SPIRITUAL IMPULSE AND SPIRITUAL AMBITION
There is a jewel hidden in each heart,
shining from emptiness.
Treasure even the smallest glimpse.
THE JEWEL
Whomever you are, you would not be reading a book such as this if you had not had a glimpse of the jewel. Perhaps as a child you sensed a world that touched a deep and mysterious wonder. You may have had an experience you felt certain no one would understand and so you never shared it, but it has stayed in your heart—some kind of knowing that seemed at once completely true and yet confusing to your mind. Perhaps there was a moment in a temple of trees when a shaft of light from the rising or setting sun struck the jewel of your heart. You may have been hiking on a mountain when you suddenly were stopped by joy, wonder, or a sense of awe. It was not just the view, the misty colors of the many ridges you could see in the distance. Your senses touched the Infinite, and you experienced beauty; something vast touched the vastness within you. Its radiance may have come as moonlight playing on the ocean’s waves. It may have shone through a piece of art, a poem, or a dream that touched what connects us.
You may have had a glimpse while sitting in a church or a temple, when the silence and reverence of place seemed to invite you to the silence within your Self. Perhaps you felt it when a baby gazed into your eyes from the eyes of such innocence that all of your defenses melted in such sweetness. The jewel may have shone through the stories you have read, heard, or experienced from great spiritual masters in various traditions. What sparkles is not the stories or words; it is something deeper that touches your heart.
The jewel seems to shine most brightly when we experience love—love for a person, a pet, a moment. When my young grandson lovingly traces with his finger the prominent veins that stand out on the back of my aging hands and tells me they remind him of rivers, we both experience the jewel, though we do not call it by any name.
SPIRITUAL IMPULSE
It is the jewel that gives rise to our impulse to know it more deeply and to want it to be revealed more consciously. Bubbling from the hidden depths of our Being arises an impulse to know what seems to lie beyond our limited ideas of who we are. There arises a sense of mystery, an impulse to know God, Truth, Self, enlightenment, love, or peace. This is spiritual impulse. Infinite Truth or Spirit has placed a longing in our heart, in the heart of our awareness, to know itself, to awaken itself beyond egoic consciousness. This impulse transcends both ego and self. We could call this impulse “the seed of enlightenment,” a seed that has been planted deep within and perhaps has lain fallow in the rich soil and silent ground of our Being.
However, at some point, it begins to grow itself, a tiny shoot at first, trying to move toward the light. It begins to be nurtured in the experience of the seeker as it moves toward fruition. But its growth and blossoming are not for the benefit of a single individual but for the benefit of the whole. Awakening is not a feather in the cap of the spiritual ego. The desire to claim it for the “me” is the ego’s spiritual ambition, and this ambition can actually hinder the growth of the seed and limit the fullness of its blooming. Spiritual impulse is a gift from our infinite ground; spiritual ambition is the desire to possess knowledge rather than to receive it.
EGOIC IDENTITY NEVER FEELS COMPLETE
Egoic consciousness is Consciousness identified with a single body-mind and its thoughts, feelings, senses, memories, will, and conditioned ways of viewing itself as a separate entity. Ego consciousness maintains a self-concept separate from the Divine, the natural world, and other beings, and it frequently feels separate even from itself. Everyone knows the many judgments that an “I” can make about a “myself.” But who is who? “I love myself.” “I hate myself.” “I’m disappointed in myself.” “I’m proud of myself.” Who is the “I”? Who is the “myself”?
Something in our egoic consciousness knows it is not complete. This sense of deficiency stems from the fact that until we know who or what we are beyond our self-image, we will always feel that something is missing, that “there must be more to life than this,” that “I am not enough.” As we know, self-images are quite changeable. A compliment or a criticism can inflate or deflate a self-image in an instant.
Egoic consciousness is limited to the finite world of time and space, and all of its productions and experiences are impermanent, as is the form of the body it identifies with. This is not to say there is no place or purpose for ego consciousness. It has very many useful functions in maneuvering a body through life. It is not an enemy; it simply has no independent existence, although it “thinks” it does. Egoic consciousness seems to have lost the knowledge that its life belongs to Life, that its consciousness belongs to a greater Consciousness, that it derives its being from Being and not from its idea of separation.
SPIRITUAL AMBITION
Spiritual ambition occurs when ego consciousness takes ownership of the impulse to awaken and assumes it will be the agent of deliverance to what then becomes its own personal goal. While what we call “ego” is actually only a movement of thought, we have come to believe it is more, and its spiritual ambition can often appear as a competitive goal with others who are imagined to be further ahead or lagging behind in the race to the top of Enlightenment Mountain.
What was a gift from the Infinite, a moment of grace, a spiritual longing, becomes co-opted by an “I-thought” (Ramana’s term for ego) that begins to look everywhere for what will fulfill its desire—everywhere but in that spark of the heart’s longing that arose from the Infinite’s fire. Our mind cannot help but look for true knowledge the way it has been taught to look for intellectual knowledge, to look “out there,” to look to others, to books, to practices, and to blame its frustrations on its own failures and deficiencies. Conversely, when spiritual insight arrives as a gift in moments of openness, spiritual ego takes credit for its arrival.
SPIRITUAL EGO AND SPIRITUAL EFFORT
Initially, the seeker’s ego imagines that awakening is the trophy it will receive for its spiritual efforts. Who is efforting? You imagine you know who is efforting when you are sitting on your cushion or trying so hard to be kind or compassionate. You may never even question who you are except when your behavior does not seem to match your idea of yourself. You have accepted that who you are is a person, a body-mind with certain traits and characteristics that are judged to be positive or negative, born on a particular date, in charge of your life choices, worried about making the right or wrong decisions. You imagine you know who it is who is efforting, whose ambition will achieve the “goal,” whose efforts will succeed or fail on the spiritual path. But spiritual egos face frustrations.
Friend, please tell me what I can do about this world
I hold to, and keep spinning out!
I gave up sewn clothes, and wore a robe,
but I noticed one day the cloth was well-woven.
So I bought some burlap, but I still
throw it elegantly over my left shoulder.
I pulled back my sexual longings
and now I discover that I’m angry a lot.
I gave up rage, and now I notice
that I am greedy all day.
I worked hard at dissolving the greed,
and now I am proud of myself.
When the mind wants to break its link with the world
it still holds on to one thing.
Kabir says, Listen my friend,
there are very few that find the path!1
KABIR
What may have begun as a deep, authentic, and quiet spiritual impulse of the Heart to awaken, to know one’s Self or God, can quickly be co-opted by the egoic mind, which then becomes the agent of spiritual ambition. Some traditions use this ambition to spur students on. “Sit like your hair is on fire!” or “Don’t waste your time, day or night!” might be the exhortation of a Zen roshi. Continued failure at koan study can feel deflating to a mind that wants to “get it” intellectually. The promise of heaven or hell can be the enticing carrot or dreaded stick to an ego wanting only endless pleasure and avoidance of pain. Believing only a few find the path can set up a competitive ego that wants to prove he will be one of the few. Or it can lead the mind to a sense of frustration and futility.
In all spiritual traditions, spiritual practices have developed to help the seeker on his journey. Any one or perhaps several of such practices may have appealed to you over your years of seeking. You have tried one and failed or tried another that seemed useful and continued doing it. There is nothing wrong with spiritual effort or practice. The problem occurs when we imagine that the effort belongs to a separate “self” and that it will take us somewhere else.
Spiritual effort appears when it appears; it is the action of the moment. The spiritual ego believes it is the one efforting. The acting or efforting called “spiritual practice” simply appears in a particular body-mind organism that, at least initially, takes himself to be separate from who or what he seeks. However, identified mind imagines that you are creating that effort in order to arrive somewhere else.
Because you seek to be someplace else, you want everything you are doing to be a means to that goal. However, when the Buddhist master says, “Sitting itself is enlightenment,” she does not mean sitting in awareness of a separate “me” being a good boy or girl, a worthy student of Buddhism, hoping for a reward called “enlightenment” if he or she just sits long enough and thinks the right thoughts. Of course, all of you aspiring buddhas know that these are precisely your thoughts—at least for a while! Realize that effort only refers to mind-body interpretations of experience. The Self does not effort. It simply is itself.
If we are trying hard to be “worthy” or “holy” and thus ensure a place in “heaven” or trying to be “good” so that we will not find ourselves punished in “hell,” we may remain totally unconscious of the fact that heaven and hell are productions of a dual mind in Consciousness. Many, many realms or dimensions of thought and experience exist in Consciousness; nothing exists outside of Consciousness. The questions are “Whose Consciousness?” and “Are any ideas of the dual mind Truth?”
NIRVANA IS NOT A PLACE EXTENDED IN TIME
We want heaven or nirvana to be a “place” extended in “time,” and thus we often fail to touch the timeless dimension of ourselves, where we are never separated from anyone or anything, and where we are never apart from the infinite and unconditioned love that is available now, if our hearts open wide enough. What is timeless and eternal is Now, not something extended in duration. The mind defines eternity as unending time, failing to realize that in the timeless there is no time. Our mind continually wants to be somewhere else than here and now because if it were to totally stop moving, it would disappear.
If we are not trying to be somewhere else, we are simply living as the present moment. Much has been written and spoken about being in the present. You imagine that the present moment is a point in time, rather than timeless Awareness, and then you imagine you can practice being in time.
The sense of a separate self requires a sense of time and space. Separation requires the sense of someone in form who occupies space and the sense of someone who is “becoming” or “moving” in time. “One day, in the past, I was born; now I am growing older; someday in the future I will die.” Without a sense of time or a sense of becoming, there is only timeless Being, and yet eternal Being and apparent becoming share a single essence. All of us have experienced timeless moments in which life or action just seemed to flow effortlessly. In these moments we were not feeling separated from our being or from the moment we were living.
WHAT SEPARATES YOU FROM THE MOMENT?
What is the single thing that continually and without fail seems to separate you from the moment of living? It is the thinking mind, is it not? It continually moves about between memories of the past and projections into the future, interpretations of the moment in the context of past conditioning or anxieties about what might come. It carries on a running dialogue about everything. It is your private tour guide or narrator, incessantly commenting on the passing scene. The thinking mind sometimes seems capable of getting into every nook and cranny of your life without exception. And while the thinking mind carries on its continual commentary, it imagines that its thoughts about the moment are the same as experiencing the moment.
Imagine seeing a flower before you had a name for it. Here is a delicate pink, white, and green shape flowing in a graceful pattern, perhaps delivering a sweet fragrance. Initially, there is simply experiencing, no separate subject or object. Then comes naming: “That is a flower.” Before naming, there has simply been seeing, without a “seer” and a thing “seen.” Now there is a “something” that is seen by a “someone.” Both have names, names that are part of the mind’s conditioning. This fact does not mean language, names, or concepts are wrong. It just means they are not the reality to which they point.
Separation arises along with the naming. The experience becomes “I [a separate someone] see a flower [a separate object].” Along with this arrives an accompanying mental commentary about whether the flower was pretty, whether we liked it, what it reminded us of, when we saw a flower like that before, when we planted flowers in our garden, how quickly they got eaten by snails, what a poor gardener we were, how we should really remember to feed our indoor plants tomorrow or send flowers to our friend for her birthday, and on and on and on.
Actually, in this experience, seeing and its object (flower) arose together. But how quickly the experience of seeing becomes a memory, a concept of a “someone” seeing a “something” about which he has various opinions, associations, and reactions. With this automatic reduction of experience to names and labels, we move away from the freshness, wonder, and intimacy of the moment and begin to believe that the virtual reality we assign to our thoughts is Reality. It is not, and yet neither is it separate. What has been aware of both the moment of seeing and the mind’s movement to describe?
PERCEPTION IS NOT CONCEPTION
The running commentary of the thinking mind is not the same as experiencing the moment, although thinking may be the experience of the moment. Perception is not conception. Neither perception nor conception could occur without Consciousness, but conceptualization is what appears to take us away from the present moment. Thinking becomes our means of separation from simply being, yet thoughts are neither good nor bad. They are simply thoughts. What notices them?
What is indivisible and undifferentiated becomes differentiated by conceptualization, by naming. This is not a problem if we experience ourselves as that which is indivisible and has manifested itself in all forms or functions. But the average person takes his or her conceptualization to be the same as the reality to which concepts are merely pointing. In other words, we take our thoughts about a thing or a person, God or “enlightenment,” to be the truth; and we take the concept of ourselves to be who we are. We imagine our concepts are the same as what we perceive, and thus we stop being open to the moment in its essential nature of Being—a flowing river of Being. We take our ideas about who we are to be the same as the reality of who we are and thus lock ourselves tightly in a separate and rigid identity that cannot experience its true nature.
It is the conditioned mind and its continuous monologue about life that gives experience meaning, interpretation, and value—positive or negative. Without such an incessant flow of ideas—that is, when the mind quiets down or ceases to judge—there is experience of life as it is. This does not mean that the conditioning of the body-mind will not appear, or will not sometimes be quite useful, or will not affect the experience of living. Nor does it mean that no preferences will arise or that thoughts are necessarily an obstacle. They are not—unless we believe they are Truth. However, it does mean that concepts are not imagined to be truth about anything, and one’s happiness does not depend on having one’s preferences constantly met. The truth that quenches our spiritual thirst or longing will not be found in our conditioned mind.
NO ONE ELSE CAN DELIVER WHAT YOU ARE
Spiritual egos want to “know” what the awakened ones speak about and imagine Truth can be found in understanding the concepts. Even though some written or spoken words seem to be alive with presence and resonate deeply, it is where the words come from and where they are received that makes them shimmer, not the concepts. Words are used to point toward Truth or Reality. Spiritual ambition wants to take someone else’s description and try to live as if it understood. But as long as you imagine someone else can deliver the taste of your food without your taking a bite, you will never know for yourself. It is only experiential knowing that nurtures and transforms us.
No one else can deliver truth to you. You may imagine that “truth” or “you” have to look a certain way, based on your understanding of someone else’s description. This obstacle will never be overcome until there is a sincere desire to find Truth for yourself, regardless of how anyone else may describe it. “Be a lamp unto yourself,” advised the Buddha. “Find out who it is who wants to know,” says the Advaitin guru. When we begin to truly taste what it is that feels nourishing to the heart, words become less important. A menu does not deliver the taste of food.
Can we begin to see that our longing for awakening, enlightenment, love, or peace is a gift from the Infinite, a precious thread to follow inward, and that our spiritual ambition drives us away from what is here in this moment, keeps us looking elsewhere than in the heart of our own awareness for the jewel? The place to look for Spirit, for Truth, is in the looking, right here and right now.
As the poet Kabir pointed out, “When the mind wants to break its link with the world / it still holds on to one thing.” For me, the important point here is “wants to.” When the mind wants something, it generally means it is not content to be where it is. Thus, wanting to break one’s link is the assertion of separation that is itself separation! I do not dismiss the freedom and truth experienced in transcending our ideas of a world or a “self.” Waking up out of the relative into the Absolute is an important first step, but ultimately we find that what is transcendent is also immanent in the world and in our very lives.
Whatever appears in a human life is life unfolding itself in its totality. Effort is not “yours,” nor is non-effort “yours,” yet it is no one else’s either. Through all the ideas, all the confusion, all the desiring, and all the attempts to stop desiring, seeking continues, and spiritual ambition continues. The spiritual seeker imagines himself vying for what he thinks is a personal “enlightenment,” a trophy for the accomplishments or pleasure of the spiritual ego. Spiritual ambition is the ego’s desire to awaken to the Undivided, to possess its wisdom and compassion, yet still remain a separate “me.” The stream does not want to relinquish its conditioned view of what it is.