuring of, another. This use of
what I call hard power often conspires to reduce life in one way
or another.
The new power I
am talking about is not hard and has nothing to do with ego and in
actuality, only becomes available to us once our egos are no longer
dominant and our hearts are more open. In fact, it comes directly
from the heart. This power can truly empower because it doesn’t aim
to control or dominate other people so much as help them be a
space or an opening where they can celebrate themselves. Thus I’d
call it celebratory power.
And celebratory
power is the power of life itself… It’s a befriending kind of power.
It is a power we are able to access as our hearts begin to melt
open and we make the choice to fuse with life and cooperate with
where we intuit life needs to flow.’
I believe that
much good can be done in the world through an exercise of this kind
of power and that the seeker is challenged to try to develop it in
himself. Indeed, when he allows mind and heart to begin to fuse or
when the seeker can learn to marry the masculine and feminine parts
of himself, and this new power begins being generated, a new
wisdom space can begin to open up inside him, allowing for great
natural magic to happen. The seeker’s ability to accelerate the
process of his own transformation through aligning himself more
effectively with the will of God so that more and more he can be
part of the solution to the problems of the world as opposed to
being part of them, becomes enormously enhanced.
FACING
DIFFICULT TRUTHS IN OURSELVES AND OUT IN THE WORLD’
An integral part of our sacred journey then, requires that we
have the courage to face the darkness not only at the bottom of
our own hearts but also within the heart of our world. Or as a
character in a Thomas Mann novel once said, ‘If a way to the better
there be, it lies in our taking a full look at the worst!’
However, doing
this requires that we be both open hearted and tough minded.
Without this new kind of ‘heart power’, it can be too frightening.
Normal man (who, as we’ve seen, tends to incline more towards
soft-mindedness and hard heartedness) never does this. Rather, he
prefers to project his own darkness outside of himself all the
time, that is, to accuse others of possessing characteristics he
refuses to acknowledge inside himself. For him , all the problems of
the world are other people’s/nations/ organisations fault, and have
nothing to do with him. The more innocent he remains (in his own
eyes) the more his own and our world darkness is permitted to grow
bigger.
The seeker,
however, whose mission is to find the spiritual gold hidden in this
darkness, or, as St Francis would put it ‘To bring light into the
darkness’ , is challenged to engage both with the light and with
the dark at much greater depths. We could say he is challenged to
confront the worst within himself and within his world from the
perspective or viewpoint of what is best!
From a place of
heart, then, we are challenged to open to the injustice, insanity,
inequality , violence and sheer human stupidity that characterises
so much of life today. We need to do this in the recognition that,
as part of that whole, aspects of ourselves are also part of this
insanity, part of this dangerous and conflict-ridden society, part
of this world run by greed and fear, where we over-consume, where
global warming threatens our survival, where millions die of AIDS ,
feel marginalised and disenfranchised (especially women) and where
the poor continue to get poorer as the rich get richer!
As spiritual
seekers, we need to recognise how soulless and superficial we as
a species have become, how addicted so many of us are to drama,
drugs, war and destruction and violence in all its many forms and
that today, there exist many fanatical people, more in love with
death than with life, who wish to destroy the world in the name of
God. We also need to acknowledge how much our world is still in
the thrall of the military-industrial complex and how much our world
economy depends, for its survival, upon our spending more and more
money (which could be used to alleviate disease and poverty) on
manufacturing more and more weapons so we can destroy ourselves
more and more barbarically by fighting more and more wars
(‘Perpetual war for perpetual peace!’)
If we are to be
authentically spiritual, we cannot ignore such truths!
DON’T CURSE THE
DARKNESS BUT BE THE LIGHT
And
it is tough : allowing ourselves to see how far we seem to have
journeyed from our deeper calling. Yet, as I said, if we can see
all these things through the lens of a tough mind and a
compassionate heart, new understandings will grow in us and out of
them, new ways of confronting and dealing with these insanities
will emerge. The old way of operating, for example, is to believe
one can eradicate evil by attempting to kill it off, as in fighting
wars against it. This, of course, not only does not work but
results in even more darkness being generated in the process, as
those who are the protagonists of such policies, turn into the very
‘evil enemy’ they are battling against.(See my long CDs on ‘
Terrorism, the Shadow and the spiritual path’ and ‘Spirituality and
the Dark Side’).
THE POWER OF
LIGHT
The
seeker needs to understand, therefore, that darkness is best
handled, not by being hated and attacked, but by his learning to
bring wisdom, truth and light into it. In Mother Theresa’s
words: ‘Don’t curse the darkness, instead light a light’. However,
this is only possible if we know how to do this, that is, if we
are ourselves, carriers of spiritual light - if we know how to
ignite the light inside ourselves. Put simply, this kind of work
cannot be done without this light which begins to grow inside us
only as a result of much effort on our part to purify ourselves.
( Indeed, we can say that the purpose of the spiritual journey is to
try to be more and more of a space so that the divine, light-filled
sacred us is allowed to emerge.) Light is terribly empowering. If
we will have learned how to be that light which we are, then we may
be able truly to exercise a transforming effect on the darkness
around us as opposed to our being overwhelmed by it.
TOWARDS
MULTIVIDUAL-HOOD
Therefore, unless our path is to be that
of the recluse , one of our great challenges today is to choose to
take powerful loving heart/ tough mind stands for light , truth,
harmlessness and innovation, in whatever area or areas of our dark
world we feel called upon to address. So if, for example, we are a
teacher, we may need to bring a deeper understanding of heart and
mind – a new vision - into the educational system. If we are in
politics, we might take a stand on behalf of a new spirit of
honesty or on behalf of a new solution to those world problems
that we believe are most pressing. If we are an ecologist, we might
choose to spread the message on behalf of greater planetary
sustainability. And so on.
Hence the great
Boddhisattwa vow to the end that ‘So long as one of my fellow humans
is not free, then I am also not free’, and which in the past,
used to be understood only at a personal level, now has to be
‘understood’ and ‘lived’ at a planetary level. Today, it is
only by our taking on the whole world or expanding the sphere of
our responsibility to include more and more dimensions of our
planet, that we will be able to grow into our deeper humanity and
thus come to realise that who we actually are is not an
individual but a multividual - a universal being! So when Plato told
us that each of us contained the qualities of everyman and
everywoman and that both what is best and worst about man - his
capacity for sainthood, sage-hood and genius, as well as his
destructiveness and murderousness- lies inside each of us - from
this ‘new’ place, his words can begin to make sense!
Making this
quantum leap into this new awareness state, however, is not easy,
simply because, as a species, we have tended to become so fixated
into our old, limited and (often endarkened) beliefs about who we
think we are , that we find our old identities hard to let go of.
(Who would we really be if we let go our old limited
sense of self?) Many seekers describe feeling marooned between the
old, personal consciousness pulling them back and the new
universal one stretching them forward. On the one hand they have not
yet managed to let go the past, while on the other hand, they have
not yet been able to embrace the new, emerging more light-filled’
them!
Some seekers,
beginning to navigate these higher reaches of human awareness a
little more effectively, may find themselves not only having to work
through their own ‘personal karma’, but also at times, having to
‘take on’ aspects of the karma of humanity as a whole. They have
described themselves having experiences of becoming Everyman being
tortured or Everyman being persecuted or Everyman being abused,
raped, victimised or murdered. In his excellent book ‘Dark Night,
Early Dawn’ , Chris Bache develops this theme most poignantly.
So just as the
beginner on the path attempts to work through his own personal
‘deficiency’ spaces by entering into them and experiencing them and,
as a result, finding them gradually begin to evaporate to reveal
deeper and subtler layers hidden underneath, so the same thing
happens with more advanced spiritual seekers, only here they may be
challenged to ‘take on’ and work with, higher-order deficiency
patterns which pertain to universal man! There may well be times
when we are - quite literally - not just one person struggling in
agony, but entire battalions of people doing so! And again, all
this can be pretty tough .
STILL TOUGH
AFTER AWAKENING
I
mention this in order to offset the myth that the more advanced we
are, or the more we enter into universal levels of consciousness
and beyond , that the more we are guaranteed perpetual joy and
bliss and the easier our path becomes. As mentioned earlier on, I
think this is illusory. Certainly my experience of having worked
with many people transiting into these subtler realms, is that the
more they travel into the light, the denser seems to be the darkness
that they are called upon to confront. Or as Jung put it: ‘The tall
tree casts a long shadow’.
Sometimes the
despair felt can be very deep as the full horrendousness of our
inhumanity can be seen that much more clearly. Indeed, if we read
the autobiographies of significant spiritual personages, we find
that they too (just like us )have their dragons and demons to
confront, their painful divorces, periods of fear and depression,
conflicts with family and tragic losses. What is different is that
because of the greater degree of light that they have been able to
release within themselves, their ability to process their pain from
a more abundant space, is considerably greater.
For example, I
recently read an account of a famous Sufi Master going through the
agony of trying to help his atheistic son who was dying of his
heroin addiction and constantly being told by him that his condition
was his father’s fault , that his father spent too much time trying
to be a great Master and had neglected him. Despite his
enlightenment, this man suffered a great deal. We see this degree of
suffering clearly depicted in the well-known Biblical story of Job,
who, despite being highly evolved and loved by God, was not
spared a very rough ride! In a very short space of time, Job lost
everything - his health, his family, his status, his money. He went
from superstardom to penury in one fell swoop. The story went that
because Job was very beloved by God. God was testing him very
strongly. Would he still love God or would he curse him?
LIGHT EVOKES THE
DARK SIDE
My
point simply is that the closer we come to the light of our soul,
the more we may need to confront our darkness which obscures it.
This is because our gradual birthing into a deeper, more unitive
self, tends initially to signal its presence by letting us see what
still stands in our way – it enables us to realise how fixated
parts of us may still be in the contractions of our dis-unitive
self. And this can be very painful.
It can be very
painful because, among other things, we will probably get to
realise things about ourselves that we would prefer not to. For
example, we may get to see how attached parts of us still are to
being ‘asleep’(unawake) – having been that way for so long - and
how loath we are to relinquishing our old desires and graspings.
(Who would we be without those desires of ours, which the Buddha
saw as being the source of so much of our suffering, we ask!) It
hurts too, when we get to see that, despite all our aspirations to
be deep, parts of us are still mired in superficiality, and that
while our hearts may have some idea about what the truth is, it is
still so difficult to live it. I remember personally going through
a long period where every day I was confronted with the fact that
every single one of those ‘Seven deadly Sins’ applied to myself! It
gave me a little comfort, I remember, when, talking about this to a
Zen priest , he told me that he still needed daily to confront his
small-mindedness, his lust, his greed and his restlessness!
None of this, of
course, ‘comes up’ for ‘normal man’ or the person who is not on a
path and therefore not concerned with becoming more fully human.
Normal man is ‘allowed’ to live without self awareness! Seldom, if
ever, does he have to look at his dark side and so confront his
greed, selfishness, vanity and violence. Rather, as we have seen,
he is free to project these tendencies outside of himself onto
everyone else!
CONFRONTATIONS
WITH DEATH
For
many seekers, the more they begin moving into the higher realms of
their human nature, the more they are challenged to confront death.
As Stan Grof put it in his book ‘The Stormy search for the Self.’
‘All the
situations that provide opportunities for spiritual opening are
typically associated with a variety of strong opposing forces….Here
belong terrifying experiences that can deter less courageous and
determined seekers, such as encounters with dark, archetypal forces,
the fear of death and the spectre of insanity.’
Dr John Perry,
also says the same thing.‘When a true spiritual awakening and
transformation is under way, one often encounters images of death
and destruction of the world itself. The psyche does not express
itself gently.’
Put
simply, God not only moves in loving and mysterious ways (God’s
presence in Moses’ burning bush) but also, at times, in disturbing
and painful ways! In this context, we need to remind ourselves anew
what spiritual evolution is essentially about. It is essentially
about death and rebirth : the gradual death of an ‘us’ or a self
attached to a particular identity, and the gradual emergence in
its place, of a ‘new, more all inclusive us’, a deeper self
founded on a whole new and wider identity. It follows, therefore,
that unless the old form dies - which implies the totality of
behaviours, attitudes, beliefs and ideas that hold that old form in
place, the new, more expanded identity has no ‘space’ to come into
being. And it is sometimes the case that our old encrustations or
un-consciousnesses will have become so solidified ( the continual
repetition of our old egoic habits will have laid such deep tread
marks in our psyche) that the only way that they can be broken up (
and so die) is explosively . As Gurdjieff put it:
‘Man being the
inert, unconscious creature that he is, often, the only way he can
‘wake up’ is as a result of being confronted by a force greater
than the sum of his own inertia! ‘
SPIRITUAL
TSUNAMIS
Thus, it may sometimes be that the seeker/initiate will have to be
subject to severe suffering if he is to shift at all ( if his ego is
to begin melting). And these ‘spiritual tsunamis’ can take many
different forms as we have seen: the death of a loved one ( as
happened with my mentor), a stroke (Ram Dass), a financial or
physical or emotional or mental collapse. I remember once I had to
experience a severe financial loss, a near-fatal illness and the
loss of a loved one, all within the space of a few weeks! While I
don’t think I dealt with these losses in a particularly ‘spiritual
way’ at the time ( I spent a great deal of time marooned on the
island of self pity!) I know my soul engineered them for my own
deeper spiritual good and I am probably the better for them today!
Basically, what
suffering does ( and it does it much more powerfully if we can
really take it into our heart, experience it consciously) is that
if it doesn’t destroy us (and it can do – hence the danger of this
journey), it burns away the old protective covers or egoic
sheaths. This helps us become increasingly naked and as such,
enables us to discover a new, more expanded sense of Selfhood. In
this new space, our souls are given a new opportunity to emerge.
So if, for
example, we are used to defining ourselves through our money, and
it is our money that stands in the way of knowing ourselves more
deeply, our souls might engineer a crisis taking the form of a
financial crisis. Similarly, if we use our social position as a
screen to hide our real self behind, something might happen for that
social position to become blown away, etc. Basically, what the
initiation does is allow us to see that our old ways of ‘playing
the game of life’, do not work and if we are to advance, a new and
‘higher life game’, a more authentic version, needs to be brought
into expression.
NOT TO PATHOLOGISE
SPIRITUAL EMERGENCE
What
is important if we happen to be going through one of these tough
‘crises of transformation’, is that we desist from seeing it
through a pathological lens - see it as evidence of something
having gone awry. This can sometimes be difficult as our ‘feel-good
culture’ makes us believe that feeling sad or depressed is somehow
‘wrong’ .If seen through such a lens, it can make the seeker
potentially susceptible to taking on whatever negative projections
might be being directed towards him.
Seen from a
spiritual perspective, then, it may not only be that nothing has
gone awry; it may well be that very significant things may be
happening, with a transformation for the better being just around
the corner. As seekers, we must understand that in the same way
that the rites of passage taking us from adolescent to adult can be
tough - teenagers face all kinds of growth pains as they mature –
so, in moving beyond ‘normal adulthood’ to more universal states of
consciousness, we may similarly experience ‘higher’ growth pains!
Therefore,
while the symptoms of spiritual transformation might appear on the
outside, to be very similar to those experienced by people
undergoing a psychotic breakdown, this is not at all what is
happening. Not only is pathology not present , not only does the
spiritual aspirant who experiences ‘strange things’ or who may be
plunged into deep dark nights or existential angsts, not need to be
locked up in a mental institution , but on the contrary, he needs
to be celebrated and supported as someone with the courage to voyage
into the higher reaches of his humanity. But the going can be pretty
tough . Especially if there is no one around him who understands his
state of being and who is simply projects their own fears and lack
of comprehension onto the seeker. That is why it is difficult going
through deep spiritual transformations in a culture not programmed
to understand them. As I said, the seeker may actually take on the
viewpoint of his society and use it to invalidate his experiences
EXAMPLES OF
SPIRITUAL CRISES
For
example, if the seeker happens to be experiencing, say, a Kundalini
Awakening ( the rising up of a particular evolutionary energy coiled
at the bottom of our spine), it may initially feel as if he is
exploding in fire, especially if his chakra system happens to be
blocked, making his body somewhat resistant to this powerful
energetic current. If we research into this particular phenomena,
however, we will find that these experiences are natural, that they
happen to many thousands of seekers and that there exist many ways
of being able to work creatively with them.
Another
well-known and much documented spiritual crisis is the Dark Night of
the Soul experience , beautifully described in St John of the Cross’
little spiritual classic of that name. Here, we go through a process
of feeling utterly abandoned by God and where all we can see are the
darkest and most loathsome and impure aspects of ourselves. This
can either feel as if we have ‘fallen from grace’, done ‘something
horrendously wrong’ and are being punished for our terribleness, or
that we have a severe and incurable depressive illness! In
actuality, none of these things will have occurred and again this
crisis is a very core part of the process of purification or
‘shedding of old skins’, that is so necessary if we are to open up
to deeper levels of heart and soul. And again, it is perfectly
natural. If the seeker has the courage, consciously, again with
heart, to ‘sit the crisis out’, experience fully everything that his
psyche brings up for him, it can result in the deepest of
transformations occurring for him. But again, it’s tough!
Also, often
just before a big breakthrough, we can experience a huge
contraction, as if all our ego encrustations that we have laboured
so hard to try to dissolve, seem more solidified than ever. This
‘Existential crisis’ is one of our being caught, as it were,
between two ‘meaning systems’. The old self, which has not yet
fully died, is nonetheless seen as utterly false and empty, while
the new , more unitive one has not yet come into being. Stuck
between the devil and the deep blue sea, the seeker can feel almost
suicidal with grief. Again, this is a natural part of our spiritual
birthing and again we need to open to our grief and allow the
necessary transformations to take place in their own time. But it is
tough!
THE PROBLEM OF
SPIRITUAL ADVANCEMENT WITHOUT HAVING DONE OUR EARLY HOMEWORK
What
can make these ‘higher-order awakenings’ even tougher, however, is
if we try to move through them without our having done the
necessary ‘preparatory work’ , and therefore are still holding
onto old wounds or unresolved emotional patterns relating to our
birth, early childhood or even to past-life memories. So long as our
old ghosts have never been properly exorcised, they will continue to
haunt us in one form or another. To give an example, if we have
never worked at resolving an original birth trauma relating to our
original physical birth, it may well impact upon how effectively we
complete subsequent ‘metaphysical births’ - the birthing into our
deeper nature. That too, may be traumatic.
Similarly, if we
only focus on ‘being better’ ( a spiritual aim) without first
handling the issue of ‘feeling better’ (a psychological goal) and
thus try to awaken our deeper self without first trying to work
through issues relating to our egoic self, that is, we try,
spiritually , to run before we can walk, we may well encounter
trouble. For example, if we dislike our personal father and have
never resolved things with him, our emotional pain and anger may
well spill over into our spiritual questing and contaminate it. We
may well project our unhealed resentment towards our judgemental
and condemning personal papa onto our image of God the Father and
so get him to behave similarly towards us!
In other words,
if the seeker tries to move too quickly or too deeply into the
‘enlightened life’ without having first worked at loosening up
some of the central emotional issues in his personality, he may
suffer as a result. His enlightenment may not be total and he may
have insufficient emotional strength to be able to process the
higher frequency spiritual energies which I quoted Deunov as saying
are now emerging on our planet. This is why ego healing work or ego
development work is such an important aspect of spiritual
awakening.(See my CD ‘The meaning of Enlightenment.)
THE SELF’S NEED
TO METABOLISE EXPERIENCES AT EACH NEW LEVEL
The
seeker needs to understand, then, that one of the central tasks of
the self, as it journeys from little egoic/false self to more
expanded, higher-order spiritual self, is that it must learn to
metabolise or digest the experiences presented to it at each stage
of development. If this does not occur, damage takes place. Put
simply: we cannot and should not, skip out stages. In Ken Wilbur’s
words, ‘We cannot get to the Buddha without first embracing Freud!’
Basically, all parts of us need to evolve. We need to take the
whole of us along with us on our journey and not split off from or
abandon aspects of ourselves as being ‘non-spiritual’ ,as these
abandoned aspects simply stop evolving and set up camp in our
basement metamorphosing into our opponents! In Wilbur’s words again:
‘If the Self
fails to digest and assimilate significant past experiences, and
these remain lodged, like a piece of undigested meat, in the
self-system, psychological indigestion is generated.
Put another way,
self climbs the ladder of expanding consciousness, but if something
goes wrong in our early development, the self can lose an arm or a
leg at any rung….Aspects of the self can get damaged or left
behind….And this loss results in a pathology characteristic of the
stage at which the loss occurred’.
What happens is
that the split-off part of us ceases to evolve and , as Wilbur says
, ‘Sets up shop in the basement holding onto a very primal moral
view of the world.’ From this place, it tries to sabotage our
development in every way it can.
And this is one
of the problems that can affect people who are otherwise highly
developed spiritually. Those spiritual teachers, for example, who
are susceptible to the three temptations of money, sex and power,
may be deeply connected in to spiritual wisdom at one level, yet
at another level, still be fixated into a primal moral view of the
world and be suffering from ego damage. This is why it can be
potentially so dangerous to skip out stages. One definition of
someone who is authentically mature is that they no longer have
undigested pieces of psychological meat going rotten in the
basement of their psyches! Such a person does not have to struggle
to align themselves to a higher spiritual will, for they will be
disinclined to want to participate in anything that is not fully
aligned to a higher purpose.
The seeker must
also understand that pathologies don’t only happen later on as
re-enactments of earlier ones. The Self can also, metaphorically
speaking, lose an arm or a leg in the higher-order rungs of the
evolutionary ladder as well. Thus, someone who may not have been
damaged earlier on in their lives, can, in transiting into the
higher worlds, go through an initiatory gate the wrong way and
suffer a new lesion. This happened to a good Buddhist friend of
mine. He went through a natural phase that advanced meditators go
through whereby one gets to see the painful nature of manifest
existence. However, instead of simply getting insights into the
sourness of life, he actually went sour on life and entered a severe
depression that lasted a long time and required a lot of help to
free him from it.
As you can see,
there are trials and tribulations to face at all stages of the
spiritual journey.
INNER WORK AS
TOUGH CHALLENGE
What
can be particularly tough for students going through these kinds of
tests and who see themselves as being on an eclectic path , and who
don’t feel called to be involved with any particular tradition or
Spiritual Master, but are trying to find their our own way, is that
they need to be both teacher and student to themselves. They need to
stumble through a lot of this light work and dark work on their own.
They need to be making important choices all the time as to where
they feel they need to go, spiritually, as well as be deciding what
kind of inner work will best support their intentions at any
time.(8) I must make the point here that none of us grow spiritually
simply by thinking it might be a nice idea to be a more loving
person. This will not get us very far! Rather, we grow spiritually
by engaging in certain practices aimed at developing our spiritual
muscles, such as meditating on sacred qualities, doing our best to
engage in loving and purposeful actions and having the courage to
confront our dark side, etc.
Let us look, for
example, at Meditation, which is the ‘staple diet’ of most spiritual
paths. It may sound easy to meditate, but whatever people pretend,
unless we live in a monastery and have a regular teacher, it is
tough - tough but not impossible - to do it properly and to
improve and be able to maintain a quiet mind in such an unquiet
world.(9) The same holds true of prayer (if our path includes it ) .
We remind ourselves that its effectiveness requires that we will
have established a strong connection to that source with which we
are seeking connection with. Without this, spirit cannot ‘hear’ our
supplications and answer ( if it be within the scheme of things) our
requests!
All the time,
therefore, the seeker needs to be deciding issues such as what
practice or practices would most benefit him at any time, and where
he should go to obtain them. For example, when does he need to
focus more on himself and when should he put more effort towards
supporting or serving others? When do we need to make huge efforts,
or when is it preferable to relax and simply let grace in? When do
we need to work more psychologically, or when is it preferable to
stop working psychologically? Should we get someone to help us or
should we go it on our own? Or is it best to submit ourselves to
some kind of formal training and if so, what kind?(10)Etcetera.
It is tough
trying to get all this right , that is, blend inner and outer -
earn our inner living at the same time as focussing on our outer
one. Not surprisingly, most of us are much better at earning our
outer living. This is because, firstly, that kind of ‘living’ is
societally sanctioned ( we live in a world that only really gives
credence to what can be seen and touched), secondly, we get trained,
and , most importantly, we get paid! Since we all need to survive
financially, the money element is very important. The point is that
no one pays us for inner work. At least not initially! With inner
work , not only do our rewards tend to come later, but even then,
they can sometimes be hard to quantify.
WHAT PATH TO
CHOOSE?
Another challenging ingredient for the seeker is that of being
able to construct a workable morality for himself. ( For example,
does he live by the code of Buddha’s Noble Eightfold Path or
Christ’s Commandments or does he just listen to his heart?) How
‘Green’ should he be? How does he integrate, say, sex and
spirituality or money and spirituality? No genuine spirituality can
exist without a corresponding set of ethics that relates to how we
treat other people and our environment. It may be that if we are
not part of a particular tradition, that we will need to discover a
moral code that works for us. Or even invent our own!
What is also
confusing is that today there are so many different ways that we
can work on ourselves, so many different spiritual wares or
‘spiritual paths’ on offer. Which should we choose? And what
criteria do we use for choosing? And how many ‘wrong’ paths do we
need to experience before we discover what works for us? And how do
we really know what does work best for us? It may that ‘feeling
good’ is not a sufficient indicator! Here, the seeker also needs to
know that simply because a particular spiritual technique or
process or course of study may have served him well at one time,
that this is no guarantee that it will continue to do so, as he
moves into a different stage in his life. It is often the case that
continuing a particular practice or a particular method of study
beyond the time that it is useful to us, can prove
counter-productive.
We can look ,
for example, at the work involved in opening , healing and
developing our hearts. Since I teach a year-long training programme
on this theme, I am only too aware how difficult this work can be,
not least because as the heart opening begins, the student will
generally have to confront his hearts’ many defensive skins - all
those areas and layers where he is wounded - and then find the
best ways to work through these wounds. For some of us, this may be
a long and arduous process. Often too, as heart qualities begin
showing themselves, it may be that we will need to confront their
opposite in us. For example, when love surfaces, we might need to
work with our hardness and indifference, when joy is present, with
the spectre of our joylessness, when wisdom peeps forth, our
dumbness. And so on.).
THE SIGNIFICANCE
OF THE EGO ISSUE
Whatever path we are on, be it a Devotional one, be it one of
Action-in-the World or Illumination (or whatever), a central focus
will always be on our gradually learning to move away from being
identified with our egos or with that part of ourselves that
keeps us fixated in the illusion of our being separate!
Indeed, the
seeker needs increasingly to understand that he is not, and never
ever has been, the various ego images he has of himself, no matter
whether they be positive or negative, and that actually what holds
him back is an inability to see himself as he truly is, namely a
divine self! This is because our egos, which are fully entrenched
into everything about how our current society functions, have a
powerful pull over us. We could say that they are singularly tricky
customers and they need us to believe that who we are is what they
tell us we are, as in this way they can control and maintain
power over us.
Because ego is
so strongly entrenched inside our psyches, it never works to try to
confront it head on. In fact, one of its favourite tricks it tries
on to wrestle back control from people who do try to challenge it in
this way , is to make us feel that our inner quest is a stupid waste
of time and that engaging in activities such as opening our hearts
( their biggest enemy) or surrendering to a higher purpose, is truly
a game for idiots! ( So if ever we hear a voice like that speaking
inside us and debunking our spiritual undertakings, we will know
where it comes from!).(11)
In fact, our
egos love to tell us that their death would mean our death, and that
there is nothing beyond them. Thus they will fight us tooth and nail
to maintain their existence. Another favourite ploy is to make us
resist change by keeping us attached into or bound into our old
comfort zones or old lifestyles in the old culture which Peter
Deunov rightly told us, has to die if we are to become properly
spiritual. And if ego cannot succeed in this mission ( all our
resistances to things sublime are ego based, with no exceptions) at
a last resort, it will try to worm itself into our spirituality!(We
realise this is happening, if we ever start to feel overly pleased
with our spiritual progress and believe we are truly some highly
evolved, wiser-than-anyone else, spiritual dude!)
In actuality,
all ‘spiritual burning’ - all the pain we experience as we confront
our vanity and greed and narcissisms, etc, is the burning up of our
egotism. That said (see my article on Ego in Kindred spirit, now
on my website), it is nonetheless important that we do not view
ego as our enemy and try to attack it, or believe that we are always
ready to let it go. We may not be. There is a time and a place for
doing everything and this very much applies to when we are ready to
relinquish our egos.
One of the
things that some |Eastern spiritual teachers often forget is that
our egos are not ‘bad’. (What becomes bad or evil is if we hold on
and stay attached to them for too long, beyond the time that they
have anything to offer us). For whatever we can say about them, they
have, at times, offered us much and divinity resides within them. We
needed them as babies and in our childhood and adolescence, and
what is known as psychological damage refers to ego damage of some
form or other. Ego then, is a kind of primary scaffolding that we
need in order to survive and evolve our early life. And if we try
to erect higher stories to our being ( that is, try to develop
spiritually) without first having established a secure and strong
ego base , we can be playing with fire . If there is not enough
ego solidity in our basic structure, the whole edifice of our
being could topple.
I always
remember those wise words of Ram Dass’. ‘Before we can be a nobody’,
i.e., let go ego, ‘We first have to be a somebody’, that is, have
established a healthy ego. Interestingly enough, the healthier and
therefore, stronger, our egos become, the more willing they seem to
be to allow for their dismantling. The problems around ego evolve
around our either trying to ‘get rid of them’ prematurely or
conversely, hanging on to them for too long!
Andrew Cohen
maintains, for example, that we are always ready to let ego go and
that the belief that it is not yet ‘time’, is another of the tricks
it plays on us. Yes, this can be the case sometimes, with some
people. But it is not so with all people. With some people – those
who have not yet developed a strong ego and who don’t yet have a
secure sense of ego self – if they try to ‘get rid of ego’ , the
effects can be disastrous. Egolessness is not always an asset and
here we remember that many wierdos, loners and serial killers tend
to be people who have never evolved a strong-enough ego in the first
place . (The case of Charles Manson the murderer, was a case in
point. He did not have a sufficiently grounded-enough structure in
which to process all the spiritual information coming into him. That
was why it all went so terrifyingly wrong). Put simply, we cannot
let go of something that has not yet properly come into being
inside us.
The way I view
ego is that it is something which first needs to be allowed to grow
and develop in us, and then, later, as we feel moved to evolve
spiritually, needs to be allowed to die as we shift the focus of
our attention increasingly away from it. I like that Hindu
saying, ‘When the fruit is ripe it falls from the tree’ as I think
it applies very aptly to our ego life. Thus, the more we
intentionally try to align with spirit - to ride the new spiritual
current Deunov spoke of, work at opening up more of our spiritual
nature, resolve our psychological wounding, serve our fellow humans,
etc - the less our egos get energised, and the more they begin to
starve or diminish in potency! Once we know what kinds of
activities feed them, we can choose not to engage in them.
For me, ego is
never my enemy. It starts off in life as my ally and then becomes a
less obvious ally when it becomes my opponent later on. But I
think I need that kind of opposition if I am to grow! Indeed, far
from ego taking me away from myself, it actually offers me the
opportunity to come more fully into who I am and as such , is an
integral and important part of my journey of trying to become a
little more fully human!
OPPOSITION
CREATING POSSABILITY FOR A DEEPER GROUND OF BEING
The Spiritual teacher, Karlfried von Durckheim, in ‘The Way of
Transformation,’ saw life in a similar way and made the following
suggestions as to what the seeker needed to do on those occasions
when he encountered difficulties. In his words:
‘The man who,
being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world, will
not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him comfort
and refuge and encourages his old self to survive. Rather, he will
seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably helps him to
risk himself, so that he may endure the suffering and pass
courageously through it thus making of it a ‘raft that leads to the
far shore.’ Only to the extent that man exposes himself over and
over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible arise
within him. In this lies the dignity of daring. The first necessity
is that we should have the courage to face life, and to encounter
all that is most perilous in the world…Only if we venture repeatedly
through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being,
which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable. The more a man
learns whole-heartedly to confront the world that threatens him with
isolation, the more are the depths of the Ground of Being revealed
and the possibilities of new life and Becoming opened up….’
Powerful words,
aren’t they? I think the annihilation he talks about is that of our
egoity. And while written some years ago, I think what Durckheim
says could not be more pertinent today, for, as I suggested earlier,
the seeker today is being challenged to do his evolving right in the
middle of a world that is not only not especially interested in
‘spirituality’, but is deeply in crisis , with many elements within
it deeply opposed to change of any kind! In ‘After the Ecstasy the
Laundry’, Jack Kornfeld described the challenge of spiritual growing
in a gentler yet not dissimilar way.
‘The true task
of spiritual life is not found in faraway places or unusual states
of consciousness. It is here in the present. It asks of us a
welcoming spirit to greet all that life presents to us with a wise,
respectful and kindly heart. We can bow to both beauty and
suffering, to our entanglements and confusion, to our fears and to
the injustices of the world. ….To bow to what is, rather than to
some ideal is not necessarily easy, but however difficult, it is one
of the most useful and honourable practices.’
GRIST IN THE
MILL
I
like this. Basically he is saying: ‘ Respect life. Live with
heart. See everything that you encounter as your teacher.’ David
Spangler, the educator who used to be the mouthpiece of the Findhorn
community, suggested we learn to ‘’Sprout right where we are
planted!’ In essence, what they are all suggesting
is that we discover who we are not by avoiding or denying anything
about our world , but by having the courage to embrace everything
that it may throw up for us at any time, in a big-hearted/tough
minded way . And again, we can only do this if we bring in the
power of the heart world. Without this particular ingredient, no
such embrace is possible. Only with heart and the light it brings,
can the work we do, the relationships we have, the initiations we
confront, the terrors we face - everything we engage in - become
grist in the mill for our spiritual awakening. Without heart, ego
is permitted to live on; without heart, we will lack the capacity
to make virtues out of our necessities and it becomes very risky
indeed to allow ourselves to touch into world suffering.
SPECIFIC
DIFFICULTIES INHERENT IN WAKING UP
This awakening process, however, is never easy because most of
us have been used to living half asleep or semi aware, lives, for a
long, long time. In part, this is because we are wounded and so we
‘numb out’ or close down in order to protect ourselves from pain.
In part, however, it is a sign of our ‘evolutionary
incompleteness’, (as Theodore Roszak would describe it) whereby we
have not yet come into a space or place of realising our own divine
selfhood.
So long as we
are asleep ( to who we really are) then, we cannot know our
sacred nature. Just as the vaster part of an iceberg is invisible as
it lives under water ( only a small part being in view) this same
analogy holds true for us, in that the vaster part of ourselves is
also ‘underground’ and unconscious and so unavailable or invisible
to us. In our un-awakened state, then, we tend to float on the
surfaces of life wholly unaware of its depths. Thus, we are not
especially aware of many of our motivations for doing things. Many
of our agendas lying behind why we do what we do, remain hidden from
us.
So what is
spiritual awakening, which is in effect the prime occupation of
the seeker? At one level, it is a process of de-numbing or
un-contracting ourselves; it is about our letting ourselves thaw
out to be more and more ourselves as we learn to bring more of who
we really are(more of our light) out from the dark and into
expression. It is therefore about our increasingly learning to
perceive more of what is going on both inside ourselves and
outside in the world. It is learning to live in such a way as to
be more fully alive both to life’s joys and its uglinesses.
Living in this way, however, is difficult, because for most of our
lives we have grown so used to living unconsciously and therefore to
splitting off from the truth of who we really are. In the words of
psychologist Jean Huston: ‘We are born Stradivariuses yet we are
brought up to believe we are plastic fiddles!’
NEED TO BE IN
PRESENT TIME
And
one of the effects of our believing in the myth of our fiddle-hood,
is that it is often hard for us to be in a place that is very
important to be in, if our spirituality is to develop, and that is
, be in‘the now’ or in present time. (One of the symptoms of
insufficient awareness, is that our attention tends either to be
drawn backwards to our past or forwards to our future.) Also, the
more awake we become , the easier it is for us to choose our
states of being at any time, and not live, as asleep man tends to,
in a state of continual reactivity to what is going on around him.
We can choose, for example, to not be a victim, to be brave and
determined, to see more, to love more, to be more effective. If I
am awake, I am more able to access ecstatic states and the easier it
becomes for me to have reverence for all of life on earth..
NEED FOR
RESPONSIBILITY AND OPENNESS
I
make the point once more, however, that this waking up is never a
‘given’. Whether or not we move away from ego, whether or not we
discover the grace, joy, inner calm , open-heartedness and truth
that we are looking for, is always up to us and how much effort we
are prepared to make to move in this direction. And certainly it is
a sacrifice as it means giving up time and energy in which we could
be engaging in other activities. (But then, at one level, whatever
we do or don’t do, in our lives, is a sacrifice and we could equally
argue that not engaging in inner work and not evolving is equally a
loss!)
I think that our
making the choice to work at manifesting particular qualities, is
especially important at the start of our journey, where we need to
be focussing on trying to ‘attract the attention of spirit,’ in
order, we hope, that spirit might assist us. Later on, our concern
may be more with surrendering to a higher will, but we cannot do
this before we will have first made the effort to have established
a good rapport with that will which we are trying to surrender to,
(through things like prayer, meditation, service, study etc.)
Luckily,
however, this ‘work’ is not only one sided. (Which makes things a
little less tough!) Luckily, if we are trying to court the divine,
the divine is also trying to come closer to us, help us ‘Lift our
eyes up to the hills from whence cometh our help!’(12). Put simply,
the divine needs us as much as we need the divine. Thus God or
higher consciousness ( or whatever we want to call ‘it’) is always
trying to reach us in many different ways. These may include
planting sacred yearnings in our heart, talking to us in our
dreams, giving us Peak or Near-Death Experiences , arranging
synchronistic or ‘chance encounters’ with wise human beings,
etcetera. The question always is: how open are we to receiving?
NEED FOR
STILLNESS
One
of the biggest resistances many of us have to spirit, is being
too externally focussed, too busy , too anxious and so too full of
emotional static to hear that ‘still small voice’ ( the favoured
way the divine has of ‘communicating). Put simply, the more power we
invest in our ego selves, the less open we are to messages coming
to us from ‘ higher’ sources. This is another reason why meditation
is so important ( and of course why ego hates us meditating). To
believe that we can go deep and find a quiet place inside us,
without our doing some practice to still our restless ‘ monkey
minds’ which love to jump about all over the place ( and to which
our egos attach to so gratefully!) - is like believing we can play
tennis without a racket!
However, the
moment we really find stillness, the moment we really begin to make
genuine progress, is often the moment, when, as I said earlier,
spirit seems to test us most. And this testing, we must understand,
is part of our journey. In fact, it is one of the main ways that we
are able to evolve. How, for example, could a St. George have
‘grown’ the quality of courage if he didn’t have his dragons to
confront? How can we develop particular spiritual capabilities –
wisdom, say, or compassion (another very important sacred quality) –
if there were not situations out in the world for us to encounter
(sometimes to strip us apart) and which ‘ask of us’ – demand even,
in some instances - that we bring forth these particular qualities?
Sometimes, if we lose everything which we depended upon to remain
puffed up and inflated, we have no option but to become humble. Do
you see?
And how can
these qualities really become anchored within our being ( as opposed
to merely being ‘nice ideas’ in our head) unless we have no choice
but to put them concretely to use? To give an example, let us say
that we are working on trying to be more loving : it may well be,
then, that spirit will test us - see how much progress we have made
- by placing some very unloving and very difficult people in our
path ( for as we well know, it is very easy to love people who are
warm and open-hearted and much harder to do so with those who are
closed, angry and suspicious.) Therefore, being loving with these
people requires much more work, much more intentionality. Yet it is
often through such encounters that our ability truly to be
open-hearted is put to the test and hence our ‘love muscles’ are
enabled to grow!
RESISTING
TEMPTATION
A
significant way that the seeker is often tested is through being
tempted! Are we, like Oscar Wilde, ‘able to resist everything
except temptation’, or is there something more endurable in us? It
is easy, for example, to believe that we are no longer vain,
self-seeking and greedy when we never encounter situations that test
us in these areas. But what about when we encounter scenarios that
do? I remember a time in my life when I was feeling very
self-satisfied and thought ‘I am a nice person. There is not an iota
of aggression , jealousy or vanity in me! ‘, only to have all my
illusions rudely shattered when a friend of mine run off with my
girl-friend! The emotions that came up allowed me to see how far I
still had to go and how caught up I still was in my self
delusions , self-conceits and general aggression.
One spiritual
teacher I knew who could talk the talk very inspirationally, was
chronically unable to resist pretty young devotees throwing
themselves at him, despite his knowing that sexual intimacy would be
wholly detrimental to their soul development. Indeed, three of the
main areas where the seeker tends to be tested are around sex, money
and power. Having such challenges give us the opportunity to see
where we are still vulnerable - where there are still ‘holes’ in
our humanity , as well as the opportunity to patch these holes up
, if we are able. This is one reason why doing our spiritual
growing within the world and not away from it, can be so useful. If
all seekers only lived in monasteries, these same temptations, and
hence the opportunities to use them for our growth, simply would
not arise.
Some seekers
also discover, as they advance along the path, that they are
beginning to develop new powers. This is yet another test, as
having these powers can be rather exciting and glamorous at first!
(They include different kinds of psychic ability - clairvoyance,
clairaudience, etc - certain kinds of endurance, the ability to
exercise mind over matter, etc.) Again, the challenge is whether the
seeker uses these ‘siddhis’, as they are called in the East, for
their own egotistical purposes or for the good of humanity. Most
teachings on this subject tell us to recognise these powers, but not
to fall into the trap of thinking that they signify heightened
spiritual awareness! For actually they don’t. Being able to see
into the future is certainly an asset and a good example of a new
human capability that may develop in us, but it does not necessarily
make us a kinder, humbler , wiser or a more loving and generous
person, which I believe are the hallmarks of true spirituality.
ADVICE TO THE
SEEKER
So,
as a seeker, please don’t embrace this path blindly or naively.
Make sure you do so with your eyes and your heart open, and take
the trouble to inform yourself about the nature of your journey and
what to expect and what some of the challenges that might confront
you might be. There are three big mistakes that we can make. The
first is that we over-stay our time in the lower realms, and instead
of moving up with the angels, we still continue to fight old
dragons when they will already have become appropriately tamed so
as not to stand in our way. This tends to be the cardinal sin of
the psychotherapist who believes everything has to be ‘worked out
psychologically’ all the time. Yes, some things do, but not
everything and not all the time. If our awareness is only focussed
on dragons, that is what we will find. |Remember: if our wounded
patterns are sufficiently loosened up and if we will have
developed sufficient consciousness inside ourselves - sufficient
spiritual capacity - spirit will probably be able to work on us to
complete the healing process.
The second
mistake is that we ignore our dragons - we don’t process our
‘stuff’ sufficiently (often the cardinal sin of people on the path
of Illumination) and think that just because we have ‘good
intentions’, that our dragons will somehow get tamed without being
looked at. They won’t! Sooner or later, the seeker will find that
what he will have repressed, will kick back and hit him, generally
when least expected!
THE ART OF NOT
DOING
The
third mistake is that we continue to make big efforts - for
example, we continue to strive hard in our meditations, or
struggle with our inner conflicts or with becoming more
compassionate - when in actuality we are in a phase of our
development where we are being able to say: ‘Thy will, O Lord, not
my will, be done’. In other words, all our good, sincere, efforting
work thus far, will have drawn higher power much closer to us,
so it is able to work on us and help us. This means that instead
of doing all the running ourselves, we are in a space where what is
required is for us to ‘not do’, to allow ourselves space just ‘to
be’. In the Tao to Ching, Lao Tsu tells us that ‘ The ‘Unwise
person does a lot and yet nothing gets accomplished, while the
person of wisdom does nothing, and yet there is nothing that does
not get done!’
What is being
suggested here is the idea of effortless effort, where we align
ourselves to a higher will or a higher intentionality which works
through us or ‘efforts’ through us, and thus is able to direct us
to the extent that we are able to get our egos out of the way! (Ego,
as you can see, is very resistant to any idea of surrender!)And
here, as in everything, timing is very important. If we try to ‘do
nothing’ prematurely – before certain important structures will have
been built into place , or before we will have erected a
strong-enough bridge linking us to the higher worlds - then in all
probability, our surrendering will not be to a higher will but,
much more likely, to our own unconscious chaos!
It is all a
question , then, of our knowing when to make efforts and when to
stop and allow divine effort to make us! If we continue all the
time to strive to become, we may never be in an appropriate space
actually to receive from spirit the benefits that all our prior
striving will have evoked for us.
OUR OWN JOURNEY
IS UNIQUE TO US
It is
also important that we understand that our journey is uniquely our
own and will be different from everyone else’s and thus our
particular challenges will differ. (In my CD on ‘The different paths
to God’ I explore this theme in detail.) So yes, we can learn from
other travellers, and it is helpful to do so, but we should not
compare ourselves with them. We all have different karmas to fulfil
and we are all at different levels. Some people’s challenges seem to
be more internal , while others are challenged more as a result of
external events. Again, some seekers are more naturally inclined
towards more mystical approaches, while for others, ‘finding God’
occurs as a result of engaging in dangerous activities out in the
world. Also, our ways of working will be different. Some people find
it much easier, say, to dance or sing their meditations, than sit
down quietly all cross-legged! And some people’s style is to move
ahead with great leaps and bounds and then spend a long time
integrating their experiences, while others may move much more
slowly, gradually integrating things as they move along.~~
I suggest you
read accounts of successful spiritual navigators (psychonauts) of
the past and present and see how they handle their egos and
temptations , their confrontations with the numinous and their dark
sides, and see if what they say applies to you. Also, very
importantly, try to gather a good support group of fellow travellers
around you, with whom you can openly share your thoughts. This is
very important. Otherwise, one can feel rather alone. Spending most
of our time with people who are primarily ego-identified when we are
trying to grow a deeper soul life, is never particularly helpful.
Make sure, too,
that you are adequately prepared before you attempt to ascend the
higher peaks. Here, it may also help at times to have some
‘specialist guide’ at hand, someone more advanced than you, and
who, metaphorically speaking, can ‘hold your hand’ and assist you.
Dante, after all, had his Vergil who helped him circumnavigate the
difficult terrain of his ‘hell’, without whose aid he might never
have ascended to Heaven! (As regards the important role which the
Spiritual Master can play in our journeying – and they too, can
make it pretty tough for us, let us be under no illusion – again I
refer you to my CD on this particular topic.)
NEED FOR
FORGIVENESS
It is
vitally important that we be as open and forgiving of ourselves as
we seek to be of others, and that we do our best not to make
ourselves wrong for things that we may have done or not done in
the past, as this only makes for surplus pain. We must know that
what we did then was the best we could have done with the material
we had at the time, and now that we are a little wiser, we are
freer to play a ‘higher game’ – that is: do things differently. But
we might not have been able to have done that then!
So if there are
regrets or resentments, it is important that we should work through
them and let them go. We must realise that yes, we might have made
other, wiser, choices for ourselves that could have made our lives
easier, or more successful at one level. However, we should also not
forget that had we made those ‘better decisions’, we might never
have given ourselves the particular opportunities to learn the
particular lessons that we needed to learn!
And as I said
earlier, please also move beyond the idea that God will only make
good things happen for us if we are good people. As we have seen,
spirit moves in mysterious ways, and unpleasant things can happen
to good people and pleasant things also happen to the rogues of this
world. So if suffering enters our lives, what is important is that
we accept its presence, we engage with it and we try to bring as
much heart awareness into it as possible and so try to use it to
burn up as much of our old karma as possible. Then our suffering can
work for us. As I said at the start, God has both a light and a
dark side. Jung told us that whenever he experienced something very
joyful or very painful in his life, he knew it was about the
presence of God making Himself felt.
THE ‘SPIRITUALLY
UN-LIVED’ LIFE IS TOUGHER
Also
remember this. If it is often an effort to do spiritual work, and
we really would prefer to watch television all day, never
meditate, stay unconscious, remain ego-centred, we must not forget
that a spiritually unlived life is actually a far tougher one.
Especially as we grow older. Alistair McIntosh, who has written much
about spiritual activism, once remarked that the ego tends to run
short of its birthright of oil in middle age and either burns out or
needs to reach beyond itself to find new oil. I fully agree. I have
several old friends who have devoted their lives primarily to the
acquisition of status and materiality, and have never spent much
time considering spirituality in any shape or form. And they are
paying the price!
I think that if
there has never been any effort to try to cultivate an inner life,
that we won’t have one. There will be no sacred flame to be found
burning in our hearts. And sadly, without it, there will always be
something lacking inside us, an absence perhaps, of a certain kind
of inner aliveness. The problem is that our old ‘hole fillers’ -
being busy, doing business, cultivating prestige, success,
glamour, sex, etc - cease, after a while, to do the trick. (In
actuality, they never did; they only actually made the ache worse in
the long run). In actuality, the only way the spiritual
vacuum can be filled is from within, through our working at coming
into a deeper relationship with our own essence, by way of our
learning to connect more deeply to our spiritual source. If that
‘essential connection’ is never made, the sense of divine
discontent - the feeling that something is not quite right in our
lives - will never quite go away!
So if trying to
live an authentic spiritual life has many difficult elements, living
an unspiritual life is , in my opinion, far tougher. Indeed, if we
will have only lived for ourselves and if there is no belief in
anything ‘higher’ or ‘greater’ than us - no deeper ground of being
to connect to in order to warm and nourish us in wintry times when
the cold winds blow and we can no longer hide behind the excitement
and exuberance of youth, something in us will feel desperately
lonely. We may experience crises, yet lacking the wherewithal to
perceive their deeper role as potential soul activators, we may well
let them pull us down.
Indeed, many of
my psychotherapy clients who are middle aged and who come to me
ostensibly for psychological problems, suffer from what I call
spiritual malaise. I am always aware that behind many of their
emotional issues lies a deeper spiritual sadness and that behind
the pain and loneliness of not being in a nourishing personal
relationship, for example, may reside a deeper sorrow caused by a
lack of any kind of relationship with God ( be it a deity outside
of or within themselves.) Often, underlying the alcoholic’s need for
spirit from a bottle , lies a deeper thirsting for a spirituality
that cannot be found anywhere else but within the deeper recesses
of their own heart.
TOUGHNESS IS NOT
BAD
So :
we have established that aspects of the spiritual path are tough,
that transformation and awakening are tough, that many aspects of
life are tough. But who said that tough is bad or that it shouldn’t
be that way? I think there is something about the kinds of
struggles we seekers go through to try to be ourselves , that are
also enlivening and, in many instances, enjoyable. To try to
stretch ourselves, to dare to be more who we really are, to have
the courage to try to love and to live our truth as opposed to
conforming to other people’s or society’s agendas all the time -
what all this does is that it strengthens our moral and spiritual
muscles; it makes us more fully human and more alive. And this can
be fun. Indeed, if life is too easy, it can lack meaning; we can
lose our edge and our vitality, and so no longer have access to
that miraculous place inside us where we can live purposefully and
where extraordinary experiences may transpire for us
LIVING WITH
HEART
In
saying this, please don’t think I am suggesting that we court
struggle and suffering as an end in itself. Not at all. There is
quite enough of it out in the world without our needing to
manufacture more. I am only suggesting that if and when it seeks
us out – courts us – that instead of complaining about it and
resisting it, we should open to it with full heart, thank it even,
and recognise that, from a spiritual perspective, our suffering may
be teaching us things and opening up new dimensions of ourselves.
Often, it is only when things are not easy that we are given the
opportunity to drop bits and pieces of our egotism and discover our
Stradivariusness!
I stress once
more: the central ingredient to our spiritual journeying and to our
ability to deal with the many tough challenges it confronts us with,
is that we try to keep our hearts as open as we can to everything
that we experience, be it joyful or painful. For it is essentially
in our hearts that we discover God and hence have access to the
healing energy that may start to transform us and metabolise our
dragons. As I said at the start, just because we may be being
pricked by the thorns, does not disbar us from being able to smell
the roses. In fact, the sharp pricks should incline us all the more
to embrace that sweet fragrance . I have tried, in my life, to
walk a path of heart and from that perspective, I have sought to use
difficult or painful experiences as reminders to me to open up more
fully, to stay as loving and as tender as possible . It is only
with the power of my heart available to me – creating a natural kind
of ‘up-beatness’ - that I am able to think positively and not
allow myself to become downhearted.
THE POWER OF
GRATITUDE
What
I often do if I am going through a difficult patch, is to meditate
on the quality of gratitude and think of all the wonderful things
that have happened to me in my life, all the gifts and blessings I
have received, (so many of which, because I was so unconscious at
the time, I was not fully able to appreciate.) I like to image a
large lighted room in the middle of my heart, with a big fire
burning in it and see myself sitting in that room surrounded by all
the gifts and benefits that have come to me in my life, all the
wonderful people that have contributed so much in their different
ways to making my life so rich. From this place my prayer becomes
one vast ‘Thank you God’. And in this process my heart can become
as big as a mountain, and joy and gratitude can sing out from every
pore of my being. The bigger my heart becomes, the more of the
world ‘out there’ it is able to embrace, the more my sense of
family can grow to encompass all of humanity, and the easier it
becomes to understand and relate to people very different to myself.
As this expansion happens, and as I become more than ‘just a
person’, my personal difficulties begin to shrink.
I think a lot of
our pain can increase because we use it as a signal or an excuse to
shut down – to numb off and not feel . And what this does is that
it diminishes us by putting us out of touch with ourselves. Thus
the us viewing us becomes a reduced us, an us shut off from that
vital ingredient inside each of us that can enable us all to
digest, make meaning of and celebrate whatever we are experiencing.
When our hearts grow small and closed, they become hard and empty,
and thus the life we see out there is also hard and empty. That
philosopher who pronounced life only to be ‘Nasty, brutish and
short’ was possibly not one of the world’s greatest celebrators of
the magic of being
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