“During the past 30 years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have consulted me. Many hundreds of patients have passed through my hands. Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over 35—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was that of not finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”
—Carl Jung (1875–1961),
Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist;
author of The Undiscovered Self (1957)
There are three ways to know if you are making any progress on the spiritual path:
1. The extent to which you don’t think,
2. The extent to which you have taken the ego out of your thinking, and
3. The extent to which you are at peace.
“Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself, and know that everything in life has a purpose. There are no mistakes, no coincidences, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.”
—Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, MD (1926–2004),
Swiss-American psychiatrist and researcher;
author of On Death and Dying (1969)
“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882),
American poet and educator;
author of “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855)
The following represents a compilation of ideas, concepts, and insights from the many lectures and seminars I have given and the books and essays I have written over the past 25 years. Together, they represent a guide to positive, peaceful, and purposeful living, one that is centered in the stillness and joy of our authentic selves. With this as your solid base, you will be able to live a dynamic, fulfilling, and spiritually oriented life, one of your own choosing yet one that is also chosen for you by God.
Spirituality is not served well by language of any kind; indeed, no serious subject is. All language originates from the world of form and hence necessarily has limitations contained within it. For example, how accurately and meaningfully could you explain to another person what a latte or a peanut butter cookie really tastes like, whether consumed individually or indeed together? Or consider winning a gold medal at the Olympics, successfully climbing Mount Everest, or falling madly in love. When people in these situations are asked, “How does it feel?” they usually respond by saying something like, “It’s an incredible feeling but I really can’t put it into words. It has to be experienced.”
We in the West in particular are all too quick to put labels on everything we see and experience—another compulsion of the mind—and this can only lead to serious misunderstandings and unnecessary complications. Isn’t it strange, and arrogant of us, that at the precise moment we put a label on something, we think we know it? I suggest you strongly resist this temptation and trust instead in your own ability to experience true awareness, understanding, peace, joy, bliss, and love on their own terms.
You are being asked in this book, perhaps for the very first time in your life, to analyze in detail how you actually think. All too often you spend a lot of time thinking in small, concentric circles (i.e., from A to F!) about why you are not living the kind of life you want to be living, not doing what you want to be doing, and not getting the results you want to be getting. You are stuck in a pattern of thinking that is getting you nowhere, certainly not ahead, yet you don’t know what to do to break free. You are locked in limbo, frozen in place, confined to a prison of your own making. It seems the best you can do is to ask this important question: “Where is the key, because I want to get out of here?”
But how could this happen? Invariably, at some point in your life, you will find that things are not progressing the way you think they should. You are disillusioned with life and unable to bridge the gap between wanting something and doing something in order to have it. Faced with this difficulty, you accept you have to confront head-on personal failure and growing frustration. Clearly you understand your feelings about your predicament but are at a loss what to do about them. After all, having ongoing feelings of disappointment and despair is not exactly conducive to taking decisive action.
As you read through this book, you are going to discover the following: You must embark on a journey of introspection and self-assessment to discover your true source of inspiration. The process involves coming to a well-informed conclusion about who and what you are, and why you’re here. As you travel down this road, you will find that buried memories will come alive again, and bring renewed energy and excitement back into your life. In turn, you will become alive again as well.
If you agree to engage in this activity, the rewards you’ll receive will be in direct proportion to the amount of effort—time, energy, curiosity, and open-mindedness—you invest in the process. The good news is that even a mind that is seemingly hard-wired (meaning very closed to change) can be modified if sufficient interest, determination, and persistence are present.
Life is one long continuum of activity. Inertia lies at one end of the scale, and it creates monotony, sadness, and misery in your life; action lies at the other end, and it creates excitement, happiness, and fulfillment in your life. The ideas in this text are designed to specifically minimize the former and maximize the latter. Our analysis will necessarily lead to the thoughts you are thinking on an ongoing basis and the feelings they generate. These feelings in turn are a prime indicator of the quality of thinking you are engaged in as well as the quality of life you are enjoying.
Consider the following:
Assume an exciting, inspirational thought strikes you: “I’d like to be an entrepreneur (or an engineer, a scientist, a doctor, a nurse, a journalist, a history professor, a business executive…). I have lots of good ideas. The newspapers are full of stories all the time about people who have succeeded at starting a new business. It sure would be exciting to try.”
You then say: “But who am I to think I could succeed? I don’t have what it takes. I don’t have the education, the experience, the network of people, the necessary financing, the skills, the determination—and I’m not the smartest person in the world, that’s for sure.” In other words, without any serious thought on your part, you quickly evaluate the possibility of succeeding at a certain endeavor, and conclude you are neither capable nor deserving.
You then feel: Sad, down, perhaps even a bit depressed. All the fears and doubts you ever had rise once again to the surface and reinforce your evaluation of yourself. You quickly retreat back into your comfort zone (aka the dead zone) where you know it’s safe.
Here, there is no pressure on you. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone, including yourself. You just accept the low opinion you have of yourself; it’s the path of least resistance. After all, no one knows you better than you know yourself, so obviously your evaluation of yourself and your prospects for success are correct. (Wrong!) The result? You are immobilized, and your feelings of self-doubt and lack of confidence keep you exactly where you are. As a result, nothing in your life changes very much, including your low opinion of yourself.
This thought sequence plays itself out in the minds of thousands, if not millions, of people all over the world every day. On the surface, the conclusion that is reached appears quite logical; on closer scrutiny, however, it does not. There is simply no conclusive evidence to support it, no matter who the individual is. Any belief you may have about yourself and your abilities to succeed at any activity needs to be tested in the real world through action—and often repeated action—and experience. It begins and ends with two four-letter words: hard work. (Recall Thomas Edison’s comment that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.)
We get up in the morning, groom our physical bodies, don our physical clothes, and satisfy our physical hunger. We proceed to go to some physical place, and compete and compare by playing silly games in the confines of our physical world to receive primarily physical rewards. At a certain level, we wonder why we do this all the time. Is this what we have been created to do? Is this all there is to our Being? Is this all a silly dream and we need to awaken from it? If so, how?
One moment of insight is more valuable than a lifetime of experience. So consider the following and what insight you might gain from it.
People generally experience a wide variety of feelings as they go about each day, accompanied by a corresponding level of stress and anxiety. These feelings can range from simple discouragement and disappointment in some cases (i.e., low reaction) to desperation and despair in other cases (i.e., high reaction). If intense enough, the latter can lead to extreme anxiety, or even moderate to severe depression. Let’s look more closely at this ailment, depression, for it can have serious consequences if not diagnosed early and dealt with promptly.
Depression is the manifestation or emotional response to an observed incongruence between what you are currently experiencing (i.e., the thoughts/cognitions you are having, and how you are interpreting and internalizing them) on a day-to-day basis, called your “actual” reality or reality one, and what you want and think you should be experiencing (i.e., events, happenings, or outcomes), what is called your “preferred” reality or reality two. This apparent dichotomy often takes place at both the conscious and subconscious level.
Depression, which could be accompanied by feelings of extreme sadness and despair and acts of aggression, will continue to haunt you in your life until you come to understand that both reality one and reality two are rooted totally in the ego, meaning your limited and inaccurate sense of self. It is the ego that distorts and manipulates your thinking, and in turn causes emotional upheaval and distress that in extreme cases can lead to thoughts about death and suicide.
This in part explains the huge increase in interest in practical spirituality in our society today. For it is through spirituality that you come to see that both reality one and reality two are illusions. Hence both are irrelevant and meaningless, which means that the perceived difference between them is irrelevant and meaningless as well. Such realities are simply imperfect mental constructs based on false assumptions and erroneous beliefs, and a serious lack of understanding about how the mind works.
It all comes down to seeing and appreciating the role the “one Self” plays regarding human consciousness and awareness as compared to the role the individual little self or ego plays. The former is accommodating, accepting, and inclusive; the latter is competitive, confrontational, and exclusive. A clear understanding of who and what you are is known as reality three, and it is the only constant, true reality. How close you come to living out this reality on a daily basis is indicative of how close you have come to being awakened and enlightened, and experiencing the joy and peace that this brings into your life.
Understanding how your delusions can confuse, trick, and restrict you in your thinking has huge implications not only for your own behavior but for the behavior of groups, organizations, and society at large. This topic is related to what is called self-image psychology, which in turn deals with the three key elements of the human psyche, namely (1.) the self-concept, (2.) the self-image, and (3.) self-esteem. The latter, self-esteem—how much you truly like, love, value, or esteem yourself—determines to a large extent how you live your life: your relationships; your work and career; your accomplishments, both personal and professional; and your physical, mental, and emotional health. Together, these determine the quality of your life in all its many and magnificent manifestations.
“Ego-speak” is the playing out of thoughts in your mind that represent your basic fears and desires, all the things you think you need to complete what you perceive as your faulty and limited sense of self. For example, do you want to be important? The ego will gladly show you how. Do you want to impress others? Again, the ego will gladly show you how. But consider this: After the ego has shown you myriad ways to be important, impress others, and show others how smart, how successful, and how special you are, what have you really accomplished? Why do you feel you have to do this all the time? What other important experiences in life are you missing out on because of this constant preoccupation, this unrelenting obsession? Which part of you is doing all the doubting about your real self-worth here?
The following is a traditional Native American story that has been passed down over many years, titled “Two Wolves”: “An old Cherokee chief is teaching his grandson about life. ‘A fight is going on inside me,’ he said to the boy. ‘It is a terrible fight and it’s between two wolves. One is evil—he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, self-doubt, and ego. The other is good—he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.’ The grandson thought about this for a moment and then asked, ‘Grandfather, which wolf will win?’ The old chief simply replied, ‘The one you continue to feed.’”
You shouldn’t be surprised or alarmed that unexpected and unwanted events (usually viewed as problems or setbacks) will continue to occur in your life, despite your best efforts to avoid them. They are simply part of life’s journey. They can, in fact, be extremely helpful.
If you find yourself in a situation that is causing you ongoing pain and suffering, it’s simply telling you that you are not in tune with your spirit, with who you are. I believe God has a plan for each of us, and sometimes He needs to send us a wake-up call that says, “Hey, I know you are hurting, so don’t forget about me!” We may hear this call on a specific occasion or it could be a constant, gentle whisper that never goes away. We need to know our Father doesn’t want to hurt us, He wants to heal us; He doesn’t want to punish us, He wants to protect us (usually from ourselves!). He is forever wanting reunion with His creations and His voice will not go unheard. In this way, unwanted events, even extremely tragic ones, can be blessings in disguise because they bring us back to the path, back to His perfect plan.
In the minds of some, there seems to be a great deal of confusion regarding “knowing about” God versus “knowing” God. You can come to know “about God” by reading the scriptures or other religious books on the topic and going to church, a temple, a mosque, or synagogue. “Knowing” God, however, and practicing His ways as a way of life is a very different matter and involves a very different process.
It’s like the difference between a map and the actual territory. A map is not the territory; it’s only someone’s two-dimensional approximation of what that territory is like. You can never get to “know” God by reading a book about God, or going to church and listening to someone speak about God, no matter how good that book is or how knowledgeable and eloquent that speaker is. Similarly, you can never get to “know” the Grand Canyon by studying a map about the Grand Canyon or listening to someone speak about the Grand Canyon, no matter how good that map is or how knowledgeable that speaker is.
The proof of whether you “know” God or not is simple: Have you adopted His ways as your ways in your everyday life? Are you God-like in your thoughts, feelings, and actions? Do you live according to God’s teachings or simply to further your own personal agenda?
Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Moving at this speed, it would take a person exactly 1.284 seconds to arrive at the moon, as it is 238,857 miles away. That’s about the time it takes you to snap your fingers. While traveling at this same speed, however, it would take a person 2.3 million years to get to the galaxy nearest to Earth! (This means you would arrive with very long fingernails and in desperate need of a haircut!) It’s called Andromeda. And we know there are thousands upon thousands of other galaxies billions of light-years beyond that (Source: Wikipedia). Clearly the Infinite is not only stranger than we think it is, it’s stranger than we can think!
You may wonder at the slow pace of human evolution. Why are we so ignorant about so many things? Why can’t we seem to get along with each other? Why do envy, distrust, and hatred still abound in relationships among individuals, groups, and nation states? Why does it seem we are incapable of loving our neighbors as well as ourselves? Richard Christopher Carrington (1826–1875), an English amateur astronomer, puts it all in perspective with this explanation:
“Let us imagine that, by some magic, the whole Earth’s history could be compressed into a single year. On this scale, the first eight months would be completely without life. The following two would be devoted to the most primitive of creatures. No mammals would appear until the second week in December. Man, as we know him, would strut onto the stage at approximately 11:45 p.m. on December 31. The age of written history would occupy little more than the last 60 seconds on the clock.”
Can you imagine that? In this analogy, we see that we’ve been around for only 15 minutes in a full year that has 525,600 minutes in it! It’s obvious our species is still in its infancy. Yet we have to wonder if and when we will ever grow up. (Hmmm. Is there something you can do in the meantime to help facilitate this?)
Although precise numbers are still being debated, scientists generally agree that our universe was formed about 13.7 billion years ago; that planet Earth was formed about 4.6 billion years ago, that the first elementary life forms appeared on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago, that early dinosaurs roamed the planet about 230 million years ago, that human history began about 7 million years ago, and that homo erectus appeared about 1.7 million years ago (Source: Wikipedia).
Consider neurosis. Neurosis is a mental disorder that describes any number of emotional disturbances that may include stress, anxiety, compulsions, obsessions, insecurity, anger, paranoia, depression, or guilt, as well as fears and phobias of various kinds. It’s generally the result of a distorted, inaccurate, or irrational perception of reality. Anyone seeking a cure for this affliction must begin by realizing, first, that such pain and suffering are always self-inflicted (no one can cause you to feel anything; you always choose to feel the way you do, whether consciously or unconsciously); and second, that such pain always has its origins in the cognitions (the thoughts and the interconnectedness of thoughts) being practiced by the individual. The road to wellness is always to critically analyze and question the original thoughts and thought sequences themselves. This will lead you directly to the source of any suffering you may be experiencing (again, say hello to the ego!).
The fact is, everyone is a neurotic to some extent. No one perceives the world 100 percent correctly, no one thinks 100 percent correctly, and no one ever will. The critical question then becomes, “Are your current neuroses so debilitating that they are preventing you from being a happy and productive person in all the ways you want to be happy and productive?” If so, you need to do something about it.
A neurotic person needlessly inflicts pain on himself by engaging in faulty and erroneous thinking. In other words, such a person injures himself both mentally and physically for reasons that are totally not necessary.
For example, a neurotic typically practices a particular manner of thinking over and over again, yet knows there is no possibility of a different outcome. The person’s illogical and irrational thoughts are simply being cycled and recycled, resulting in only more intense and deeper feelings of misery and worthlessness. For some, this type of repetitive thinking may give temporary relief. They bask in the illusion, at least for a time, that they are making progress because they are engaged in some kind of mental activity. Eventually, however, it only creates more anxiety because they soon come to realize they are right back where they started. (One definition of insanity is when someone does the same thing over and over again, yet still expects a different outcome. Using this as our gauge, how sane/insane are you?)
Imagine you are an airplane on the ground that wants to take off, but you don’t know how. So you just taxi around the airport hour after hour thinking it’s bound to happen sooner or later. After all, you are an airplane! You are meant to fly! All this effort is frustrating, time-consuming, and very nauseating, of course. It keeps you in the same place—a sort of living hell. And in a real sense, it is fatal. It drains you of your creativity, it eats away at your self-confidence, and eventually it kills your dream (i.e., at some point, you will run out of gas!).
This is not a discussion about aeronautics, however. It is about going beyond inertia and the misery it creates in your life to personal empowerment and experiencing the fulfillment you really want in your life. It is about breaking free from your past and creating a whole new future. It may sound silly but this book is about following your dream, doing your thing, being true to who and what you are. It is about being who you can and must be, and doing what you can and must do, often for seemingly selfish but, in fact, altruistic reasons.
Here is a quote from the book Inner Peace, Inner Power (1985) by Dr. Nelson Boswell that gives further insight into how we think:
“Whether we are neurotic or not, we believe what we tell ourselves is reality, but often we come up with falsehoods, incomplete information, half-truths, and sometimes even nonsense. Our conclusions are often slightly or grossly slanted. We go around programming ourselves with our inner statements and messages, and we don’t even hear ourselves. We don’t sense the full meaning of what we say. We’re not even aware that it is we who are programming our own minds. And then, when we’re feeling down, angry, bitter or hopeless, we are not aware that it had to happen. We brought it upon ourselves….”
It shouldn’t be any surprise that anxiety (which in turn often generates fear and trepidation) is so prevalent in our society today. Most of us live simply by trial and error, a sure recipe for disappointment and despair. Consider the following manner of thinking in which most people are engaged. First, you know you can’t predict the future, and some bad things will invariably happen to you that you have no control over. Yikes! Second, you are unhappy with some things from your past and aren’t able to change any of them. Yikes! And third, you are a phony. You are acting in your life as though you know who you are when, in fact, you don’t. You have no idea. In addition, it seems your deception will soon be discovered by those who know you well. Yikes! I’d be anxious, too, if I thought this way.
Any peace process among individuals, groups, or nations should follow these basic steps: (1) actively engage, (2) seek to understand, (3) practice acceptance, and (4) offer unconditional love. The alternative is to confront, bully, repudiate, or even try to exterminate. This results in you digging your grave and the other side digging theirs. Bravo! Another win for the ego and yet another loss for humankind.
Here is a quote from the book The Magic in Your Mind (1961) by American author U.S. Andersen. It demonstrates an incredible degree of insight into what we are talking about:
“We exist in order that we may become something more than we are, not through favorable circumstance or auspicious occurrence, but through an inner search for increased awareness. To be, to become, these are the commandments of evolving life, which is going somewhere, aspires to some unscaled heights, and the awakened soul answers the call, seeks, grows, expands. To do less is to sink into the reactive prison of the ego, with all its pain, suffering, limitation, decay, and death. The man who lives through reaction to the world about him is the victim of every change in his environment, now happy, now sad, now victorious, now defeated, affected but never affecting. He may live many years in this manner, rapt with sensory perception and the ups and downs of his surface self, but one day pain so outweighs pleasure that he suddenly perceives his ego as illusory, a product of outside circumstances only. Then he either sinks into complete animal lethargy or, turning away from the senses, seeks inner awareness and self-mastery. Then he is on the road to really living, truly becoming; then he begins to uncover his real potential; then he discovers the miracle of his own consciousness, the magic in his mind.”
The role the ego plays in your life is critical to understand, for the ego can cause you no end of grief if left unnoticed and unchecked. I would go this far on the matter and state the following:
The ego in you lies at the center of what causes all the pain and suffering you will ever experience in your life.
The curse of the ego as it affects human behavior has been noted and written about for centuries. In more recent times, William Shakespeare (1564–1616) incorporated this fact into the plot of many of his plays. It was also highlighted by American poet and essayist T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) when he commented, “Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.” And Gelek Rimpoche, a Michigan-based Tibetan Buddhist lama and author of Good Life, Good Death (2001), went even further when he said, “The true enemy is inside. The maker of trouble, the source of all our suffering, the destroyer of our joy, and the destroyer of our virtue, is inside. It is EGO.” (emphasis in original)
If you fail to understand the ego and how it impacts, distorts, and manipulates your thinking, you will experience pain in many aspects of your life. If you feel you want to engage in a heated debate about this statement, it’s only because the ego in you is feeling threatened and wants to leap to its own defense! I implore you to deny it this opportunity. In the meantime, keep an open mind on the matter and see if your view changes over time.
What is the ego, anyway? Where does it come from? What does it do, both positive and negative, productive and unproductive? These are key questions you must answer if you want to understand how you function and why you so often fail at, or at least fall short of, being who you are and achieving the peace of mind you want.
The ego is defined as self-centered, self-importance, self-conceit, self-absorption. It originates from the Greek word meaning “little, separated self,” as opposed to the collective “one Self.”
We know the ego is something that our species created over several million years of evolution; as well, you have come to believe it is an essential part of who you are and that it has your best interests in mind. (Wrong!) In other words, you think it represents the real you. This belief or mindset is based on the erroneous assumption that you are separate from everything and everyone else; that you need to look after, protect, and nurture yourself in competition with, and exclusion of, everyone else; and that as an individual, you are somehow special, meaning more worthy, more deserving, and more important (and all that this entails) than everyone else.
The ego in you is a very busy fellow, working tirelessly night and day with only one goal in mind: to masquerade as your best friend and protector, all the while keeping you separate from your true Nature, your Source, the collective consciousness of all that is. This is a master deception—in fact, the ultimate deception of all human existence: that you are alone and separate, and hence vulnerable, and can survive and prosper only if you put your interests first, well ahead of everyone else.
Consider the question “Where are you looking for meaning?” The vast majority of people look for the most important things they want in life—acceptance, love, prosperity, health, happiness, peace of mind, meaning, and personal fulfillment—outside themselves. Let’s give these attributes a specific name. Let’s call them high-level spiritual needs. People look and look and look, but don’t really find what they are looking for. So they end up disappointed and frustrated, even angry both with themselves and others. This leads them to ask some serious questions: “What’s wrong? Why isn’t life giving me all that I want? Am I not capable, worthy, and deserving?”
You have been taught, through social conditioning and environmental programming, to believe—again wrongly—that you can find what you want in life outside yourself. This is another paradigm, literally a framework or mental construct, which is a certain way of thinking to which you have become accustomed. As such, it is firmly ingrained in your mind and won’t easily go away.
At first glance, it does seem logical to look at what you can actually see that is physically all around you for all the things you want. After all, this stuff is right there, right in front of you. You can clearly see it, you can often touch and sometimes even taste it, and you can easily relate to it and earnestly want it. But alas, what you see is only an illusion, a temporary state of affairs that is constantly changing, constantly evolving. Of course, physical things that you can see and touch are always “transforming.”
The problem is most acute when you continue to look to the physical world to define your Self, to determine who and what you are. For example, you may say to yourself and others, “I am what I do. I am a teacher, a laborer, a truck driver, an accountant, a homemaker”; or you may say, “I am what I own. I am my car, my clothes, my jewelry, my bank account, my house”; or you may say, “I am my body. I am my skin, my lips, my eyes, my legs, my hair.”
But you would be wrong in each and every case. Who you are has nothing to do with the physical world. The world at large has no idea who you are; that isn’t its job. It’s yours! And once you understand this, you’d better wise up and look in another place, in another direction—say, inside yourself. After all, if what you want in life cannot be found “out there,” the only other place to look is “in here!”
Materialism is the doctrine that says physical things and physical matter (all that is in form) are the only true reality, and that everything else in the world, including thought, will, spirit, love, insight, and wisdom, can be explained and interpreted only in terms of matter; it’s the belief that comfort, wealth, power, pleasure, and success are the only and the highest goals you should strive for; it’s the tendency to be more concerned in life with material things and physical objects than with spiritual thoughts that instill feelings of joy, wonder, hope, serenity, and deep peace.
Why do we, especially in the West, immerse ourselves in a culture of materialism? Is it just another form of escapism? If so, from what are we trying to escape? Some would say we are escaping from accepting our divinity because if we accepted it, we’d have to live up to it—and most people aren’t prepared to do that. Why are we individually and collectively such willing participants? What are we accomplishing by participating (in many cases, indulging) in this? Why do we encourage our children to go down the same path? Is it that we don’t know any better? Are we simply involved in perpetuating the silly game called “monkey-see, monkey-do,” and just let the game go on?
Our preoccupation with the physical world, with what we can perceive with our five senses, is a major problem for society today. Why? Because you cannot get what you want most in life through the frantic and uncontrolled accumulation of more and more things! On your deathbed, do you plan to brag about how many pairs of expensive shoes you bought during your lifetime, how many juicy lobster tails you ate, how many bottles of premium wine you drank, or how much you paid for your favorite putter or driver?
The following strictures indicate how several of the world’s major religions view excessive consumption:
Buddhism: “By the thirst for the riches, the foolish man destroys himself as if he were his own enemy.”
Christianity: “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a person’s life does not consist of an abundance of possessions.”
Confucianism: “Excess and deficiency are equally at fault.”
Hinduism: “When you have the golden gift of commitment, you have everything.”
Islam: “It is difficult for a person laden with riches to climb the steep path that leads to bliss.”
Taoism: “One who knows he or she has enough is rich.”
(Source: Douglas V. Smith and Kazi F. Jalal)
Pierre Teillard de Chardin (1881–1955), the French theologian and paleontologist, made this interesting statement:“You are not a human being having a spiritual experience; you are a spiritual being having a human experience.”
Think about it. Have you ever bruised a knee? Have you ever scratched an itch? Do you regularly cut your hair? Do you regularly trim your fingernails? Have you ever bled from a cut? Have you ever suffered from a sun-burn? Have you ever broken a bone? Have you ever hungered for food or water? Yes? Then you are human.
Alternately, have you ever been sad? Have you ever been happy? Have you ever cried? Have you ever laughed? Have you ever been a voluntary giver and felt great? Have you ever been a voluntary receiver and felt grateful? Have you ever regretted something you did? Have you ever hungered for love and basked in being loved? Yes? Then you are spirit.
As spirit, you necessarily have a number of needs that you are striving to satisfy. You want to love and be loved; you want to accept and be accepted, to have hope, happiness, peace of mind, fulfillment, meaning, and a real sense of purpose. You want to feel worthy, to be relevant, to know in your heart and soul that you are important. Nothing more, nothing less.
So a question. How many of us are spending all of our time and energy trying to satisfy our spiritual needs from a physical world? The answer: practically all of us! But it’s obvious a physical world is incapable of satisfying spiritual needs. Think about it. How much can a rock love you, even if it is a three-carat diamond? It cannot. Or a mansion in Hollywood? Or a Ferrari? Or a Rolex? Or a private Lear jet? The physical world mocks us with the phrase “Seek me out and you will find.” But this is an illusion. We have to look inside—at our very essence, our spirit, our Godliness, you might say—to meet our most important needs.
As a species, we have been very successful at exploiting technology, especially in the last few hundred years. Sir Isaac Newton, the English mathematician, alchemist, and philosopher, introduced the world to the scientific method, namely how to discover so-called “reality” by using rational, logical, linear, left-brain thought, with reality meaning “what actually is,” including how the universe works. The many marvels that our minds have come up with are almost too numerous to mention: television, jet aircraft, nuclear reactors, spacecraft, the computer, cell phones, solar energy, the Internet, and so forth.
Is our proven prowess to mold our environment to our liking, leading us to believe that we can solve all of our problems ourselves? Albert Einstein once commented that humans cannot hope to solve all the problems they have created by using the same mind that created them. Take a moment and think about this, as it may apply to you and your so-called “problems.”
Newton lived from 1642 to 1727. It has been said that he discovered more of the essential core of human knowledge than anyone before or after. Chet Raymo, a U.S. science columnist and author of The Path: A One-Mile Walk Through the Universe (2003), has said this of Newton:
“He developed the theory of infinite series, and showed that it was possible to treat the Infinite and the Infinitesimal with mathematical rigor. He refined concepts of space, time, inertia, force, momentum, and acceleration, and formulated laws of mechanical motion. He invented the Theory of Universal Gravitation and applied it to celestial and terrestrial motions. To facilitate his calculations, he devised what is now called the differential and integral calculus.”
Note that Newton accomplished all this before he was 24 years old!
Incredibly intelligent people such as Newton don’t come along very often. But even Newton was unable to explain where matter originated or who/what devised all the laws of physics and mathematics in the first place. Clearly, we are sadly lacking in our ability to fully understand and master the physical world.
For example, man has never created something from nothing. Think about it. Everything we have designed, built, and use today was possible only because we found a host of raw materials already on the planet, whether we use wood for making paper, fine furniture, and buildings; sand for making glass, cement, and silicon chips; or gold for making expensive jewelry, dental fillings, and coins. Never have we humans created something from absolutely nothing, and we never will. Clearly there is an intelligence at work in the universe that was around long before we arrived and set things up so we could play the often-silly and amateurish game called Life.
Carl Jung wrote Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1955), in which he postulates that human beings move through various stages of development. He listed and described in detail five specific levels of maturity as people get older, indicating that as you become more aware and informed, you move to a higher level of consciousness. The age groupings shown here necessarily vary greatly among individuals. The following description is based loosely on Jung’s ideas.
Age 1–10: Adolescence: You are at the stage of the child, the age of innocence. You are dependent, impressionable, vulnerable, and compliant, meaning you are pretty much under the control of other people and the circumstances in which you find yourself. You are quite helpless and easily victimized. During this period, you are very much in the process of being molded to conform to societal wishes, beliefs, and norms (i.e., various values and virtues, as well as vices).
Age 11–25: You are at the stage of the athlete. You take great pride and get a lot of your meaning from your physical appearance—your attractiveness, your beauty, your strength, your physical prowess. You sculpt your body in a gym, you tan your body in a studio, you cleanse your body in a spa, you coif your hair in a salon. Your sense of self is very much centered around this part of you and you try to stretch out this period of your life as long as possible. At various times as you age, you may take vitamin supplements, protein drinks, and steroid pills; or, more aggressively, you may undergo plastic surgery, face-lifts, tummy-tucks, hair transplants, and breast implants. But your body slowly deteriorates no matter what you do and eventually disappears into simple dust. Because this part of you is always changing, it’s not real.
Age 26–50: You are at the stage of the warrior. You take great pride in competing, in winning, in accomplishing, in succeeding—you strive to arrive—in proving to yourself and others that you are smart, capable, superior, and special compared to everyone else. You strive to accumulate material objects (both in quantity and quality), fill important positions in your career, and achieve goals you have set for yourself; all this then defines for you who you are. Of note is the fact that you may even go to great extremes to achieve these things. You may lie, cheat, steal, even go to the point of becoming over-stressed through overwork and put your very life at risk. This stage can be characterized by aggressiveness, manipulation, plotting, and scheming, and is often accompanied by a whole lot of ranting and raving in general. Warriors do whatever they need to do to win.
Up to this point, you are motivated mainly by fear in your life: fear of not being secure, not being accepted, not being loved, not being respected, not being able to prove you are capable and deserving, not being acknowledged as special by others for being better/faster/smarter than those with whom you compete. You then undergo a slow evolution, sometimes very slow, into being more love-motivated in your thinking and behavior. You move from your concern being primarily for me (meaning only yourself, as can be the case with many young children) to we (small and large groups including family and extended family) to primarily others (meaning everyone but yourself). In the extreme, your focus is directed totally at others, including those you don’t even know and likely will never meet. This includes others who have yet to be born.
At the extreme end of the scale in one direction is a person’s fixation with “getting everything and giving nothing”; at the extreme end in the other direction, it is about “getting nothing and giving everything.” Then again, some people like Saint Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) and Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910–1997) held a firm belief that is even more radical than either of these two extremes: that you get everything by giving everything away!
Age 50-plus: You are at the stage of the statesman/humanitarian. You see well beyond the little self and feel attracted to and an intimacy for all living things. Your primary concern is for the greater good—the collective whole. Increasingly, you volunteer your services, participate in community activities, and actively support charities of various kinds.
Age 60-plus: You are at the stage of the spiritualist and consider yourself part of the collective consciousness of humankind. You have moved beyond simple duality (i.e., the self and the Whole) to complete identification with the Divine. You are fully awake, you are fully aware, and you are fully alive. You are at one with the “universe” (aka “one song”).
Consider love and its various meanings. Love as a noun is defined as: (1.) a strong affection for or attachment or devotion to a person or persons, (2.) in theology, love is God’s benevolent concern for mankind and man’s devout attachment to God, (3.) the feeling of benevolence and brotherhood that people should have for each other.
Love in its many forms does induce emotions of various kinds and degree. When looking at unconditional, transcendent love, however, we see that it is more than just another emotion. This state of love has a unique, mystical quality that goes beyond any emotion; in fact, it is the single, most creative force for good in the Universe.
The seat of the soul is love and what love in turn creates. To love is an active, intensely personal experience that taps into the soul’s natural essence. Only transcendent love is real and only transcendent love endures. It is the ultimate expression of our true Nature.
Does love have an opposite? No. The spiritual plane does not have opposites. The absence of love is simply non-love. Everything in the physical plane indeed does have opposites: left/right, backward/forward, on/off, war/peace, before/after, open/closed, wet/dry, light/heavy, right/wrong, and so on. Thinking this way, many people believe that fear, anger, or hate is the opposite of love. It is in the physical plane. But in the spiritual plane, fear, anger, and hate do not exist. Only the ego-driven mind knows these hurtful, limiting, and debilitating emotions.
It’s the same with light. Most of us think that the opposite of light is darkness. But there is no such thing as darkness per se; darkness is simply the absence of light. Hence darkness does not exist. We manifest non-love in many ways: fear, anger, hurt, hate, greed, guilt, bitterness, jealousy, resentment, and spite, all the usual litany of human failings. Ultimately, love is what each of us is seeking; it’s all we want for it is all there is.
It serves no useful purpose to “know about” transcendent love simply on an intellectual level. It has to be experienced. For example, you can be taught everything there is to know about baseball—its history, its rules, the current standings, and everything in the record book. You can watch it forever yet still never really know it. You have to experience baseball (actually play it to win but sometimes lose) to really know what it is. It’s the same with love. You have to be love (“pure” consciousness) and sometimes not be love (“self” consciousness) to fully understand and appreciate it.
The path to greater awareness and a higher level of consciousness can be a long and difficult one, but it is achievable. It is possible for the average individual to manifest qualities that reflect his divine Nature. Sogyal Rinpoche, in his book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying (1992), explains the process of enlightenment and getting on the true path this way:
“In the modern world, there are few examples of human beings who embody the qualities that come from realizing the (true) nature of mind. So it is hard for us even to imagine enlightenment or the perception of an enlightened being, and even harder to begin to think that we ourselves could become enlightened…. Even if we were to think of the possibility of enlightenment, one look at what composes our ordinary mind—anger, greed, jealousy, spite, cruelty, lust, fear, anxiety, and turmoil—would undermine forever any hope of achieving it…. Enlightenment…is real; and each of us, whoever we are, can in the right circumstances and with the right training realize the (true) nature of mind and so know in us what is deathless and eternally pure. This is the promise of all the mystical traditions of the world, and it has been fulfilled and is being fulfilled in countless thousands of human lives.”
Note: The word “true” has been added twice in parentheses for clarity.
The world’s major religions have traditionally played a central role in society by providing spiritual guidance leading to hope, healing, harmony, and personal enlightenment. Their ultimate goal is basically the same: to help people reconnect with their essence, reclaim their inheritance, and help remake the world. Their sacred teachings show remarkable similarities in both tone and insight, as the following quotations clearly demonstrate:
“God is the sun beaming light everywhere.”
—Tribal African; African religions
“The radiance of the Buddha shines ceaselessly.”
—Dhammapada; Buddhism
“God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.”
—1 John 1:5; Christianity
“In the lotus of the heart dwells Brahman, the Light of Lights.”
—Mundaka Upanishad; Hinduism
“Allah is the light of the heavens and earth.”
—Koran; Islam
“The Lord is my light; whom shall I fear?”
—Psalms 27:1; Judaism
“The light of Wakan-Tanka is upon my people.”
—Song of Kablaya; Native American religions
“The Light of Divine Amaterasu shines forever.”
—Kurozumi Munetada; Shinto
“God, being Truth, is the one Light of all.”
—Adi Granth; Sikhism
“Following the Light, the sage takes care of all.”
—Lao-tzu; Taoism
Although there are aspects of different religions that often divide us, they also offer a universal spirituality that can unite us. Ignorance of this very fact has led to much needless violence and many atrocities throughout history.
Every living species on the planet cognizes its “own universe” in its own unique way. A snake uses infrared, a bat uses ultrasound, and a honey bee uses ultra-red to determine its so-called “reality.” And each is able to survive as a result. In turn, humans use their own perceptual artifacts (eyes to see, ears to hear, nose to smell, tongue to taste, and skin to feel/touch) to determine their reality, basically the nature of the physical world. And, we, too are able to survive as a result.
And your ego—that thinks because you are human, you are superior to other living things—tells you that your sensors are more accurate and hence your version of reality is more reliable, more “correct,” more “real.” But you know from personal experience that your sensors are often inferior to those of many animals and birds at seeing, hearing, and smelling. In fact, it has been said that human beings are able to perceive less than 1 percent of 1 percent of all that is actually there!
So here is the situation. One species sees this world; a second sees that world; a third sees another world—a fourth, a fifth, and so on, each seeing its world and each believing that what it sees is reality. But there is only one true reality, and none of us is actually “seeing” it. Alas, we all have imperfect sensors.
We now see that what is real cannot be perceived by physical means, regardless of the species involved. The sun never really sets or rises; the Earth is neither flat nor solid nor round; and you can never actually sit still because you live on a planet that is rotating on its own axis, circling around the sun, and also flying off into outer space at several thousand miles an hour. Yet your physical sensors would lead you to believe none of these things.
If you looked into an electron microscope, initially you would see that matter is made up of molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, and many other small atomic and subatomic particles. As you looked closer and closer to find the smallest, the most minute building block of nature, you would find that there are no more particles. There is just empty space. In fact, all matter is made up mostly of empty space. You therefore come to understand that the basic building block of matter is “non-matter.” This non-matter is simply referred to as the void. Someone looking at you and who was able to see the “real” (physical) you, would first see something as expansive as the night sky, with emptiness everywhere, with only the odd star flickering here and there representing highly dispersed atoms. The same applies to any physical object, no matter how compact or dense you may think it is, such as the mineral called lead.
Everything in the universe is made up of the same matter; it is all made of the same basic stuff. There is only so much oxygen, so much hydrogen, so much nitrogen, so much carbon, so much manganese, so much silicone. Everything in nature is made up of the same basic building blocks of nature including your brain, bones, blood, cartilage, skin, and hair. As some astute observer once said, “This is that, that is that, you are that, I am that, and that’s all there is!” All this stuff is simply being recycled between you and every thing and every one else in the universe. Indeed, some scientists have concluded that every living person on the planet today has one million atoms in him at any given time that were once in the body of the Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed.
Consider these facts. As you breathe and eliminate waste, you recycle your atoms. You have a new liver every six weeks, a new stomach lining every five days, all new skin once a month, a new skeleton every three months, and on and on it goes. In fact, in less than one year you replace 98 percent of all the atoms in your body. And you replace 100 percent in two years. So to think that you are a body and only a body requires you to ask, “Which one? Which model? Is it the 1990 model, the 2000 model, the 2010 model, or this year’s latest edition?” So you see that various parts of your body have a different shelf life, some quite short, some quite long. But whatever the time frame, all of it is changing all of the time.
Now it gets even more interesting. There is a part of you that has no shelf life at all; it is timeless, changeless, immortal. Each model—each new edition of “you”—carries forward memories from past experiences. Each new model remembers how to laugh or cry, love or hate, feel joy or sadness, as well as tie your shoelaces, brush your teeth, take a shower, ride a bicycle, peel an orange, toss a salad, barbecue a steak, and drive to and from work. But since you first learned all of these things, every single cell in your body has been replaced, in most cases many, many times.
It seems there is an invisible intelligence, some type of “knowing” that is in you beyond your basic physicality, beyond your simple form, beyond the world of the changing. And this intelligence is in everyone on the planet, not just a chosen few. This invisible intelligence is often referred to as your essence, your spirit, your divinity, or your soul. You can choose from any of these terms or select another one that you feel more comfortable with (after all, it isn’t what you call it: It is what it is.).
Now consider this: How many other types of “knowings” might be in you that you don’t remember because you have temporarily forgotten about them? I suggest that the most important memory you want to reconnect with is who and what you are, for this and only this will lead you to discover why you are here.
Clearly the spiritual and physical are not separate from one another but are very much part of each other. One represents the invisible memory or intelligence (formless) that is the “real” you; the other represents the visible carrier or host (form)—your body—of the memory itself. You have chosen to show up in the form you now have because you found it convenient for your present purposes, whatever they may be. And once your present purposes have been met, you will necessarily move on and return from whence you came.
In other words, you have come from “no-where” to “now-here” to do what you need to do; and soon you will return back to “no-where” once again, wherever that may be. Note that the letters for both of these “places” are exactly the same, just as the very essence that represents who you are is exactly the same, no matter where you are.
Consider human nature as we know it and witness it in action every day. The following 10 character traits (it would be easy to come up with many others) are indicative of the way we have evolved over many thousands of years. In fact, it’s probably true that if we were not this way historically, we would not have survived and gone on to perpetuate others just like ourselves. Imagine a species that may have existed a million years ago that was totally selfless, and motivated only by kindness and love of humankind. How long do you think it would have survived in that environment: 200 years, 20 years, two years, two months, two weeks, two days, two hours, two minutes?
We see that these character traits represent our more primitive, primordial side—that side of our nature whose main purpose was to ensure our physical survival in earlier times. At the same time, we need to understand that some of these same character traits serve a useful purpose and can be the basis for good today.
Here are the 10 characteristics:
We are all ambitious. We want to advance—be more, do more, have more and better, whether wealth, fame, or respect.
We are all opportunistic. We tend to take advantage of situations to further our own self-interest.
We are all stubborn. We are obstinate; we refuse to listen or comply, preferring to stick with the status quo.
We are all ignorant. We don’t know all there is to know about any one thing in particular or about most things in general, and never will. Hence, each of us lives our life in a huge void of uncertainty. We don’t know who we are, why we’re here, where we came from, or where we’re going. It’s no wonder, then, that we live according to something we are not.
We are all greedy. We have an excessive, even compulsive, desire to have or acquire; we want more than we need or deserve.
We are all lazy. We have a tendency to put in the least effort to get the most results.
We are all fearful. We have a preoccupation, a concern, a feeling of anxiety, apprehension, or agitation, sometimes even terror, relating to danger, evil, or pain, whether imaginary or real.
We are all selfish. We put our own interests first, well ahead of others, to an extent that is neither fair nor right nor moral.
We are all vain. We have and project an excessively high regard for ourselves: our ideas, our opinions, our abilities, our appearance, our possessions, and so on.
We are all vengeful. We want to return an injury for an injury by inflicting punishment and pain on others for what they have done to us.
If you are offended by this list, as some might be, just ask yourself: “Have I ever exhibited this particular quality at least once in my life? Have I ever been ambitious, opportunistic, stubborn, ignorant, greedy, lazy, fearful, selfish, vain, or vengeful at least once?” I already know your answer. Now we both know that each of these qualities is in you (indeed, in varying degrees in everyone), whether you want to admit it or not.
So how could some of these characteristics serve us and be the basis for good? How could they add to the collective wellness and benefit humankind? Well, you could be ambitious, opportunistic, and stubborn, and use these same characteristics to help others live healthier, longer, and more productive lives. Think of all the medical researchers who have spent years—sometimes their entire careers—to come up with cures for debilitating diseases such as diabetes, tuberculosis, and leprosy. Or inventors—where would our society be today without modern telecommunications and transportation equipment and systems? Whether modern agricultural practices, new medical devices, or new materials, all were developed to serve a very real need (although in some cases, simple greed may have been a motivating factor as well). And characteristics such as ambition, opportunism, and stubbornness will continue to drive people to use their ingenuity, creativity, and innate intelligence to better the human condition.
When other, totally selfish motives are at play, however, you need to ask the question “Why?” Why have you exhibited many or all of these traits at one time or another in your life, albeit some more frequently and more passionately than others? Specifically, what is your personal pain-story—your justification or rationalization for acting this way?
Again, may I introduce to you—the ego! The ego’s power and influence over the way you think has been at work since the beginning of human history. Simply stated, it owns you, or at least it thinks it does. And most of us would have to readily agree because we haven’t seriously considered the possibility of something else as the driving force in our life.
For example, you think, feel, and do each day without really understanding the force or forces that are directing all of this; in many cases, you do whatever you do instinctively and just hope for the best. The ego represents an elaborate belief system that is in your genetic makeup, your DNA, that first and foremost has said to you and is still saying today, “Survive! Look out for number one! Nothing is more important than your personal safety, comfort, and welfare!” And survive both you and I did. But how much longer our species will survive in the way it is currently going about it is perhaps the more pressing question.
To know you must survive implies you must be at risk. If you think you are at risk, you come to believe you must compete. (Sure, it’s a struggle, but what choice do you have?) In order to compete, you must be prepared to fight or flee. If you fight, you might lose; if you flee, you might be caught. Fear, then, is one of the main driving forces behind a lot of what you think, feel, and do.
After telling you (1.) to survive, the ego then directs you to move up the ladder to the next level and instructs you to (2.) seek safety, security, and freedom from fear; (3.) seek acceptance, friendship, and love by associating and fraternizing with others; (4.) seek recognition, status, and self-respect; and finally (5.) to prove to yourself and others that you are unique, capable, and worthy of high achievement. Having gotten you this far, the ego tells you with great fanfare that you have finally “made” it; you are now on top of the world! And it takes full credit for getting you there! This scenario loosely describes Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human wants and needs as first postulated in his book Motivation and Personality (1954).
The ego in you is always focused on building up the ego for the ego’s sake (i.e., selfish concern for me) and is totally incapable of considering more altruistic pursuits (i.e., unselfish compassion for others). Its primary goals are twofold: self-aggrandizement and survival. This must be kept top of mind when considering how the ego works. In other words, it is enemy number one (in the sense that it wants to control and direct all your thoughts, feelings, and actions) and must be recognized as such.
Maslow’s ideas are usually depicted as part of a large pyramid with five distinct levels: Physiological needs are at the very bottom, rising to safety needs, social needs, self-esteem needs, and ending with self-actualization needs at the top. Maslow’s theory in this regard is central to helping us understand our basic desires and motives for wanting more in our life. In this regard, the key question we must always ask is: “What is my real motivation for wanting more?” Is it simple self-interest (selfishness) or society’s general welfare (selflessness)? Or can the former also lead to the latter? Hmmm. What do you think as it applies to what you are trying to accomplish in your life?
Later in life, Maslow postulated that his pyramid shouldn’t stop at self-actualization needs at the very top, that in fact there is another key factor he had unwittingly left out. This he called transcendence, meaning the spiritual level that transcends the purely physical world. Maslow’s transcendence level recognizes our natural desire to act morally and ethically with compassion, humility, empathy, kindness, tolerance, benevolence, and generosity. Without taking into account this spiritual or trans-egoic side to our nature, he felt we are simply living as instinct-driven animals or pre-programmed machines.
An important factor that initially gave credibility and power to the ego, and continues to do so today, is that you were born as a single entity. You discovered that you came in a certain “package” or container, so to speak: a body with finite walls that were made of soft, delicate skin. You arrived in this body very much separate from every thing and every one else. Quite quickly—in fact instantly—you also found yourself all alone. This, at a time when you were the youngest, weakest and most vulnerable, is a very scary realization indeed!
But it gets even worse. Your actual physicality—your physical form—allows you to use only physical sensors to perceive what you see as only a physical world. Now, as you look out and observe all that is going on around you, your separateness is confirmed: Yes, you are separate; yes, you are alone; yes, you are at risk; yes, you must compete; yes, you must fight; and yes, there is good reason to be afraid. (Yes, those train tracks do come together somewhere off in the distance!) We are all wired—7 billion–plus people—to think this way; we are all driven instinctively to want more and more out of life, and eventually get to the so-called “top.” Knowing this, should it be any surprise that there are so many problems in the world?
The ego evolved as a necessary survival mechanism for individual human beings during the long and arduous course of human history. And it did its job very well, at least for those of us who are here today. The irony is that now it has become more of a death wish. As such, we must find ways to overcome or transcend it, not just tame it or try to control it, as it now clearly threatens both our individual and collective selves.
As we humans develop more and more efficient and innovative ways of killing each other (i.e., IEDs, cluster bombs, and unmanned, missile-carrying aerial drones), and more and more invasive ways of degrading, indeed raping, the planet (i.e., open-pit mining, clear-cutting forests, and bottom-trawling the ocean floor), there is an urgency today that has never been greater in history. Whether we are able to change our ways, to rise above our destructive nature, only time will tell. Many think it is already too late.
We have previously described the 10 character traits that are a product of the ego, or are at least closely connected to it. In contrast, consider other traits that are beyond the ego, in fact unknown to the ego, examples of what we will call supreme virtue. They are prime examples of our true Nature. It may be that we don’t see them on display in the world as often as we would like but when we do, we usually take special notice of them. (Here the late Nelson Mandela comes to mind.) These traits or qualities go by such names as honor, respect, compassion, empathy, humility, honesty, truthfulness, virtue, courage, industriousness, justice, righteousness, fairness, generosity, service, responsibility, forgiveness, mercy, and unconditional love.
This list is by no means complete but it’s a good beginning. Let’s see what each of them means:
Honor: A keen sense of right and wrong; adherence to actions and principles that are considered right.
Respect: To feel or show honor or esteem for others; consider or treat others with deference or courtesy.
Compassion: To feel sorrow or deep sympathy for the troubles or suffering of others, with an urge to help.
Empathy: The projection of one’s own personality into the personality of another in order to understand him better; intellectual identification of oneself with another.
Humility: The state or quality of being humble of mind or spirit; absence of pride or self-assertion.
Honesty: Refraining from lying, cheating, or stealing; being truthful, trustworthy, and upright.
Truthfulness: Sincerity, genuineness, honesty; the quality of being in accordance with experience, facts, or reality.
Virtue: General moral excellence; right action, and thinking; goodness of character.
Courage: The ability to face anything recognized as dangerous, difficult, or painful; quality of being fearless or brave.
Industriousness: The putting forth of earnest, steady effort; hardworking; diligent.
We now see how you can live authentically, meaning in a genuine and real way as opposed to a false and hypocritical way. You need only manifest the divine essence that is within you. To live authentically is to live in agreement with fact or actuality, in a manner that is consistent with who and what you are. When you are authentic, and only when you are authentic, can you be useful to a higher cause; in other words, play this game called life with much more insight, much more skill, and much more passion. This involves love: love of self, love of others, and love for all things, both animate and inanimate.
The only alternative is to stay trapped into trying to prove to the world that you are a “somebody,” indeed a special somebody. The irony is that you don’t even know who this somebody is that you are pretending to be. It’s like every day is Halloween and you don a different costume that you think best suits the occasion: “Hey, do you like me like this? No? Then how about this? Or this? Or this? Please, like some version or variation of me!”
Hypocrite means: (1.) an actor, one who plays a part; (2.) a pretender; an imposter; (3.) a person who pretends to be what he is not; (4.) one who pretends to be better than he really is or pious, virtuous, etc., without really being so.
When you live thinking you are a human being having an occasional spiritual experience, (for example, adopting virtuous behavior only when it suits you and the circumstances), you have to ask yourself, “Am I really what I portend to be?” In other words, is being spiritual only a part-time job? At a deep, subconscious level, you know you are not; you are living falsely, dishonestly, and inconsistently. In fact, you are living a lie.
Yes, a lie that you have been led to believe by authority figures, caretakers, and well-wishers of all kinds who constantly told you to do this but do not do that; believe this but do not believe that; act like this but do not act like that; go to this church but do not go to that church; enjoy doing this but do not enjoy doing that, etc. And you have never seriously questioned all of their dictates. These people, after all, were much older and wiser than you, and supposedly had your best interests in mind; shouldn’t they know?
All professional actors live a lie when they perform on a stage and take on the persona of someone they are not. And it is an extremely difficult and stressful undertaking, to which most would readily attest. Now consider spending all of your waking moments pretending you are someone you know you are not. This results in a serious case of cognitive dissonance: You are aware there is a disconnect. You say to yourself, “I don’t like this game; I’m not very good at playing this game; I don’t want to continue playing this game.” You show your displeasure by resorting to the usual primitive behaviors that result from disappointment, frustration, and anger; you lash out, you criticize, and you complain. Yes, you demonstrate all the usual mean-mindedness, even invectiveness, that is indicative of the fact that you are not happy.
Everyday happiness is defined as having, showing, or causing a feeling of great pleasure, contentment, joy, or gratification. And for many, to be happy is the primary purpose of life. But real, authentic happiness is not fleeting, nor is it something that can be had indirectly. Rather it is the result of a deep knowing that comes from being and doing what is in accordance with who and what you are. It’s when you are in a state of continuous validation of your very essence, living as your true Self.
In other words, authentic happiness is not a by-product of something else. You cannot buy it, steal it, eat it, drink it, or touch it as an entity in its own right as many thieves, con artists, fast food addicts, alcoholics, drug addicts, and sex addicts would have you believe. It can be had only directly, with no strings attached. Happiness is an energy and a force, and not a result of anything physical in the world. You can never hope to put your hands around it, caress it, and say, “Wow! Look: I finally have this thing called happiness.”
Here is a keen observation by popular American singer and comedienne Margaret Young (1891–1969): “Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things or more money, in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the exact reverse: You first must be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.”
Consider these words by Lama Surya Das in his book Awakening the Buddha Within (1997) about how to move beyond your first impulse, the ego:
“As you walk the inner path of awakening, recognize that it is most definitely a heroic journey. You must be prepared to make sacrifices, and yes, you must be prepared to change. Just as a caterpillar must shed its familiar cocoon in order to become a butterfly and fly, you must be willing to change and shed the hard armor of self-centered egotism. As compelling as the inner journey is, it can be difficult because it brings you face-to-face with reality. It brings you face-to-face with who you really are.”
So how should you go about living your life? There are two principal ways you can gain some insight into what you could do and how you should behave. One way is to watch others whom you admire, and then try to emulate, copy, or duplicate their behavior. This option is called modeling, because you are using a model (an actual picture or image) as a prototype for your own actions. And it works quite well. Athletes use it, actors use it, and singers and dancers use it.
Of course, this approach has some limitations. First, you may not be witnessing what the other person is doing in a perfect way. Second, you may not have the natural talent and ability the other person has, and hence cannot do exactly what the other person has done. Third, a perfect model for what you want to do may not exist, or at least may not be readily available to you. And fourth, you may not possess the same motivation, self-discipline, and intensity as the model does.
The second way involves creating a picture in your mind of the precise behavior you want to exhibit. This approach is called creative imaging, because you are relying on your imagination and intellect to define the specific behavior you want to adopt. This approach also has its limitations.
First, some people are not very good at forming mental pictures—they may be more verbal and less visual in the way they think. Second, mental pictures are less specific in nature; at best, they are an approximation of the behavior you want to emulate. And third, as in modeling, you simply may lack the natural talent and ability, as well as the motivation, self-discipline, and intensity you need in order to do what you are visualizing in your mind.
Most people make use of both these approaches in their daily life. Consider the evolution of a child. A child’s mother (or father) may be a teacher, a nurse, or a singer. A child’s father (or mother) may be a policeman, a fireman, or an actor. We all know children who grew up and adopted the same career paths as one of their parents; they ended up doing what they witnessed on a daily basis.
We also know children who became as adults what their imagination created for them. Walt Disney was interested in cartoons when this art form was still in its infancy. The Wright brothers were interested in airplanes when none had yet been built that actually flew. Thomas Edison was interested in electric light at a time when only candles were available. Alexander Graham Bell wanted to use copper wire to transmit the human voice over long distances when such an idea was considered totally absurd. Yet through trial and error and total faith in themselves and in what they wanted to do, they all succeeded.
Clearly, whether you rely on various role models that are available to you or the creativity and ingenuity of your own mind, you can achieve a very high level of competency if you really believe in the thing you want to do. This applies to all areas of human endeavor: art, literature, engineering, sports, business, politics, entertainment, as well as practicing spirituality and integrating its powerful principles into your daily life.
In this regard, some questions come to mind. Is there a spiritual teacher with whom you are familiar, admire, and would like to emulate? Is there a unique contribution you would like to make to others—and ultimately to your self, since we are all One? Where does your real, intense, waiting-to-be-manifested passion lie? The only way to answer these and other questions like them is to go into silence and listen attentively to what it tells you. As the Buddha counseled us many years ago, “Your work is to discover your work, and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.”
Consider beliefs (in particular, yours!), how you got them, and how they currently influence the way you think, feel, and act (in precisely this order) on a daily basis. Like everyone else, you have a very detailed and extensive belief system that is deeply embedded in your mind, and you use it to observe, understand, and define yourself and your place in the world. In most cases, you have become totally comfortable with it, and therefore no longer question it or even know that it exists.
For example, you have probably come to like certain people and not like others; to like certain foods and not like others; to like certain cars and not like others; to like certain books, movies, clothes, jewelry, and jokes, and not like others. It could also be said that not only have you become comfortable with these personal frames of reference, you have become a slave to them. They are forcing you to limit yourself to thinking inside a box of a certain size. Again, if you feel compelled to challenge or dispute this statement, this is proof by itself that you are limited in how you think.
Let’s look at the belief system you now have that defines for you much of your basic make-up: who you are; what you’re made of; why you’re here; what you stand for; what strengths, talents, and natural abilities you have; how to behave; what dreams and aspirations you should have; and so on. In other words, you have adopted a certain mind-set, a certain sense of self, a certain self-identity, a certain self-concept, a certain notion of who you are: how attractive, how capable, how acceptable, how lovable, how intelligent, how productive, and therefore how important and how worthy you are. This is how you have allowed your brain to be programmed up to now. And guess what? This book is going to ask you to question this master paradigm and change it—indeed, change it dramatically in some important areas.
To ask you to change your personal belief system—how you see yourself, your world, and your place in it—is often viewed as an exceedingly challenging, even daunting task by many people. Remember before we proceed that we have all had to make paradigm shifts—both major and minor—in our life concerning our beliefs about any number of things, both big and small. For example:
On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager became the first person to break the sound barrier in an airplane. Many thought this could never happen.
On May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister became the first person to run the four-minute mile. Many thought this could never happen.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first person to walk on the moon. Many thought this could never happen.
In the early 1990s, Japan entered an economic recession after almost 40 years of rapid economic growth. This recession went on for more than a decade, and well into the new millennium. Many thought this could never happen.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists flew two commercial aircraft into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, destroying both structures and taking approximately 3,000 lives. Many thought this could never happen.
On October 10, 2002, a single share in Nortel Networks (a much-respected high-tech firm) closed the day on the New York Stock Exchange at 67 cents. It was valued at more than $124.00 (or 12,400 cents!) only 24 months earlier. Many thought this could never happen.
During the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009, some economists estimate that between $10 to $15 trillion evaporated into thin air as a result of the global banking and credit crisis. Many thought this could never happen.
Add to this list the fact that when you look down a set of train tracks, they appear to come together somewhere off in the distance. But when you get on a train and travel that distance, you find that they do not. In other words, what you see on the physical level is not actually real!
So perhaps the task at hand—changing your concept of who and what you are—is not as daunting as you first thought. Consider this comment by the American writer Elbert Hubbard (1849–1912): “The recipe for perpetual ignorance is to be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.”
Here is a quote from the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) by Richard Bach:
“The only difference, the very only one,
between those who are free and the others,
is that those who are free have begun to understand
what they really are and have begun to practice it.”
This is one of my favorite books, and it contains only 127 pages. I recommend it to you. It is about an extremely brave and daring young seagull named Jonathan Livingston Seagull who thinks he is an eagle.
Here is my take on the story. We know all seagulls who think they are seagulls do what other seagulls do; and we know all eagles who think they are eagles do what other eagles do. So Jonathan, believing he is an eagle, acts accordingly. He hovers at great heights, he soars above mountaintops, and he dives at frightening speeds, all the dramatic and often dangerous things that eagles do. Not surprisingly, his fellow seagulls think he is completely mad and kick him out of the flock. But is he really mad?
Think about it. Because he thinks he is an eagle—it is what he conceives and believes himself to be—and for this reason only, Jonathan is able to do pretty much all the things that eagles do. What a great metaphor for you in your life!
You now know what you have to do: Decide who you want to be and what you want to do. Do you want to hover at great heights and soar above mountaintops? Do you want to be the best you can be? Do you want to do something significant, and contribute something unique and meaningful to help others in the world who are hurting?
You can if you think you can! It only requires that you formulate the appropriate pictures in your head, then act on them with immense passion, unbridled self-confidence, unlimited determination, sharp focus, and an unwavering commitment to succeed.
Here is what three world-renowned experts have said about critical aspects of your psychological make-up: your personal belief system; your self-image; and your level of self-esteem. These factors are all closely related and interdependent, and each plays an important role in your life.
“What is self-esteem? It is how a person feels about himself. It is his overall judgment of himself—how much he likes his person. A person’s judgment of self influences the kinds of friends he chooses, how he gets along with others, the kind of person he marries, and how productive he will be. It affects his creativity, integrity, stability, and even whether he will be a leader or follower. His feelings of self-worth form the core of his personality and determine the use he makes of his aptitudes and abilities. His attitude toward himself has a direct bearing on how he lives all parts of his life. In fact, self-esteem is the mainspring that slates each of us for success or failure as a human being.”
—Dorothy Corkille Briggs,
author of Your Child’s Self-Esteem (1970)
“There are positive correlations between healthy self-esteem and a variety of other traits that bear directly on our capacity for achievement and for happiness. Healthy self-esteem correlates with rationality, realism, intuitiveness, creativity, independence, flexibility, ability to manage change, willingness to admit mistakes, benevolence, and cooperative-ness. Poor self-esteem correlates with irrationality, blindness to reality, rigidity, fear of the new and unfamiliar, inappropriate conformity or inappropriate rebelliousness, defensiveness, over-compliant or over-controlling behavior, and fear of or hostility toward others.
“The higher our self-esteem, the more ambitious we tend to be, not necessarily in a career or financial sense, but in terms of what we hope to experience in life—emotionally, intellectually, creatively, and spiritually. The lower the self-esteem, the less we aspire to and the less we are likely to achieve. Either path tends to be self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating.”
—Dr. Nathanial Branden,
author of The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem (1994)
“The ‘self-image’ is the key to human personality and human performance. Change the self-image and you change the personality and the behavior. But more than this. The ‘self-image’ sets the limits of individual accomplishment. It defines what you can and cannot be. Expand the self-image and you expand the ‘area of the possible.’ The development of an adequate, realistic self-image will seem to imbue the individual with new capabilities, new talents, and literally turns failure into success.”
—Maxwell Maltz, MD,
author of Psycho-Cybernetics (1960)
Dr. Maltz explains that psycho-cybernetics is a mental activity that takes place at all times and in all circumstances as you live your life, whether you want it to, know it, accept it, or not. This is important to understand, as you spend almost all your waking moments thinking about any number of things, from what to eat for breakfast in the morning to what time to go to bed at night.
This is how your mind actually works to get you through each day. The conscious mind is a goal-seeking mechanism—it’s called teleological or psycho-cybernetic—and it represents a unique success system that never fails. It takes a picture stored in memory and transforms it into its physical counterpart, just like a modern camera creates an actual photograph from a visual image. The mind has been designed and built to do this perfectly and consistently; in fact, it is incapable of not doing this. This is the principle regarding all purposeful human behavior: Your mind always acts out the pictures you have put in your head.
The implications of this phenomenon are both prophetic and profound. If you want to be successful at any given activity—parenting, managing, selling, public speaking, or losing weight—you have to have the right pictures stored in memory regarding that particular activity. It’s a simple equation that basically says only positive inputs produce positive outcomes.
These positive inputs—pictures!—represent a detailed imprint or blueprint for being successful at whatever it is you are trying to do. The process begins with a diligent and thorough search to find the right pictures—this could be called the applied part—then accepting them as valid and true for you, as representing who you really are; this could be called the surrendering part.
It’s important to ask yourself what pictures come to mind as you consider the questions “Who am I?”; “What am I made of?”; and “Why am I here?” These pictures are critical as they are an indisputable and significant indicator of where all your thinking has taken you in your life. They are also the major driver buried deep in your subconscious that is determining the direction your life is now taking. Once this assessment has been done, you will be in a much better position to make positive changes.
So where can you find the right pictures and what can you do to readily access them? As we have seen, they come from no-mind—from the depths and tranquility of Now. This is why you are encouraged to engage in meditative practice every day. In stillness, as your mind begins to shed its many preconceived (often-silly) ideas, (often-silly) understandings, and (often-silly) concerns, these pictures begin to appear as you are in your most basic, natural, and simplistic state (i.e., unconditioned consciousness). You realize this is who you are, that this is your very essence. When you understand who you are, then fully accept and closely identify with who you are, you begin to act out this reality in all that you think, feel, say, and do. At last! The shackles of your prior conditioning have been broken. You are free and able to embrace a new reality.
If you were God and had all the powers available to you that God has—to radiate, to illuminate, to communicate, to educate—what would you do with your life? What pleasures would you gladly forsake? What initiatives would you eagerly undertake? What contributions would you earnestly make? Ah, yes, if only you were God. (Okay, if you want to notch it down a bit: if only you were God-like!)
Clearly there is a point where a person sees beyond his individual nature and private needs and wants. Here, such a person is “at one” with spirit, hence is totally “need-less” and “self-less” in his thinking and behavior. This level can be called “Unity Consciousness.” Buddhists would say that if you were at this level, you could ignore all the others, that in fact there is only one level of true consciousness. They would say that the other levels are only temporary diversions/distractions along the true path to Oneness or nirvana.
Nirvana in Buddhism is the state of perfect blessedness achieved by the extinction of individual existence and by the absorption of the soul into the supreme spirit; it involves the elimination of all earthly desires and passions.
The late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918–2008), the founder of Transcendental Meditation, was once asked the following question at a public event: “Maharishi, wise people everywhere know that ‘As you sow, so shall you reap.’ And mystics are fond of saying that we are all one. If there is literal truth to these sayings, then whatever you do to another person you must be doing to yourself. Therefore, as you have said, violence has no value to solve problems. My question is, how literally can we take these sayings that we are all one? We seem to be separate, but is there some higher reality that we are not perceiving? Are we like individual cells in one body?”
The Maharishi answered: “Exactly like that. I think your inference is grand. All are one. The example will be of a tree—so many thousand leaves, thousand branches, thousand flowers, fruits and all. They are all different on one level—they are one on another level. They are one on the level of the sap—they are different on the level of the expressions of the sap.”
I believe it is possible to tell how successful you will be in your life by asking the following five questions, and then critically assessing your answers. They are in no particular order except I would put the last one first!
1. What are your dreams/goals?
2. Who do you associate with?
3. How do you spend your spare time?
4. What books are you reading?
5. What values do you live by?
We have seen that cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)—itself a form of critical thinking—has been used for more than 50 years by leading psychiatrists and psychotherapists all over the world to treat people suffering from either mild, moderate, or severe depression. Unfortunately, depression is one of the most prevalent yet most difficult diseases in our society to treat. Many people (including teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, bankers, soldiers, police officers, politicians, actors, singers, musicians, etc.) don’t even want to admit they are feeling depressed because of the social stigma (i.e., embarrassment and shame) that is associated with it. Most decide to just tough it out and keep on keeping on, hoping that things will get better all by themselves. Because the disease is often never admitted to, it’s seldom properly treated, leaving people to endure their pain all alone and in the silence of their own mind.
The Toronto Star reported some interesting results in the first countrywide survey on mental health in Canada (with a population of about 31.5 million at the time) in an article on September 4, 2003. It found that 2.6 million people (1.4 million women and 1.2 million men) reported having symptoms of mental illness (i.e., about one in 12 people). Symptoms were related to anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, major depression, eating disorders, and suicide attempts. Of this number, almost half, or 4.5 percent, reported symptoms or feelings associated with major depression. Mental illness was found to be 18 percent for people aged 15 to 24, 12 percent for those aged 25 to 44, 8 percent for those aged 45 to 64, and 3 percent for seniors 65 and older. Fewer than half sought out any treatment.
Here’s another important finding. The results of a 16-week study at the University of Pennsylvania on the effectiveness of cognitive therapy were published in the April 2005 issue of the U.S. journal Archives of General Psychiatry. The study involved 240 people with moderate to severe depression. One group of 60 received cognitive therapy; another group of 120 received antidepressant medication (usually Paxil); and a third group of 60 received a placebo or sugar pill. The finding was that cognitive therapy when provided by experienced psychotherapists was just as effective as antidepressant drugs in the initial treatment of moderate to severe depression.
According to the researchers, patients in the cognitive therapy group attended two 50-minute sessions each week for the first four weeks of the study, one to two sessions a week for the next eight weeks, and one session a week for the final four weeks. After eight weeks of treatment, the response rate was 50 percent in the medication group; 43 percent in the cognitive therapy group, and 25 percent in the placebo group. After 16 weeks, the response rate was 58 percent for patients in both the medication and cognitive therapy groups.
The researchers concluded by saying, “It appears that cognitive therapy can be as effective as medications.” This finding was contrary to the guideline at the time of the American Psychiatric Association that said most moderately and severely depressed patients required medication.
Another study shows how science is only now catching up to spirituality. Scientists have discovered that a single cell found in a microscopic piece of skin, flesh, or cartilage has the DNA of the whole species contained within it, whether a human being, a plant, or an animal. In recent years, we have seen the first cloned sheep; Dolly was born on July 5, 1996. She was followed by a mouse, a pig, a cat, a rabbit, a cow, and a horse. Then, on April 23, 2009, scientists announced they have cloned a puppy that even glows in the dark! They named him Ruppy, short for Ruby Puppy (Source: Wikipedia).
In other words, the son or daughter created exactly as the father or mother. Think about it. A fertilized cell of a living organism can replicate all the parts of the original organism; the intelligence of the whole is contained in the smallest particle of the whole. Does this not say something profound when you consider the wisdom of universal mind (i.e., the intelligence of the whole) being contained in you (i.e., the smallest particle of the whole)?
There is an incredible Presence or knowing that lies deep inside each of us. We often hear its pleadings—its gentle whisper calling us home, wanting to reunite us with the joy, peace, and love that it represents. But we seldom heed its call. Perhaps it’s because we are afraid of it; after all, it is unknown to most of us. Or perhaps we think we can heal ourselves—that we are strong enough or smart enough to overcome anything that ails us.
We all have issues from the past, which can make us feel trapped or limited. These can be manifested in our daily life in many ways, including hurt, fear, anger, guilt, or regret. Certain preoccupations may also be at play. We may lack confidence in our ability to live our life the way we think we should; indeed, we may want to live a life completely different from the one we are now living. We may wonder why there isn’t more love, hope, meaning, and sense of purpose in our life. We may be suffering from the recent loss of a loved one, a debilitating addiction, a marriage breakup, or the loss of a job that we have had for many years. Or perhaps it is the fear of our own death that frightens us the most; we know we are all going to die sometime (i.e., undergo yet another transformation!).
As this is happening, many of us find we cannot heal ourselves all by ourselves. We know another power, whose magnitude we can only guess at, is also at play, yet we often live in ignorance or denial of this very fact. Perhaps we feel unworthy, weak, or inept because we are unable to do this. We may even feel ashamed of our seeming incompetence. After all, we do solve a large number of problems of various kinds every day. So the ego, never too far from our innermost thoughts, tells us to just labor on, learn a little more, try a little harder, become a little smarter—but no matter what, never surrender!—all representing false hope, wasted effort, and poor logic. The result is, and can only be, ongoing pain and suffering. What a dilemma—yet what an opportunity to grow if we would but wake up!
Here is a quote from A Course in Miracles that talks about what is real and what is true: “Truth is unalterable, eternal, and unambiguous. It can be recognized, but it cannot be changed. It applies to everything that God created, and only what He created is real. It is beyond learning because it is beyond time and process. It has no opposite, no beginning, and no end. It merely is.”
Can practical spirituality help you with goal-setting in your life? After all, we are always settings goals of one kind or another, but very often we don’t achieve them.
The answer is a definite yes! The first and most important consideration when goal-setting is to ask yourself, “What is my motivation, my real purpose, for wanting this result (i.e., whatever goal you have decided upon) in my life?” You can answer this question by imagining you have already achieved this goal—that it’s already part of your life. This way, as an internalized entity and existing in Now, you will be able to sense how it feels in your gut, and in turn come to understand if the goal is primarily for personal and selfish reasons or for the common good. It’s a significant difference in how you feel. If it’s indeed appropriate for you, it will resonate with your energy field and excite you like nothing else can. This, invariably, is why such goals are ultimately achieved: All this positive energy is directed at them and not at others.
When living in the world of form, we tend to organize everything in our life as perfectly as we can, like lining up all the ducks at a shooting gallery. To this end, we set goals, goals, and more goals, both major and minor. We then spend an inordinate amount of time each day trying to achieve them: Get this (object/thing) in place, get this (object/thing) in place, get this (object/thing) in place.
As a young woman, for example, you may decide to marry your boyfriend, move to California, and pursue an acting career. On the few occasions when we are successful at getting everything absolutely perfect—note this only adds to the illusion that we can organize our external affairs exactly the way we want all the time and all by ourselves—we sit back and marvel at how great our life is. “Wow,” we say, “I’ve finally made it. What a smart person I am!”
But in the world of form, we know the phenomenal nature of events and situations is totally unpredictable and sometimes tragic. So one day everything can indeed be fine and the next day everything can be terrible. It’s like asking for more cards (by tap, tap, tapping on the table) in a poker game, trying to come up with a perfect hand (i.e., a royal flush). We want to get everything just right; we want to win the jackpot. But when even one of these cards is missing (the ace, for example), things necessarily fall back into total disarray. What a way to live!
Imagine you are Captain Edward John Smith and have just been selected as the first captain of the RMS Titanic, the culmination of a long and illustrious career as a naval officer. You are asked to take this fine ship, the largest and most sophisticated ocean liner in the world at the time, on its maiden voyage. The ship is slated to leave Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, on its way to New York City. Incredible—what an honor!
The result? On top of the world one moment, at the bottom of the ocean the next! (Captain Smith chose to go down with his ship.) Win an Academy Award one moment, enter drug rehabilitation the next. Win the MVP at the Super Bowl one year, be relegated to warm the bench the next. Win the lottery when you are 25, be penniless and homeless at 30. Get married in Las Vegas on Saturday, get divorced in Tahoe on Sunday. Such is the nature of living in the extreme, polarized environment of “object” consciousness.
Let’s revisit spirituality and try to understand why interest in it is on the increase in many parts of the world at the same time that interest in organized religion, at least in many parts of the West, is in decline. Spirituality can be defined in many ways. I see it as acceptance that there’s an element of the sacred in each of us—that there is a world beyond the world of form, beyond what we can perceive with our five senses. It’s recognition that we are more than just our physical bodies and the thoughts we think. It’s through spirituality that many people find meaning, hope, comfort, and peace of mind. Ultimately, spirituality is about understanding our relationship with the Infinite, and taking steps to develop and nurture that relationship.
There are many paths to enlightenment, and each and every religion is potentially one of them. At the same time, many people are finding that organized religion, at least in the way it is being practiced today, isn’t meeting all of their needs and aspirations. This group is seeking a more direct, meaningful, and experiential relationship with the Divine.
And that’s their choice. Spirituality, of course, doesn’t require you to give up your religion or any religious beliefs you may have. It’s not a matter of either this (my religion) or that (the spiritual path). It’s just another step—albeit for some an extremely important one—to consider as you travel down the road to greater awareness and a higher level of consciousness. (As has been shown in the text, many of the world’s major religions have common spiritual themes and practices that they all share, honor, and celebrate.)
Here is something people are beginning to understand if you remain locked into or obsessed with the everyday world of form: You are limited—there is absolutely no doubt in this regard—to bouncing back and forth between pain and pleasure, disappointment and elation, over and over again. Up one day, down the next; this is the most you can ever hope for. The result? The experience of pure joy and everyday bliss will always escape you. Therefore some people decide to move on, going deeper and deeper in search of something that is more helpful, meaningful, and impactful—indeed more enriching and fulfilling for them.
There are several benefits that people find as a result of spiritual awakening. So let’s see how spirituality is able to bring such benefits into our life. People who are spiritually aware clearly understand two remarkable things. First, they know they cannot find in the world of form—no matter how long or how frantically they search—what exists only in the formless (namely peace, love, hope, joy, and bliss), and second, they know they cannot find in the past or future what exists only in Now (namely understanding, meaning, acceptance, contentment, and fulfillment).
People who actively practice spirituality are able to evolve naturally and with minimum effort. They are more at ease with themselves and their world. They are more content, creative, productive, perceptive, and empathetic, and are more in harmony with others and with nature. They find it easier to make decisions, adjust and change, set priorities, and manage their affairs. They feel more inter-connected and grounded, and less controlled by old habits and past conditioning. They manifest pure joy and experience great bliss, which is their true Nature. Personally, I see it as a get-out-of-jail card; you are literally being set free!
Spiritually aware people are able to live in such a way that their life situation never takes them over completely, regardless of the extremes of the pain-pleasure spectrum. Because such people are centered at their core, their pain is never so crippling or debilitating (i.e., “My world is a total disaster!”) that they want to do themselves or others any harm, and their pleasure is never so euphoric or overwhelming (i.e., “My world is absolutely perfect!”) that they feel they are on top of the world. It’s because whichever way it is today, they know that tomorrow it could well be very different or even the exact opposite!
It has been said that some people live by the light, meaning with an inner glow. Imagine this as a candle that is in you. When you are spiritually connected, the flame on this candle is burning and shines brightly. It never brightens, it never dims, and it never goes out completely. It just shines brightly.
Now, as each day arrives, you lift the curtain of your mind to this new dawning, this new day. Some days, you find that the sun outside is shining brightly; other days, you find that a storm is in full force. Each represents one end of the two extremes that always applies in the world of form (e.g., up/down, over/under, hot/cold, stop/go, etc.). Neither of these occurrences has any impact on you, however, as your inner candle continues to shine brightly. So you simply proceed to go about your day. Whether the sun is shining outside or not (i.e., whether your life situation is favorable or unfavorable, welcomed or not welcomed), you function as you should, knowing what you know, being who you are, and doing what you need to do.
A final analogy to emphasize this point: When you look at any large body of water such as the ocean, you see that the surface is always in a certain state of disarray and disruption; invariably, there are waves of some kind. These may be small ripples, sizable undulations, or large white-caps, depending on the wind and other weather conditions at the time. On the other hand, you know that whatever is happening on the surface, if you travel down to the bottom of the ocean, to the very depths of the ocean, everything there is calm, everything is peaceful, and everything is serene.
And so it is with your everyday life. On the surface, meaning the world of form, everything there is active, busy, in flux, and in motion. But while all this is going on, if you travel down to the depths of your mind, into silence, into stillness, into the world of no-form, you will find there that everything is also calm, everything is peaceful, and everything is serene. This is why people flock to the oceans and lakes of the world in the first place. There, it is much easier to kick back, relax, and be your Self. In such a place, close to water, close to nature, there is much less competition in the way of inner ego and outer stimulation to keep your mind constantly running in overdrive.
The Wall Street Journal on November 7, 2013, commented on the dramatic increase in loneliness in the United States. It is thought that high divorce rates, more single-family households, electronic (remote) rather than in-person communications, the retirement of the Baby Boom generation, and more elderly people in our ranks with a variety of health issues all contribute to the problem.
The article cited John T. Cacioppo, a psychologist and director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, who analyzed several large studies on loneliness. He estimates the level of loneliness has doubled in the past 30 years, with about 40 percent of Americans report being lonely today, compared to only 20 percent in the 1980s.
The article also noted researchers at Brigham Young University who studied the correlation between social relationships and mortality in 2010. In a meta-analysis of 148 studies involving more than 300,000 participants, here is what was discovered: “[L]oneliness was as strong a predictor of early death as was alcoholism or smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and it was a stronger predictor than obesity or a sedentary lifestyle.” (See the section subtitled “Love” on page 152 for effective ways to deal with this challenging and unfortunate social trend.)
We all need to better understand romantic love because of the important role it plays in our personal life—indeed in our modern society. After all, the family unit traditionally has been the cornerstone of our social order. What is romantic love, anyway? Why do so many people crave it and feel that life is a total waste without it? Why does it bring so much happiness to some, and so much pain and sorrow to others? With divorce rates in many countries hovering around 50 percent, it appears that something is tragically amiss.
Perhaps a little background is in order. In today’s world, we see an enormous fixation on the material aspects of life—again, the world of form—from fancy cars, to designer clothes, to over-sized homes, and the belief that these things can make us happy. This is problem #1. We can call it the “toys-and-trinkets” factor.
There is also the aspect of instant gratification, especially by the younger generation, the wanting of things that are seen as desirable right now, immediately, if not sooner! This is problem #2, the stress, anxiety, and depression, or S-A-D, factor. This mind-set places enormous pressure on people and often leads to conflict between couples, usually as a result of too much debt.
Then there is the status factor, our compulsive and often-repulsive need to prove to the world (and ourselves) over and over again how important, how smart, how capable, and how attractive/lovable we are. This is problem #3, the “prima donna” factor.
With these things just described all happening at the same time, our lives are necessarily in overdrive, with everyone wanting to get somewhere (in fact nowhere) as quickly as possible. We know a treadmill leads you nowhere, after all. It only causes you to break out in a sweat while standing still!
And the liberation of sexual mores and practices in many countries continues unabated. As a result, we see higher and higher instances of teenage pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, single mothers, single households, and common-law marriages, as well as an ever-increasing divorce rate in North America and elsewhere. To note, the United States has the highest divorce rate in the Western world (Source: Wikipedia).
As Bob Dylan told us back in 1964, “The times they are a-changin’.” And we know they are changing faster today than ever before. To deal with these developments, however, we as responsible and caring adults need to better understand the many social and psychological forces that are at play.
I offer the following observations regarding romantic love. They are not meant as a criticism or judgment in any way. In other words, I’m not saying romantic love is either good or bad, or somewhere in between; I’m only saying that it needs to be better understood.
We know romantic love is a euphoric experience of monumental proportions, indeed a magnificent blessing, a unique and enthralling experience quite unlike any other we can hope to have in our lifetime. Unfortunately, however, though we readily welcome such feelings, they often blind us concerning what is really going on. So let me try to explain “what is really going on.”
We all experience different kinds of love in our life, and they include transcendent love, familial or family-centered love, and romantic love. Regarding the latter, romantic love, we have seen in the text how the ego is always wanting and needing—always trying to complete and better itself. This is the dynamic, then, that is taking place when two people find each other physically and emotionally attractive, and “fall” in love.
The attractive part is the primitive, primordial sex drive we all have that perpetuates our species. The often-called chemistry that causes us to find one person more attractive than another is the luck of the draw, I believe. It’s something we are born with and must contend with as best we can.
People who are in love feel that when they are together, they are better off, meaning more happy, playful, and joyful—more alive! But we must come back to what is real, to what is permanent, to what never changes. And by this criteria, romantic love by itself is neither real nor permanent, although it may be more convenient for a time for many personal and societal reasons (like having a ready sexual partner and the raising of children).
But we know many people fall in and out of love; it comes, it goes, it intensifies, it diminishes. Others may remain in love all their lives. It doesn’t matter. With the death of both parties, it comes to an end (i.e., when a person dies, the ego in that person dies, along with anything and everything that the ego helped create). I suggest, then, it could be argued that every marriage that is based solely on romantic love is simply a marriage of convenience.
As an aside, we know there are other marriages that are devoid of any kind of love at all. This makes them also marriages of convenience. Here the reasons may be to reduce living expenses or have simple friendship or companionship. It’s not unlike having a roommate in college.
Romantic love usually involves two very different people coming together with very different ego-related and trans-egoic drives. We know these drives often change with age and maturity; one person may change in one or more of these areas while the other may change in other areas or indeed in none at all. It comes down to how well such aspects of the two people allow them to co-exist as a unit for the mutual benefit of both. In this sense, marriage is very much an ongoing exercise in adjusting, in accommodating, in compromising, with the hope that staying married keeps you in a better place.
A final comment: Can you imagine being a gentleman who is head over heels in love with a lady you absolutely adore, but she decides to marry someone else? (I certainly can; it happened to me.) If you truly loved this person, wouldn’t you be the first to step up and cheer her on, knowing she believed she would be happier in this other relationship? (Are you kidding? I can’t imagine doing that!)
Of course, you also might think she was wrong in making the decision she made. (Yes, I sure did!) And you could very well be right. (It turned out that I was.) But is this not the ego in you jumping in, making its presence known, and putting your self-interest first and foremost? (Okay, okay—I plead guilty on all counts!)
In a typical “romantic love” marriage, the convenience factors could include any or all of the following: (1.) safety and security; (2.) acceptance and friendship; and (3.) recognition, status, and self-respect. In fact, there is no end to what the ego wants for you and no end to its telling you that it can provide it. The constant and persistent message it impresses upon you is “Do exactly as I say and you’ll get everything you want!” Until you find a ready response to this most alluring—but highly misguided—entreaty or learn how to ignore it, I believe you are putting yourself and your well-being at serious risk.
I offer the following as the ideal situation. As we have just seen, every purely “romantic love” relationship has a large ego-related component embedded deep in it that is a key part of its dynamic. And we know that dueling egos don’t make for pleasant conversation, good company, or easy living, let alone a happy marriage. So what elixir or other ingredient could be added to calm the waters that would bring kindness, patience, empathy, and understanding to the situation? Consider this: What if you were to bring unconditional, transcendent love—where the ego plays absolutely no part—into the relationship as well? Then you would have something quite remarkable—indeed, something very, very unique. In this instance, you would have nothing less than pure, enthralling, ever-enchanting bliss! And bliss has magical powers attached to it as it allows miracles to show up—yes, miracles!—not just once or twice, but on a regular basis.
Miracles are very interesting things, even though you may not have experienced many of them in your life up to now. (You very likely have but weren’t able to see them for what they are!) So what are miracles, anyway? Miracles are remarkable, unforeseen occurrences that seemingly defy natural law and hence are thought to result from some supernatural power. And, strange as it may seem, miracles have very little—in fact, nothing—to do with you individually and everything to do with the world at large (i.e., the One Consciousness). In other words, they are not “personal” in the sense that they occur for only one person’s benefit; they are a collective happening, a collective event, and have an omnipresence and omni-effect.
“All that is required now is that you continue to till the soil of your soul. Just as you would not neglect seeds that you planted with the hope that they will bear vegetables and fruits and flowers, so you must attend to and nourish the garden of your becoming.”
—Dr. Jean Houston,
American philosopher and social scientist;
author of A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story (1996)
The best conversation often involves the fewest words.
You are addicted to assuming a multitude of roles as you go about each day. For example, you may assume the role of a shopper or salesperson, a giver or taker, a teacher or student, a sister or brother, a mother or daughter, a father or son, an employer or employee, and so on. You have all these roles perfected or down pat, as we say. They have become part of your ingrained behavior, your so-called “natural” way of Being. Yet these roles you play are far from being natural. Instead, they are contrived and artificial, like an elaborate game. They are more a defense mechanism you use to protect yourself than an authentic and true expression of who and what you are.
What a dilemma! By acting in such robotic, preprogrammed ways, you are hiding your true Nature from both yourself and those with whom you regularly interact. It’s like you are an actor who enters the stage of life each day and repeats a number of roles assigned to you by your manipulative, egoic mind. You simply adopt a particular role you think best suits a given situation. But what would happen if you deleted all this old, worn-out programming and began anew—if you embarked on an exciting yet perhaps quite scary path of rediscovering who you are?
Consider the following. Can you imagine being totally present while in the company of an old acquaintance, a close friend, a loved one, or even a complete stranger? This means you need only “be” (i.e., allow what is and completely surrender to that), which precludes playing a role of any kind, whether that of a friend, a mentor, a lover, or business associate. It’s clearly a whole new way of engaging with a fellow traveler.
In this regard, consider adopting a sort of passive-attentive stance in the way you communicate with the other person. Instead of the usual type of interaction (talking, laughing, gesturing, clapping, and adopting a wide variety of facial expressions and body positions), you communicate mainly by way of the feelings (love, compassion, understanding, and gratitude) you are experiencing deep inside on a daily basis (i.e., 95 percent of the time).
The more you do that, the better you do that and the more naturally you do that, the more you will learn about who and what you are. In addition, you are more likely to discover these same things about the other person. When all the masks are thrown away, when all the pretenses are dropped, when all the usual platitudes are discarded (a process of getting naked), it’s very revealing and empowering to see what shows up.
Everyone has experienced a moment in simple stillness, one without thinking “I am this” or “I am that.” Here, only the realization of “I am” rang true and real.
Consider the following list. Here you will find some things you already know—and perhaps didn’t even know you knew—and for these you need only a gentle reminder to make you aware of them again. Regarding some other things, you just have to figure them out for yourself. I hope I have assisted you on both counts. The goal is always to live a positive, peaceful, and purposeful life, one that is full of meaning and fulfillment.
You must:
1. Know who you are.
2. Know you are totally responsible for every aspect of your life.
3. Know you create your own reality.
4. Know the power of your basic beliefs and adopted values.
5. Know you have no limits as well as unlimited opportunities.
6. Know you must discover your passion—your own area of excellence.
7. Know how to define what success means for you.
8. Know you are love, only love, and need to fully internalize and externalize that love.
9. Know how to see beauty, God’s gentle fingerprint, in every one and every thing.
10. Know you must serve.
Success is measured by the proportion of your full potential that you dedicate and direct to the betterment of other people and the planet.
“If you correct your mind, the rest of your life with fall into place.”
“Every human being’s essential nature is perfect and flawless, but after years in immersion in the world, we easily forget our roots and take on a counterfeit nature.”
“Of all that is good, sublimity is supreme. Succeeding is the coming together of all that is beautiful. Furtherance is the agreement of all that is just. Perseverance is the foundation of all actions.”
“The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.”
“To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.”
—Lao-tzu (c. 604–531 BCE),
founder of Taoism;
author of Tao Te Ching