opinion & commentary on
the modern spiritual search
by D. Patrick Miller
opinion & commentary on
the modern spiritual search
by D. Patrick Miller
PAST EDITIONS:
All Shook Up • Gambling for Grace
On a sunny Saturday in Santa Cruz, California many years years ago I experienced one of the most instructive disappointments of my life. It began with signing up for a workshop with a mystical teacher whom I knew only through his books and the glowing reports of a friend who had spent a few months in the teacher’s esoteric school.
At the time I was hardly living a spiritual life. Having ended my fledgling career as an investigative reporter a few years earlier, I was running my own graphics business and dreaming of the day I would have enough money saved to write full-time. Unfortunately I was a break-even businessman at best, and I didn’t know what I would write about anyway. So it seemed I was working hard to go nowhere, and my life sometimes seemed pointless.
While I kept telling myself and my friends that I was going to the spiritual workshop on a lark, I was privately imagining a much more dramatic scenario. Somehow I expected this teacher to notice and confront me — to deliver some kind of spiritual shock that would finally get my life going in the right direction. In short, I anticipated that I would get all shook up. And something deep within me said that it was about time.
But nothing turned out the way I expected. From the very beginning of the day, I felt like I’d dropped in on a New Age revival meeting peopled mostly by the teacher’s veteran students. As a newcomer I received lots of attention, but I sensed an agenda of attracting new students for the teacher’s school. The teacher didn’t show up for the first couple hours so I had to listen to a series of syrupy testimonials about how wonderful he was. And when he did show up he looked and sounded drunk — slurring his words and rambling incoherently about spiritual ideas he had expressed more clearly in his books. The day turned into one long, expensive exercise in absurdity. Driving home that evening I was furious, alternately cursing and laughing about what a waste of time the workshop had been.
Strangely enough, I stayed angry about this experience for months. My life hadn’t been changed by the workshop, and I just couldn’t let go of my disappointment. Then one day it hit me: I was all shook up! The workshop had delivered a tremendous spiritual shock after all by demonstrating an unexpected lesson: Do not expect others to do your spiritual work for you. When I attended another of the teacher’s workshops about a year later — this time with much lower expectations — it turned out to be one of the most insightful experiences of my life. The teacher seemed steady, sensible, even brilliant. To this day I wonder who had changed more since I first saw him — the teacher or myself?
Many people take their first uncertain steps along a true spiritual path soon after getting “all shook up.” Often it takes an encounter with tragedy, deep suffering, or simply the defeat of our expectations before we are able to open up to a way of life inspired by something bigger and deeper than our narrow self-interest. The process of opening up makes us vulnerable to a greater wisdom — but it can also make us vulnerable to new dangers.
Sense & Spirituality™ is intended to help you make sense of your own spiritual experience and steer clear of some unnecessary dangers. You can think of this column as an ongoing guide to “finding your path without losing your head.” My own spiritual path led me unexpectedly back into reporting, but with a new focus on spirituality itself. Since the mid-1980s I’ve written many magazine articles and several books about a wide variety of paths, perspectives, and teachers.
Along a true spiritual path there’s no way to avoid getting all shook up from time to time. But it can be helpful to stay in touch with others who have already been shaken (and stirred). So I hope that you’ll stay in touch — and I hope Sense & Spirituality™ helps you stay in touch with your deepest longings.
With the rise of state-run lotteries and the increasingly rapid spread of legitimate casinos nationwide, gambling has graduated from the realm of netherworld seductions to a controversial means of raising revenues for city governments, public schools, and Native American reservations. Whether you perceive gambling as innocuous or insidious, it’s clear that the irrational lure of winning big has a hold on an increasing number of people, from the occasional lottery ticket buyer to casino regulars who may regard the greensward of the blackjack table as their front yard. Since gambling is never a practical means of increasing your income unless you happen to “own the house,” it’s worth asking why so many people fall for this peculiar bewitchment.
My theory — perhaps not shared by many — is that gambling is a form of distorted spirituality. When we pick our numbers or pull the handle on the slot machine, we’re subconsciously seeking a divine dispensation. We’re hoping that we have the lucky combination to deliver us into a state of grace.
When we buy a state lottery ticket, we are entertaining the hope that it will change our lives — free us from wage slavery, enable us to buy nice things, take a splendid vacation, or even become a benefactor to family, friends and good causes. Whether any of these things would actually work out once we had our winnings, all of these dreams are substitutes for the authentic experience of grace — that is, an inward state of ease as opposed to a life on Easy Street. Grace might also be described as spiritual equipoise, a state of inner strength and balance that enables us to deal with all the dramas and difficulties of life without losing our cool (or our warmth).
We get confused about how to attain grace partly because we think the experience of ease should come to us easily. And we’re not entirely wrong on that score; some spiritual traditions suggest that grace is our birthright. Perhaps the reason that so many people have ecstatic memories of certain childhood moments is that we naturally live closer to grace when we are young. The spiritual path is often one of unlearning our adult defenses — through the hard work of self-confrontation and forgiveness — in order to regain a state of grace. We all deserve grace because we have it within us. It’s just tough to remember and recover it sometimes.
At any rate, buying a lottery ticket or taking the bus to Vegas seems like a much simpler route to a life of ease. That’s how gambling becomes invested with a spiritual charge. If we are not aware of this misdirection of energy, that same energy can turn into the force of addiction. Then we must work harder and harder at gambling (or drinking, or sex, or the pursuit of worldly power) in order to find some grace within it. This soon becomes a deadly game, because there is no grace at all within addiction.
Paramahansa Yogananda, one of the first Eastern teachers to introduce yoga and meditation practices to the West, advised spiritual aspirants to “Be cheerful but grave.” That’s as good a description of a graceful approach to life as any I’ve heard. I’m sure we’ve all met spiritual types who suffer from too much seriousness, as well as New Agers whose chronic good spirits can quickly become too much to bear. A graceful balance of gravity and cheerfulness can seem impossible to attain. Still, the chances of reaching such an inward ease through our own intention, attention, and dedication are a lot better than the typical odds of gambling. And the results, I’ll wager, are more fruitful and lasting than the biggest lotto payoff.
In mid-June of 2001, the National Marriage Project released a survey showing that single Americans in their 20s want to partner with their “soul mate” rather than anyone who merely shares their social or religious background, or delivers more conventional benefits like a decent income. Eighty-eight percent of the 1003 married and single twenty-somethings surveyed, both men and women, believe that there is a “special person, a soul mate” waiting for them somewhere in this big wide world.
When I heard this report I recalled a comment made years ago at a reading by the poet Robert Bly, to the effect that most people’s souls don’t even show up in their lives until age 35 or later. If that’s true, today’s twenty-somethings are either making tremendous spiritual progress compared to earlier generations, or are setting themselves up for an enormous emotional disappointment — the kind of disappointment, in fact, that tends to set the stage for awakening to one’s authentic soulfulness.
There are so many variations on the idea of the “soul” that I’m going to offer my own working definition before passing on some unsolicited advice about soul-mating to modern twenty-somethings (a demographic niche I haven’t had the pleasure of inhabiting for, oh, thirty-some years now). I believe that the soul is the meeting place of our ego and our spirit — where our base motives of self-preservation and self-promotion meet our highest inspirations of compassion and selflessness. That’s why the soul is not just a dreamy mix of feelings about wanting the perfect life and meeting that special someone. The soul is that part of our consciousness that constantly struggles to resolve the awesome tension between the ego’s selfish drives and the spirit’s infinite but impersonal energies. When we find ourselves conflicted between the natural instinct to “look out for No.1” and the altruistic motives of serving God, humankind, or Nature, we are engaged in the genuine work of the soul.
As we learn to create tiny notes of harmony from the seemingly opposite forces of our inner life, our soul grows stronger within us and gradually takes over more of the reins of self-awareness from the ego, which has been used to running things since birth. Our soulfulness doesn’t usually have a fighting chance until the ego has taken some solid hits in the solar plexus and been left gasping for breath at least half a dozen times. Hence Bly’s mid-30s schedule for soul-awakening seems entirely reasonable; in fact it seems to have predicted my life pretty well.
As I remember, I spent most of my twenties trying to convince the world to listen up, implement my Total Plan for a Better Future, and offer greater compensation for my efforts on its behalf. Although I was increasingly dissatisfied with myself as the big 3-0 approached, I didn’t think there was anything I could do to actually change — until I had no choice in the matter. In my early thirties, I fell prey to a seven-year illness that took away my health, my work, my home, my most intimate relationship, and my self-esteem — all my ego’s most prized possessions. Soon after, in the midst of great suffering, I began to get acquainted with my soul.
I think what really makes two people soul mates is the mutual recognition that they can help each other grow in wisdom and soulfulness for the rest of their lives. That is decidedly not the same as looking or feeling like “a match made in heaven” from the beginning. If you can recognize that profound potential for mutual helpfulness between yourself and a lover while still in your twenties, you’re very lucky indeed.
But many people will have to wait a while longer and experience several major life challenges in order to develop enough of their own soul to attract the soul of another. Thus, with tongue more or less in cheek, I recommend one, two, or all four of the following steps to the idealistic twenty-somethings who are wondering how to find the perfect soul mate:
1. Arrange for a crushing defeat of your greatest ambition, your most defended convictions, or your entire perspective on reality. This one’s easy; all you have to do is stick to your current plan for success and personal satisfaction. The universe is almost bound to deliver some kind of shocking reversal of your desires or beliefs sometime after you hit 27, if not before. I often feel pity for the young wunderkinds who make their name or their fortune in a big way by their mid-20s because early success can insulate them from reality’s rude shocks until well into their 30s or 40s, when they have much farther to fall and will be much more embarrassed about their public profile as they are picking themselves up afterward. Get your first big disillusionment out of the way by age 30, while you’re neither rich nor famous, and you have a real head start in the soul business.
2. Get sick — really sick — for at least a year or two. Nothing stimulates soul growth like a serious illness or injury of the body. Why? Because most people grow up mistaking the body as the very stuff of their being, rather than the vehicle of that being. It’s not until the vehicle breaks down that we can begin to tell the difference firsthand. Later, in the healing process, we can learn to make different choices about how we use the vehicle of our being to help insure its reliability for as long as possible. The problem with this step, of course, is that by getting seriously ill you’re courting the possibility of losing the vehicle — dying, that is. While Ego fears that possibility intensely, Spirit doesn’t much care one way or the other; it’s literally above all that. That’s why the soul experience of serious illness is always a mixture of terror and ecstatic surrender, sometimes all in the same moment. When you come out of it, you’ll value life in a far more passionate and caring way than before — and souls of equal depth and experience will naturally be drawn to you. If this step sounds awfully daunting, that’s because it is. As all the great wisdom texts have said, soul-making is not for sissies.
3. Face your addiction(s) and meet your shadow. Don’t have an addiction? Oh yes, you do! Addiction is not only as American as apple pie, it’s as human as eating, drinking, and breathing. Life on this earth is habit-forming, and no one escapes at least one dependent attachment to a substance, behavior, or belief that becomes a trap even as it seems absolutely essential to self-continuance. Learning to liberate yourself from your particular traps of habit is a process that’s key to every kind of liberation in life — and souls meet best in freedom. The important thing to remember about “recovery” in the broadest sense is that it’s not an event or achievement so much as a soul-making process. As the depth psychologist Carl Jung observed, the greatest problems in life are managed not by solving them outright, but by continuing to work on them as consciously as possible until we breathe our last. That means facing and coming to terms with our “dark side,” or shadow. Along the way, we grow in freedom and wisdom that we can teach to others.
4. Give up on the notion of ever finding a soul mate. Surely you saw this one coming! The problem with the soul-mate search is that it’s almost always contaminated with egocentric schemes of wish fulfillment. And the things the ego wishes for are generally not the lasting qualities that actually make relationships work for a lifetime. There’s an old mystical saying that “every time the heart breaks, the spirit leaps for joy.”That’s an allusion to the ego-contamination that can infect our very deepest feelings. Unless we pay keen attention to our heartbreaks in order to detect our own self-serving conspiracies against happiness, we’re doomed to serial romances that never reach their potential before coming apart. If you want to know where to find your soul mate, stop looking in the personal ads or public meet-markets and start volunteering all your extra time in a soup kitchen, reading program, or heartfelt social campaign. When you become so committed to a selfless cause that you can’t imagine fitting another person into your life, then Ms. or Mr. Right may come knocking at your door in a way you never could have imagined. Souls mate on the bed of altruism where love is freely given, not desperately sought.
Copyright 2008 D. Patrick Miller. All rights reserved.
Sense & Spirituality™ Directory
Reports ::: Bookshelf ::: Seminars
HOME • BOOKS from Fearless