Are You a Spiritual Warrior? (Part 2 of 3 - Seeing Reality)
Posted: Tuesday, July 27, 2010
by e
Dhammabucha Rocksprings Meditation
An evolution is occurring and people are actually becoming free. This evolution involves fulfillment beyond the illusory security that we have all been living with. We based this security upon a web of illusions that we found ourselves caught in, not seeing the spider in the corner waiting to pounce.
The spider in the corner is reality, and reality is anything but an illusory, false sense of security. Reality is seeing all that we are, seeing all the different ways we surrender and capitulate, and seeing the incompleteness and fragmentation of our lives. Within our illusions, we feel that our lives are complete. We become entangled in a dream state where we go through the motions of putting on a good face, but underneath that false face we only find worry and fear.
We are fast asleep, and the only thing that can awaken us from our dream is our own inner reflections, which result in personal insight and direct seeing. These can arise suddenly, perhaps due to an accident, an illness, or a misfortune of some kind which suddenly awakens us to the reality of the prison we have - first built for ourselves, then walked into, and finally locked the door behind us.
This flash of insight is a wake-up call, and when it happens, an immediate call to action results - a call to break out of our self-induced prisons. But how do we break out? How do we see how we have incarcerated ourselves?
We begin by examining our cherished values.
We are not going to rely on another authority this time, or another self-help book or priest to tell us what we will find or what we should do about it. We have created these values ourselves, and therefore this time we must examine and investigate these values by ourselves.
We know that even in a near perfect life and society we remain fearful. So why is this? What have we yet to discover that will set us completely free? We have spent our time and energy on things that society and religion insist will make us happy, things outside of ourselves. But happiness doesn't happen! It dissipates as quickly as it arises. So where have we gone wrong? How have we been misled? This is what we must find out for ourselves.
When the insight to discover becomes great enough, when we finally figure out that we haven't figured out anything, our intelligence will uncover true happiness - not a happiness promised by others, but a happiness we realize for ourselves. And this happiness has nothing to do with God, with country, or with family. It is much closer and deeper than that.
Loving God, country and family is not wrong, it is natural. But few actually love. A problem arises when we only "think" that we love these things, and instead use them merely for our own security. It is an egoistic, dependent, and selfish thing. When we use God, country, and our families for security, and they use us by creating dependencies, then love is not love at all, but dependency, and dependency can never promote love. Dependency promotes fear, and as we cling to and attempt to control the things we depend upon, we find ourselves fearfully and aggressively pitting our God against theirs, our country against theirs, and our families against theirs.
Love comes from a much freer place. Love does not come from a place of egoism and aggression. Love appears when our selfish thoughts diminish, and that which is greater has a chance to utter its subtle reminders. It is only the illusion of security that comes from these places of one-sided selfish interest.
Love is courageous, where security breeds cowardice and creates divisions among humankind. The color of ones skin, or their language, or their religion is enough to warrant their eradication. This is happening now, unbelievably, after thousands of years of culture.
This is what the new evolution is about; first seeing where we are, and how and why we have arrived there, and then doing something about ourselves which will lessen the fear that permeates our world. In order to do this, we must look at all aspects of our lives and see where we use our God, our country, and our families for our own security, confusing ourselves into thinking that this is love.
What is love? Is love what we feel when we are attracted to someone or something? New studies have shown that the part of the human brain that becomes stimulated when someone is in love is not the emotional centers at all, but the primal centers that control physical desires. Is love nothing more than animal lust that turns into possessiveness, control, and eventually a quasi-business relationship involving anger, suspicion, guilt, and apprehension?
Or is love a seeing and accepting, an undefined movement toward something that we can't completely understand, a movement toward truth that presupposes the false? A letting go?
Is love a responsibility? Responsibility can't be love, responsibility is something we must do, and love cannot be something we must do. Love is something that we "are" without obligation in mind; it is not controllable.
Admitting that we don't love God, our country or our family requires great intelligence, understanding and honesty, and believe it or not, admitting that we don't know how to love is the first step in truly loving. Only then is there a possibility of authentic love, and this time the love is universal, not narrow and confining where those other than "our" God, "our" country, or "our" family are hated. Authentic love is freedom.
Do we use God, country and family as an ego extension? Do we pump ourselves up by associating with our great country, our great God, and our great family? Or do we begin to see through the falsity of using these things to increase our own self importance, while insisting it is love?
Can we let go of our illusions about God, country and family and just be? Can we face the emptiness when we let go of these things; the emptiness from which true spiritual warriors are born? That well of non-self and reduced ego where we no longer see only our needs, but the needs of others as well, as we become not just "me", not just "them" but "us"?
And as our freedom evolves, as we become true spiritual warriors, where do we go from here?
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More commentsYa, but what do you really think...or feel? It's the "great intelligence" part that I am really struggling with, but practice makes perfect, they say. Oh, just got this from Jean :), really seems to make me...well, :). Great work.Hi David. Thank you so much. The great intelligence has nothing to do with intellect or thought processes. It is touched in the absence of these things. When the mind becomes stilled, perhaps as the result of a traumatic event - a near death experience, an accident, a serious illness, but most commonly the practice of concentration meditation, then what some call the soul, which I call the storehouse consciousness or which the Buddhist Abhidhamma calls the life continuum consciousness - this is altered.
Many times when someone comes out of a coma after a serious accident, their life changes dramatically, perhaps embarking upon a new career more compassionate than their past one, or going in a spiritual direction of one type or another. This shift in consciousness, caused by the mind becoming empty for a moment, allows (in Christian Terms) God to have a chance to get a word in edgewise for a change instead of the constantly busy mind which goes around in our karmic (habitual) circles. However God (in Christian terms - Buddhist tend to cut out the middle man) :) does not speak in languages but indirectly to the heart which precipitates direct action, such as a change in priorities and values. Buddhists call this insight.
That's why intellectually attempting to change never works, only a change in heart works and that cannot be consciously done. If it is attempted to be done consciously, then the result is only a shallow change precipitated by what the mind imagines that the change should be. This never lasts, and is not being true to oneself or one's heart. It is the direct seeing and insight into what a person is that causes change.
Trying to change is only an excuse to remain the same while faking oneself out that one wants to change. You see this happening all the time with people who so badly want to become religious or spiritual but can't quite pull it off.
When we finally figure out that we haven't figured out anything, our intelligence will uncover true happiness - not a happiness promised by others, but a happiness we realize for ourselves. - I love this line Raymond. You are so right. We spend so much time 'chasing' whatever we've been programmed to think happiness is, searching for it when it can't be found. It just is, but has to come from within your heart and mind.So true Brianna. Thank you so much for your support.
Metta.....e
E., as always you write an excellent article, but I don't quite agree with you that very few actually love. I'm not sure that any of us are in a position to be able to make that judgment call about somebody else, or even to be able to state with certainty how spiritual anyone else is.
Hi Jennifer. Very true, thank you. English is a very incomplete language. Love can be many things ranging from attachment, to clinging, to grasping, to dependency, to compassion, to sex, to lovingkindness, to all encompassing love, to sympathetic love, to unconditional love, and many many many things in between. I think generally love may be a feeling where one's self is forgotten about for a moment and one walks in the shoes of the other. The absence of ego.
Best......e
I believe that I carry some spiritual anointing because I have come out of poverty and give to others in need. Through Christ you can do all things, you have to believe, pray, execute, and watch it grow.It sounds like you are following your religion instead of bashing people over the head with it :) Thank you. Generosity is a good beginning to spiritual awakening because it calms the mind. "Spiritual" awakening in this sense (my article) is that which is beyond material, or metaphysical; beyond the physical. It's not about quasi-spirituality that remains enmeshed in the physical world, i.e. light and love and emotions. True spirituality is beyond thinking, beyond mind, beyond belief, beyond personal wants and desires, and beyond the universe itself. It is that transformation that takes place when mind becomes still, when mind becomes passive and open. It has nothing to do with logic, understanding, or religious study or worship. It is far beyond that.
It is through spiritual clarity are we able to know our purpose on earth.
Thanks Rowland, Yes, when we have the clarity to see that we (ego) are but a construct of mind, then any kind of purpose for that kind of an illusion becomes irrelevant and non-consequential. Only then has mind a chance to transcend itself. Then the return to physical existence time and again that results from ego belief is over. This transcendence of mind is called Nirvana, or Nibbana in Buddhism.
E, As always a very thoughtful and passionate article… a good intellectual exercise. I think I grasp your overall thesis and see the connection with the examples and I agree with many of the words and ideas behind them.
However, in reality, I sense that modules such as family, traditions and spiritual matters are hard-wired and difficult to block naturally. As a self-actualizing exercise such rationalizations can be part of the process-to overcome nature, and intellectually rearrange the natural priority of things. But it requires an enormous amount of mental energy to maintain daily.
We are greatly influenced by our experiences; we define the shapes and meanings by the effect of our individual encounters; they percolate down through our own particular filters (too complex to define).
Most folks have many scars and much baggage derived from tribulations of family, love, institutions, friendships and religion. It is too easy to claim, I am just going to go against the natural grain and reject that which I am made of because of the past hurt and pain. It is like shunning a person who has hurt you. You will soon find that you spend more time thinking about it and trying to concoct rationales of why you were right and they were wrong instead of confronting the situation. It might all end badly but, at least it needs to have a natural conclusion. You can close the book. You can move on. Move on to find something new to fulfill that natural yearning.
It will never be perfect-it is not supposed to be. It is supposed to be disproportionately hard. But hard is when you grow. Folks who walk around always with a pasted smile on their face seem unnatural, for any belief. Year to year they don’t seem to move beyond the same rationalizing threshold. Too much intellectualizing will consume a mind that was meant to be exercised for more constructive things-it is meant to grow, as painful as it is at times.
But granted, rationalizing and intellectualizing both are natural processes and are vehicles for growth. But using what strategy? I get weary anytime I sense that one person’s rationale is built on destroying another person’s rationale: I have intellectual freedom because I don’t believe in the same things that another does because they are not intellectually free like me!”
If bricks of freedom are built upon taking bricks from someone else, I don’t think anything is accomplished.
There is NO difference between someone screaming at me saying, if you don’t believe the same as I do then you are domed to everlasting fire and brimstone or, a calm person saying that if you don’t reject those things that I reject than you are intellectually shackled.
If you find something that works fine, tell others. But respect them enough to draw their own conclusions; their evolution will be different. They might reject your rejections but aren’t they free to do so? If they don’t, is it right to say, “If you believe as I, you are right, if you don’t, you are not.”
That is what politicians do, that is what institutions do. That is what creates the mess we all agree on. We all reject what they are selling. Freedom is a powerful word. It is like Change. I have never met a sane person who does not want Freedom or Change. It is of great comfort to many intellectual people that freedom and change occurs within the foundations of Family, Faith and Traditions, even though there is so much work still to do.
All you ideas are sound, rational and convincing. You don’t need to diminish what others believe to gain freedom.
Respectful of your freedom and desire to change, bing
Thank you Bing. As always - a thoughtful comment!
Without a direct experience of spirituality, these things are almost impossible to grasp, and a worldly mind will dismiss them out of hand. Spirituality is something that happens not to everyone. One has to have pretty good karma for spirituality to take hold. Without that background, ego will think it knows everything and will usually insure itself from eternal demise by simply taking on some kind of weak finality such as a prefabricated belief or an ideal that is someone else's idea, instead of doing the hard work of investigating itself.The spiritual aspect is metaphysical, meaning beyond the physical. Beyond the body, the hard wired mind, and beyond thought, logic and experience. To negate that mind is capable of going beyond physical, which cannot be explained but perhaps hinted at by pure, unadulterated awareness and which goes by many names such a God, etc., negates most religious deeper meanings which in the end are quite ineffable.It is this ineffability that transcends the hard wiring and takes mind into uncharted waters that in effect alter character. A student, who has greedy tendencies, may go to medical school and become a doctor, but if the character remains greedy, then the doctor will put his or her financial well being above their patients and their practice will have teeth in it where old, sick people are turned down because they don‘t have as much money as the wealthy with good insurance policies.On the other hand, if that same student studied his or her own mind until they could clearly see the greed that was present, then their lives would take on a different aspect, and their lives would go in a completely different direction - toward compassion, caring, honesty and integrity..Because logical mind cannot get it's arms around the ineffable, logical mind dismisses the possibility of anything beyond itself, beyond the very elementary senses that are our entire universe. If you become blind, numb all over, deaf, lose your sense of touch and smell, how will you communicate with the earth and you r relations? This feeling that we are all knowing and that the only realities are what we perceived is ego's disrespect of that which may be greater.But at any rate, thanks so much for keeping tuned in and please remain open to the possibility that what I talk about is not only from 30 years of serious meditation experience, but from the deeper aspects of all major religions, such as the Catholic contemplative saints, the Jewish Kabbalah, the Muslim Sufi mystics, the Hindu renunciates, and of course the Buddhist forest monks.None of this will ever make sense to natural mind, or the world, as it is normally perceived. All of this goes against the grain of the world. Although many try to incorporate spirituality into their familiar physical existence in the world, we can never have our cake and eat it both.Therefore the footprints of true spirituality are a dispassion for the world and all of the world's creatures, which spirituality sees as transient, steeped in suffering and discontent, and without any substantial reality behind the obvious physical body and mind.None of this will make sense to the majority of people who cannot be troubled by such lofty perceptions, and will laugh at even the hint that they can't know or understand it all, but a few will understand and courageously delve into the unknown of interior mind, a new and exciting world that has serious ramifications of one's destiny beyond the short lived experience on the physical plane.Please see my last installment for a deeper explanation of these things.Thanks again, Bing.
E- sounds deep to me... this ol' country boy may just have to chew on that for a long while. looking forward to read '3'.i might just have to wait for the book!-bingAlready wrote it! Amazon (dot) com "A Year to Enlightenment" (Okay, two years for Bing:)Best.....e
Yes e, the big question is "where do we go from here?" We know where we came from and where we stand today, but where and how do we move forward?Ahah! Part 3 coming today! Thanks David.
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