Archive | September, 2016

Divine Spirit is Calling Us Home

Our spiritual ancestors tell us that we don’t need to try and attain enlightenment, all of us are already enlightened. In the absolute world where all separation isn’t real, there is no one more enlightened than you or I. And there is no one less enlightened than you or I. This is no less true in the relative world, where separation appears real. However in the relative world of self and other, of joy and suffering, there are different layers of belief in our ideas about enlightenment and delusion. The veil hiding our inherent joy in the freedom of our true nature obviously appears much denser and solid in some of us than in others.

I was having a private discussion with senior dharma teacher Reb Anderson about this very topic some years ago. I mentioned that when contemplating how to further deepen others’ realization, I was aware of a tendency to want to measure where I’m at, to measure how much can I be of help? He replied that right there, in that attachment to wanting is an attempt to unenlighten your Self. Sometimes it can be helpful to reframe our neurotic egotistical obsessions as attempts to unenlighten ourselves. This simply means we’re deeply conditioned to continually attempting to control and interfere with the divine life force always living in and through us, calling us home. And clinging to these self conscious attempts is what obscures the clear realization of our inherent freedom; this clinging is an attempt to unenlighten ourselves.

I was grateful for Reb pointing out to me the need to deeply contemplate and be aware of the components and implications of that self conscious wanting I was expressing. He pointed out that it is good that there was an awareness of the tendency. The pure awareness of the tendency is witnessing the wanting from a place that isn’t attached to the wanting, from a place that isn’t attached to the results of that wanting, from a place willing to just let the wanting be what it actually is. So the inquiry becomes what is the wanting really? What is the attachment to the wanting, and what is helpful as well as harmful about the attachment?

These are big questions, and any conceptual answers I talk about here are only true for me, they are only true in my mind. And they are only true in the minds of you reading them. They won’t necessarily be helpful to you. The main point for me is that it is important to be willing to more fully enter the questions, to allow ourselves to be more fully absorbed in the questions that are most relevant to each of us. This doesn’t mean becoming fully absorbed in the conceptual content of the questions, but to become more fully absorbed in the actual life of the questions which is free of all conceptual content. Excessively clinging to the conceptual content of our deep questioning is an attempt to deaden the aliveness of the questioning, an attempt to deaden the aliveness of our spiritual inquiry. We learn to allow the questions to stay fully alive by gradually learning to allow the aliveness of our yearning, the joy and sorrow, and trusting that our aliveness of inquiry IS divine spirit calling us home.

It is usually much easier for us to welcome our joy than it is to welcome our grief that comes up from absorbing ourselves in the aliveness of the big questions. We learn that attempting to cover up and deny our suffering will eventually lead to rude awakenings, and the more energy we put into denial, the more frequent and ruder the awakenings become. When we learn to be willing to embrace our grief, by just offering it to the mystery, offering to a higher power, we begin to realize that the deepest root of of our suffering is a profound sadness from the overall felt sense of being separate from our natural expression of unconditional love and acceptance. We begin to deeply realize that underneath all of our neurotic desires, is the desire for wholeness, our deepest desire is the desire for the innate wholeness we actually already are.

The great Indian saint Anandamayi Ma said the following about our willingness to yield to the Divine calling within.

When intense interest in the supreme quest awakens, ever more time and attention will be given to religious thought, spiritual philosophy, the remembrance of God as immanent in all creation, until thereby every single knot is untwisted. One is stirred by deep yearning: “How can I find Him?” As a result of this, the rhythm of body and mind will grow steady, calm, serene.

Suppose some people go to bathe in the sea and make up their minds to swim ahead of everyone else; consequently they will have to look back. But for him whose one and only goal is the ocean itself, no one has remained for whose sake he looks back or is concerned; (transcend and include, not exclude concern for others) and then, what is to be, will be.

Give yourself up to the wave, and you will be absorbed by the current; having dived into the sea, you do not return anymore (Attachments to the sense of a separate self just continually fall away). The Eternal Himself is the wave that floods the shore, so that you may be carried away. Those who can surrender themselves to this aim will be accepted by Him.

But if your attention remains directed towards the shore, you cannot proceed – after bathing you will return home. If your aim is the Supreme, the Ultimate, you will be led on by the movement of your true nature. There are waves that carry away, and waves that pull back. Those who can give themselves up, will be taken by Him. In the guise of the wave (sometimes in the wave of deep grief, sometimes in the wave of deep joy) She holds out her hand and calls you, come Come COME!

 

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9-11

The morning of September 11th 2001 is a day that all Americans remember where they were, and what they were doing when they heard the news that our nation was under attack. I was in a hospital room with my three day old first born child Nicky, getting ready to take him home for the very first time. Of course normally this would be a wonderfully joyous occasion, a lighthearted initiation into the rites of parenthood, a celebration of a new life for our family in the sanctuary of our home. The trauma of the shock of that morning easily comes back to me every September 11th since that day. I remember helping my wife into the car as she carried Nicky for the short drive home. Two and a half hours after the attacks, the Fort Lauderdale atmosphere was dark, deathly still, and oppressively humid. I felt like I was getting into a hearse instead of going to host a blissful coronation.

The question still arises, what could this mean for our lives that such a horrific event happened right in the midst of such an important event for us? My spiritual training has taught me not to get so caught in pondering the conceptual meaning of things; all things, all experiences are only true in the mind. Adyashanti said there is no such thing as a true thought. However perhaps almost all of us human beings experience at some point the profound transformative potential when shocked with the realization that the fear of the suffering of death arises together with the blissful arrival of new life from the deepest depths of the mystery of life. Death is part of life, and suffering is part of love.

There is a movie, Shadowlands, about C.S. Lewis, the famous Christian preacher, Oxford professor, and author of children’s books, that is very moving for me. He was a very deep thinker. In one of his literature classes, he talks of perfect love being perfect because of its unattainability. “The most intense love lies not in the having of it, but in the very intense desiring of it. Delight that never fades, bliss eternal, is only yours when what you most desire is forever out of reach.” In his sermons he preached that God wants us to suffer, for it is in our suffering that we learn to desire perfect love, love that we imagine is separate from and not part of suffering. He says this is how God teaches us that he wants us to learn to love and be loved in our deep desire for perfect love.

He meets his future wife, and her love for him reveals to her his deep childhood fear of love and suffering after his mother’s death when he was 7. She clearly intuits his defensiveness in his brilliance, and unconscious sense of superiority that alienates him from opening to an intimate relationship with her. It is only when she is stricken with advanced terminal bone cancer that he realizes she is the love of his life. They are married while she’s confined to bed, and then she goes into remission. However the doctors caution that this won’t last.

They decide to take a trip into the beautiful English countryside, and he realizes he’s found true happiness. He’s not worried about the past or future, he’s finally happy now in the present moment. His wife says, “You know this isn’t going to last. I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I need to talk about it with you”. He says don’t worry about me, I’ll get by somehow. She replies, “No, I think it can be better than that, it can be better than just managing.” He says, “Let’s not spoil the time we have.” She says, “It doesn’t spoil it, it makes it real. I need to talk to about it now, so I can be with you then when I die. What I’m trying to say is, the happiness now is part of the pain then. That’s the deal.”

When she dies, he’s quite angry and is forced to face his deep fear of the pain of loss. It’s so painful that initially he is unable to console his step son who has just lost his mother at age 7 as he did. Finally they have a deeply cathartic cry together, and he fulfills his commitment to look after him after her death.

The movie ends with him asking, “Why love if losing hurts so much? I have no answers now, only the life I’ve lived. Twice in this life I’ve been given the choice, as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That’s the deal.”

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