Dec 162010
 

Picking up from the previous post, I want to address two common challenges with spiritual practice: The first is discipline and the second is misunderstanding the value of experiences.

With regard to discipline, in observing my own practice and the practice of others, it’s obvious that consistency and persistence can be  huge challenges.  Quite frankly, I believe a central part of this problem is our wanting easy, low-cost, instant gratification. It might be a little reductionist, but it sometimes seems to me that we regard spiritual practice more like a form of entertainment than a way to greater awareness, wholeness, integration and depth of being in ourselves, in relationship with God, and in our presence in this world.  Many of us also want our experiences to be intellectually or emotionally profound, and perhaps even socially or materially tangible.  Any practice that doesn’t seem to fulfill these wishes can quickly be judged as unproductive and worthless, and then we flit off to something different; we can also imagine ourselves as having already “advanced” beyond the need for that practice.   It’s so easy to ignore how often the great saints and sages have asserted the value of commitment to even the most basic practices.  It has even been said that it’s in persisting through boredom with a spiritual practice that we begin to gain the most significant, yet often most subtle, benefits.  Said another way, the most important experience can sometimes simply be the doing of the practice itself.

It might be obvious that we’ve already begun considering how confusion about the value of experiences can be inherent in our judgments about the value of a practice.  Plainly stated, the value of an experience, and therefore the practice that facilitated it, is not necessarily measured by its immediate magnitude. Another aspect of this confusion is in taking an extraordinary experience too literally; there are countless stories of visionaries who have brought horrible suffering to themselves and others because of knee-jerk reactions to their own inner experiences.  Strong desires can lead to mistaking an experience as a direct contact with something that the experience actually only represents.  For example, a flash of light experienced in the depths of meditation may reveal something to us about the presence and action of the Spirit, but it does not necessarily mean that the light was the appearance of a particular spiritual being.  Similarly, just as the on-screen image of a movie actor is not the actual character portrayed, or even the actual actor, so too can dreams and visions about spiritual beings be far removed from actual contact with them.  Even the images of these words are not the actual forms on the computer screen, let alone the actual thoughts in my mind, but are your mind’s perception of the words and the thoughts behind them.  Another potential confusion is taking the magnitude, frequency or total number of one’s experiences as an unquestionable sign of spiritual “progress.” Such an attitude is dangerously self-aggrandizing and a highly volatile fuel for wish-fulfilling delusions.

So, is there some way to minimize these risks without turning spiritual practice into nothing but a heartless drudgery or abandoning it all together?  Yes, to begin with, it might already be apparent that one guideline I’ve found valuable is paying careful attention to the overall integration and harmony of the soul’s different aspects and functions.   Of course, this guideline is itself based upon a very deep, broad and persistent practice of honest self-awareness and caring self-acceptance.  Said another way, it is the practice of being lovingly present with oneself, and thus becoming increasingly aware of the very fluid interconnectedness within us – head, heart, and gut.  Along with this practice of presence, all the great spiritual traditions recommend the mindfulness and application of certain virtues.  In Christianity we traditionally rely on the four cardinal virtues – prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice – and the three theological virtues – faith, hope, and especially charity (or agápē, spiritual love, “the greatest of these“).  But it’s very important to understand that the practice of the virtues is not about forcing one’s external behaviors to conform to some predetermined model of perfection.  The object here is not to build up some new facade in the place of being more consciously whole; in fact, the virtues are first and foremost internal processes. When incorporated with the practice of loving self-presence,  they shed significant light on the ways one is at odds with oneself, suffering from psychic fragmentation and compartmentalization, while also pointing out paths toward greater integration and harmony.  Being fully present with ourselves and working with these virtues doesn’t provide a foolproof guarantee that we won’t make mistakes, yet it can reduce the risks in making them.  When we do make mistakes, these guidelines can help us lovingly embrace them as learning opportunities and thus become even more meaningful experiences in our spiritual lives.  Beyond these very significant experiences, the practice of presence and the virtues may also facilitate a deepening awareness of something in ourselves other than thinking, feeling, sensing and doing – something quiet and still, and at first seemingly tiny and insignificant, yet more vast and powerful than we can comprehend, let alone control.

For many of us mystics, awareness of this other within ourselves is both fascinating and frightening – fascinating in its penetration into a very deep mystery of the soul, and frightening in our awareness of the comparative smallness and powerlessness of that part of us we most often identify as “me”, or what we commonly call the “ego”.  One risk associated with the fascination is confusing such an encounter with the mystical union we desire. A risk with the fear is the ego coming up with all sorts of excuses to avoid accepting and adjusting to the greater reality, including quitting a practice because we’ve realized how much it has been motivated by serving the ego; sometimes that’s just a sign that the practice is actually working!

Finally, with spiritual practice, like the rest of life, let’s acknowledge that there is no way to eliminate risk; even in retreating to avoid some risks we fate ourselves to take others.  So the question I’ll leave you with is this: What risks do faith, hope and love call upon you to take?

Agape

Dec 122010
 

Across all religious traditions, there are warnings about risks in spiritual practice, and especially practices of the mystical variety. This post is about exploring some of those risks, all of which I have experienced the hard way.

I’ll begin approaching this issue from the observation that each of us has a tendency to judge some particular kind of experience as especially meaningful or rewarding, and so we can naturally focus our efforts on spiritual practices that we believe improve our chances of having such experiences.  However, because no practice has a 100% return of the desired results, the effect of partial reinforcement can push us toward a kind of addiction in which we feel compelled to try harder and harder to get the high, no matter what the cost.  In effect, we run the risk of our practice becoming a drug that we use to attain our particular favorite high. Casinos profit obscenely from this phenomenon, and so do some people in the spirituality/religion business, but I digress.

From this point, let’s consider some different categories for experiences and practices people commonly consider meaningful or rewarding in their spiritual lives.  This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it’s a good starting place and you are welcome to add some ideas of your own.  It will probably be fairly easy for you to look at the list and pick out a few things at each end of your own like-dislike scale.

  • Intellectual – These experiences are about the discovery, acquisition, processing and communication of information, ideas, and insight.  Along with such effects through the usual academic pursuits, this category would include those from all forms of analytical, theoretical, and speculative thinking, as well as from visions and related psychic experiences.
  • Social – These experiences are dependent upon relationship with other human beings, and involve themes of acceptance, belonging, support. roles and responsibilities, status, esteem and power.
  • Physical – This category involves increased or decreased sensory stimulation.  Nature, art, ritual, ceremony, service to others, dietary observances, exercise, sex, austerities, and the bodily aspects of meditation and prayer all have relevance.
  • Emotional – Here we are speaking of heightened or lessened feelings, such as pleasure, pain, comfort, discomfort, satisfaction, frustration, excitement, sadness, happiness, anger, peace, confidence, anxiety, fear, release of tension, relief from boredom, and so on.

It’s apparent that these categories aren’t completely discreet from each other; they are interconnected.   In considering that interconnectedness, you might have already noticed how much the emotional category serves as the final arbiter of our choices.  We can come up with lots of rationalizations and justifications for pursuing one thing more than another, but the deeper we look the clearer we see that we’re more likely to follow through with something if we believe it promises some sort of emotional satisfaction for ourselves, whether it is comfort in having done the “right” thing or even a kind of masochistic satisfaction.  Even the continuation or cessation of our own physical lives is subject to this dynamic.

It’s not my intention to encourage self-flagellation about our very deep and powerful tendencies to serve ourselves.  I am convinced that emotional self-interest is an inextricable part of human nature, and any attempt to pretend otherwise only leads deeper into a life of unhealthy illusion.   These observations are instead made primarily to point out some of the most crucial dynamics leading to imbalance, disharmony and fragmentation in our souls.  Likewise, they suggest that our choices about spiritual practice can actually contribute more to psychospiritual dysfunction than to well being, even when they really feel good.

There are many different directions we could go from here, and I encourage you to explore whatever seems to lead you into a place of deeper self-awareness, honesty and wholeness.  In the next post I will offer a few further considerations.

Agape

Dec 082010
 

There are lots of different ways of talking about mysticism, but one of the things I haven’t often heard is that it’s about “getting real.”  Do you know what I mean?  Most of the time what we mean by “getting real” and “being mystical” seem contradictory, at least to most people.  Of course, we mystics tend to think and talk a lot about what is really real in a metaphysical sense, but there are a couple of other meanings to the phrase “getting real” that I want to address in this post.

First, getting real often simply means being honest.  If you’re like me, being honest about what is really real means acknowledging that to some degree reality is a mystery our tiny little brains cannot completely solve.   Being honest about this condition also urges some of us to admit that we’d really like to believe we can completely think out a solution to that mystery, or at least have some explanation that sounds good enough to let us get on with living in other ways.   Following it a little deeper than the drive for explanations, our honesty may help us discover that closer to the heart of our being is a drive to know and understand, and that it can be motivated by something stronger than our instincts for comfort, belonging and even survival.  In other words, we can discover in ourselves, or witness in others, that it’s possible to love the truth so passionately that we are willing to sacrifice everything for it.   Of course, getting real in this sense also brings with it the awareness that we can be just as willing to make enormous sacrifices for illusion rather than welcome uncomfortable, painful, or threatening truth.  I suspect the honesty with ourselves that acknowledges both of these drives at once – for truth and for illusion – is intertwined with our honesty about the utter mystery of things.   It seems to be the crux of a cross we can choose to bear or to deny, a cup we can either drink or allow to pass.

Second, as part of the commitment to honesty in getting real, we mystics sometimes find ourselves challenged with accepting that we are really just ordinary human beings.  In all our God-focused weirdness we sometimes lose sight, often willfully, of the fact that we’re wrestling with the same crap as everyone else.  Being mystics certainly does not make us morally superior; we sin, or miss the mark, at least within ourselves, just like everyone else.  Our spiritual practices do not deliver us from that cross we just considered; in many ways it only becomes more present.  We don’t attain some permanent state of angelic consciousness in which we are forever removed from the ordinary psychological and ethical struggles of humanity.  Even after extraordinary events of receiving the Holy Spirit, not unlike Jesus after his baptism, we can find ourselves alone in the desert and repeatedly tempted.  And we all know what it’s like to be face-down in the dirt at midnight, so racked with fear that we figuratively, if not literally, sweat blood as we pray to be spared some great trial, and one that we have almost always brought upon ourselves in some measure.

Aside from all this wrestling, struggling, and sweating blood, I also think getting real for most of us mystics can and should include a good laugh at ourselves and life at least once a day.  Finally, on a more personal note, in this moment it’s important for me to say that I am not just speaking generally about mystics.  When I say “we”,  that starts with me.

Agape

Dec 032010
 

The New Man: An Interpretation of Some Parables and Miracles of Christ

This book has been out of print for some time now, though there are reasonably priced used copies available.  The title and image are linked to free online versions.

Table of Contents

new man

Click here to read the book!

I The Language of Parable
II The Idea of Temptation in the Gospels
III The Marriage at Cana
IV The Idea of Good being above Truth
– The Miracle at the Pool of Bethesda
– The Good Samaritan
– The Laborers in the Vineyard
V The Idea of Righteousness
VI The Idea of Wisdom
VII Simon Peter
VIII The Idea of Prayer
– Introduction
– The Necessity of Persistence in Prayer
– The Necessity of Sincerity in Prayer
– Response to Prayer
– Request in Prayer
IX The Sermon on the Mount
X Faith
XI The Kingdom of Heaven
XII Judas Iscariot
Appendix

If you are a Christian, or any other seeker, who is beginning to look for more than literal meaning to the messages of the New Testament, then you’ll find this book a powerful starting place.  If you’re already well down that path, then you may also find things here that not only resonate with your own thoughts and experiences, but can bring fresh insights and challenge you in new ways.

Dr. Maurice Nicoll provides a profound view of the depths that we might plumb in the parables and messages of Jesus. Nicoll’s concern is not as much with historical or theological views of Jesus, but rather how the Gospel accounts of his life and teachings can show us the way to fulfill our potentials as spiritual beings. In the front of my copy (Fifth Impression), Nicoll clearly states his purpose in “A Note on the Author”:

The intention is to indicate that all teaching such as contained in the Gospels, and many other older and newer teachings, in the short period of known history, is about transcending the violence which characterizes mankind’s present level of being. It affirms the possibility of a development of another level of being surmounting violence.

Nicoll’s poignant interpretations are significantly shaped by his impressive background in medical, psychological and philosophical studies; he was a student of Freud, Jung, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. He believes the central psychological idea of the Gospels is the movement toward rebirth, which is to awaken as a person with a deeper understanding of self and others. Nicoll calls this movement “inner evolution”, and stresses that it must be engaged by the whole person – thoughts, feelings and actions.

One key he offers to using the Gospels for this kind of work is to view the various characters and elements as symbolic of aspects or dynamics of the soul.  For example, he takes up the symbolism of the Pharisee* not so much as a member of an historical group, or even a way of characterizing others in one’s life, but as:

…the Pharisee in oneself, to the insincere person in oneself who, of course, cannot receive any real and genuine psychological teaching without turning it into an occasion for merit, praise and award.

Another significant element of Nicoll’s view is a hierarchical appreciation of the relationship between the human and the divine.  In fact, this seems to be the very basis of his views on prayer.  He posits that prayer is an attempt to communicate upward to heaven, and as such requires persistence to the point of “shameless impudence,” yet, perhaps ironically, with a sincerity born of utter humility: “Unless a man feels he is nothing, prayer is useless….”  Even so, Nicoll makes it sound as though enough pious nagging will force God into serving us as we wish: “Only persistence and intensity can cause the higher level to respond.” (my emphasis)  On face value we might find these views troubling, but it would be extremely unfair to take Nicoll on face value, for he also says:

And let us also remind ourselves that the attainment of this higher level possible for Man is called heaven or the Kingdom of Heaven in the Gospels and that it is within a man, as a possibility of his own inner evolution or re-birth of himself, and that Man at the level he is on, as an unawakened creature, an unfinished experiment, is called earth. These are the two levels, the higher and the lower, and some very great differences exist between them, as great as the differences between a seed and a flower. Thus communication between these two levels is difficult. The mission of Christ was to bridge, to connect, and to bring into correspondence in himself these two levels, the divine and the human….

Nicoll insists that “by an evolution of the whole psychic man, that is by an evolution of all his mind, his love, his will and his understanding”, the “Man of the Kingdom”, the “New Man” of Christ in us, can be born.  In the end, it seems to me that Nicoll has essentially come around to saying one’s prayers are more likely to receive a positive response as one’s whole being is more attuned to the divine.  In other words, one is more likely to get what is wanted because one is more likely to persistently and sincerely pray for what is most in harmony with the divine.

Some readers will find one of the most challenging themes of the book to be about placing Good above Truth (Nicoll’s capitalizations).  For Nicoll, issues of Truth are inevitably interwoven with differing perspectives of understanding and opinion. His concern is that doctrines and laws too often stand upon that very subjective and all too often self-serving foundation, because the person who has not attained a higher level of Good “can twist the higher Truth to suit his vanity.”  It isn’t that doctrines about Truth are to be ignored, but rather should be seen as stepping stones meant to lead us to higher levels of knowing and being Good.  So it is that even the most hallowed doctrines are misunderstood if they are not considered secondary to Good:

The Mosaic Law, or, at least the ten commandments, are instructions from the side of Truth, as to how to attain a level of Good, where, as commandments, they have no further meaning. But if they are taken as an end, and not as a means of an end, they become stumbling blocks.

Nicoll speaks of this shift of priorities from Truth to Good in the Gospel language of the first becoming last and the last becoming first.  He argues that this reversal is central to the mission of Christ, for it places our understanding of Truth within the context of Good, and not vice versa, which enables us to serve the higher purposes of doctrine, the spirit of the law rather than merely the letter.  This seems to connect well with Jesus’ statement that “all the law and the prophets” hang upon our love for God and our fellow human beings.

Finally, throughout the book it’s clear that Nicoll urges his readers to engage the challenging work of connecting with the higher levels within themselves.  While he speaks much about the honest self-awareness, genuine humility, integrity and commitment such attainment requires from the human being, he doesn’t have much to say about Divine Grace.  This omission is unfortunate because Grace is such a significant element of the Good News.  Perhaps Nicoll would say the capacity and the opportunity to do that work are themselves gifts of Grace.

[* In fairness, it’s worth noting that although the stereotype of the Pharisee is often used disparagingly among Christians, Jesus and the Apostles actually had some good friends and supporters among the Pharisees, such a Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and Gamaliel.]

Nov 202010
 

In my recent reading of The Good Heart, I came across this statement by Fr. Laurence Freeman:

…there are different forms of intolerance, some more political, others more psychological.  And they all have their root in the tyranny of the individual ego that clings to its obsession with being special yet shirks the challenge of accepting its uniqueness.

This statement was made, almost in passing, while reflecting on the importance of inter-religious dialogue, but it has profound significance for every aspect of spiritual practice.

One of the things common to many mystical traditions is language about a need for the “death of the ego”, or eliminating self-interest in some way.  There are corollaries in mainstream Christianity as well, where we hear testimony that we should sacrifice our wills to God.  We may have even been taught that our highest aspiration is to throw away all our personal desires except for the desire to fit ourselves into a particular mold for how a good Christian is supposed to look, sound, and act.  It’s not unusual for such teachings to be accompanied by the psychological insight that our desire for specialness, to be esteemed and admired as extraordinary in some way, even if only by oneself, is often the biggest single roadblock to living a more integrated and mature spirituality.

While that insight is valid, it is a mistake to take it as a doctrine that there is no spiritual value to the differences that naturally and necessarily make each of us unique human beings.  From a traditional Christian perspective, such a view is at odds with the realization that each soul is a singular and cherished creation of God, each with a one-of-a-kind combination of spiritual gifts, life experiences and perspectives.  It also places unnecessary, even unhealthy, limitations on our potential to enrich our relationships with God’s other children.

In the name of being more spiritual, enlightened, or pleasing to God, the denial of any value in uniqueness can lead to a game in which we puff ourselves up with rituals of self-flagellation, humility worn on our sleeves, suppression of our talents, and refusal to outwardly enjoy even the gift of gratitude from others.   In effect, it is saying to oneself, if not everyone else, including God, “See how special I am for denying my specialness?!”  So we develop a secret spiritual pride, and often simultaneously pile up secret shame, guilt and self-loathing in our semi-conscious awareness of the deceit we are perpetrating.

There are even greater tragedies connected with this vicious circle of seeming virtue.  To begin with, such false meekness makes it easier to bury our talents and sidestep the struggles (and the joys!) of serving the manifestation of Heaven on earth in the ways, times, places and lives of others that only we, each as unique souls, can do.  Beyond that, it can produce in us a sense of resentment and self-righteous judgment toward those people who aren’t strangling their own souls as we are, which is how, as noted by Fr. Freeman, intolerance begins to emerge.  In this mindset we begin to divide humanity into teams – “ours” and “theirs” – with a desperate sense of conviction that our team is good, right, true and blessed, while their team is bad, wrong, false and damned.  Rather than serve love more directly and freely, we externalize our own confused internal warfare and spread our suffering into the lives of others.

One of the potential blessings of mystical practice is that it welcomes the Holy Spirit to facilitate a more profound appreciation of the eternal spark within our souls as well as the impermanence of our personal existence.  We also come to the awareness that the same conditions are true for everyone else, which begets the further blessing of greater compassion for others.  We can come to know and accept that each of us is a unique flower of God’s love – our petals budding, blooming, fading and then falling to return to the soil within a very short span of time, yet contributing to the ongoing processes of creation, of life and love, in ways that we cannot even begin to fathom.  This is a significant development in the spiritual formation and self-actualization of a mystic.  We do not have the foresight to know the effects of all our choices but we can proceed with the faith that a life of uniquely loving attitudes and actions will contribute to a healthier, more diverse, and more beautiful garden.  In this vision it is sad to think of a flower choosing to keep itself wrapped up tight, as though there is some special merit in trying to remain a bud.  It is sad to imagine a lily trying to pretend it’s a rose, as though only a rose can be loved by the Gardener and other flowers.  Why would the Gardener, who is Love itself, expect us to torture ourselves so?

Your heart knows what kind of flower you are, even if your mind can’t clearly foresee it.  Just let it bloom.  You’ll love it!  Other flowers will love it too.  The Gardener already does, and there is no better way to surrender to the Gardener’s will.

Agape