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| "......spiritual
vision, the more it fits those of us who don't want to be them anyway. In
the depths of their silent listening, many meditation students have
discovered that from an early age their life experience was so painful
they did not want to be born and they did not want to be here in a human
body. They look to spirituality to provide an escape. But where will the notions of purity, of going beyond or transcending our bodies, our worldly desires, our impurities lead us? Does it actually lead to freedom or is it only a strengthening of aversion, fear, and limitation? Where is liberation to be found? The Buddha taught that both human suffering and human enlightenment are found in our own fathom-long body with its senses and mind. If not here and now, where else will we find it? Kabir, the Indian mystic poet, says: Friend, hope for the truth while you are alive. Jump into experience while you are alive . . . What you call "salvation" belongs to the time before death. If you don't break your ropes while you are alive, do you think ghosts will do it after? The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten-- that is all fantasy. What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an empty apartment in the City of Death. If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire. We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us day and night. To see this truth is to realise that the sacred and secular cannot be divided. Even the most transcendent visions of spirituality must shine through the here and now and be brought to life in how we walk, eat, and love one another. This is not easy. The power of our fear, the habits of judgement within us, repeatedly prevent our touching the sacred. Often we will unconsciously draw our spirituality back to the polarity of good and bad, sacred and profane. Unknowingly we re-create patterns of our early life that helped us survive the pain, trauma, and dysfunction many of us experienced as children. If out of fear our strategy was to hide, we may use our spiritual life to continue to hide and claim we have renounced life. If our childhood defence for pain was to get lost in fantasy, we may seek a spiritual life of visions to get lost in. If we tried to avoid blame by being good, we may repeat it by trying to be spiritually pure or holy. If we compensated for loneliness and feelings of inadequacy by being compulsive or driven, our spirituality may reflect that. We will have taken our spirituality and used it to continue to divide life. One student, who had come from an abusive family in which his father was often and unexpectedly violent, dealt with this dangerous situation by creating a finely tuned antenna for any difficulty that might arise and along with it a strong sense of paranoia. In his spiritual practice he re-created this, dividing teachers and students into good guys and bad guys, those who were dangerous and those who were allies, those whom he disliked and those whom he put on a pedestal and tried to imitate. Anyone who acted as he had in his wild younger days was particularly judged, dismissed, or feared, much as he feared those parts of himself. In dividing the community around him in this way, he so antagonised a number of people that his paranoia and fears became justified--many were indeed angry with him and in no time he had re-created the dangerous good-guy-bad-guy situation of his original family. What he read in spiritual texts he used to reinforce his division, judging which people, which acts, which practices were holy, and which were ignorant, based on desire, hatred, and delusion. Without guidance, such a person could go on for years using his spiritual life to re-enact his early trauma. What was necessary in his case was to direct very careful attention to how he created such a strong sense of good and bad, of paranoia and untrustworthiness on one side and ideals on the other, and what fears were at the root of this. Once directed to examine this, he shifted his practice from the troubles of the world outside him to the troubles and sorrows he created within himself. When he began to see that he was the one creating the fear, paranoia, division, and suffering in his life, his whole old sense of himself began to drop away and a new possibility awakened for him. Another student, a young woman, came to practice with a tremendous sense of insecurity and fear. In the great pain of her own early childhood she had found peace by withdrawing into silence and daydreams. By being quiet, she had avoided trouble and conflict with the world around her. On entering spiritual practice she was greatly relieved. Here was a place that officially sanctioned her silence and introversion and supported her withdrawal from the world. To her teachers she initially seemed to be a very fine meditation student, having no difficulty with the rules and silence, quieting herself easily and speaking of deep insights into the transient nature of life and how to avoid the dangers of attachment Cont'd next page |
| A Path With Heart by Jack Kornfield |