I am finally inching my way awkwardly into a post the inspiration for which originally emerged in early December, which feels like three years ago now. What is it about Christmas break that seems to extend time into more than just two weeks?
I have a great many reservations about writing on the subject of spirituality. Most of it revolves around the language, and all the rest the people. It feels, to start with, as though writing about spirituality requires whole tomes devoted merely to definitions.
The words we use are all so tarnished, clichéd, hung with so many complex meanings guaranteed to raise either the ire or arrogance (or both) of somebody that it is not unlike the literary equivalent of negotiating the frontline of Afghanistan, always aware that one is unwittingly laying IEDs which will, strangely enough, be blown up in one’s own face.
You can’t say “God” without somebody blowing up a plane. Or at least, trying to. Or, on the other hand, inviting the immediate condemnation of all those whose egos depends on the sport of Christian-baiting, an activity which comes from just the same attitudes as terrorists and the fundamentalists these baiters claim to despise. It’s always a case of “We’re superior because what you think makes you an idiot and worthy of punishment”. Violence by other means.
Essentially, for a quiet life, you’d be better off not going anywhere near spirituality, lest it be tarnished by its brother word religion. And lest you happen to run into somebody who doesn’t happen to agree with you, especially on the internet, a place where almost everybody has been accused by almost everybody else of being Hitler, and the ad hominem argument is the rule.
I have learned that spirituality is a deeply personal thing. It might also be considered to be intensely private, as a result. Now, those who like to attack the noisier of the religious tend to point the finger and say “But they do it!” which is no justification for anything. If you don’t like what somebody else does, doing it yourself hardly rights the situation.
With all that said, I decided a long time ago that I would restrict my discussions of my own spiritual understandings to people I could trust. It is the ultimate test of a friend, I feel. I know I am safe with a person if I can mention the “S” word in a conversation without inviting either derision or an attempt at conversion.
All that said, when I first encountered Holosync I had no interest in “spiritual experiences”. In fact, that has never really interested me. It has always seemed vaguely like an alternative to having a drug addiction, the search for an incredible high that would take you outside your life, to somewhere else. Spiritual seekers are always looking for “truth”, a word that remains conspicuous in the sense that it’s never properly defined.
Yet along with using Holosync has come an exploration of a little of what lies out there in the vast territory of spirituality. I spent several months sitting in the dusty large shrine room at my local Buddhist centre, after all, and now wait eagerly each month for the free download from Adyashanti’s Cafe Dharma.
I’m not especially interested in theory. As a discussion of what happens to Zen masters on the internet on Tricycle magazine reveals, even the most apparently bliss-ridden holy of holies get into blog-based spats and petty hatreds once given access to the online world. So much for Right Speech.
My main problem with reading lots of books and wandering from “guru” to “guru” has already been enunciated clearly by Adyashanti, which is probably why I like him a great deal. Instead of becoming hooked on following somebody or something, getting addicted and endlessly needing more, he places the burden of truth back onto the individual.
He is also far more interested in the individual experience, and his focus on that rather than saying “it will be like this” makes him a far more reliable person to listen to than most of the people bobbing around in the waters of modern spirituality and calling themselves leaders or teachers.
It was Adyashanti’s talk on Johannes Eckhart, better known as Meister Eckhart, that made me curious about the 13th century Christian archbishop. Those last words might be enough to make the skin crawl for many of those I know, who have a kind of allergy to anything Christian, assuming that all of it must be self-righteous and devoid of any spiritual use.
Eckhart, however, wrote of such things that are almost indistinguishable from Buddhist and other Eastern concepts. Perhaps most beautiful is his assertion that where there is a “me”, there is a god, but when the “me” is absent, there is no god.
I suddenly had a direct encounter with that experience. It was unexpected, and I wasn’t looking for it. I wouldn’t call it an experience of “spiritual ecstasy”, this is not what people travel to India for. It was just a clear, emotional and physical understanding that as long as I felt there existed a separate “I”, it felt as though there was something missing.
And it’s that missing thing we put in grand cathedrals, mosques and temples, into jade buddhas, holy sepulchres, and wailing walls. A mysterious thing, something that we have anthropomorphised into either massive pantheons or a friendly, obese man with a beard sitting on a cloud. And inside we feel an irksome absence of something, or rather the presence of something else. Some small and ugly thing that crawls around inside us, makes us short-tempered or genocidal, irritable on Sunday mornings for no reason, and unable to make peace with what we see in the mirror.
And that we call the devil, that we have fought off so hard while we try to reach up for those gloriously painted ceilings of bearded and well-toned deities. All of it is illusion, as Eckhart said. Yet it’s coming to feel that – not to know it intellectually, because you can know anything intellectually – but to feel it, to be it, that is the real search.
Occasionally, I’ll experience this. It isn’t euphoric, however. It’s oddly mundane, in fact. As I said to a friend of mine recently, enlightenment isn’t drama, it’s just practical.
Over a thousand words into this post and I can’t believe I’ve given over a lot of words to an experience that is incredibly simple in actual fact. Doesn’t that say it all about human life as it is now? So much corollary, so much self-justification and explanation, for something that happened as I lay on my pillow one night in early December watching flakes of snow swirl past my window. A simple sensation, one that gave flesh to words and a sense of understanding about what it is to be.
