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September 2019 / More

Convictions & Concerns

TAT members share their personal convictions and/or concerns

Navigating Our Spiritual Waters to the Greatest Treasure of All

In yonder days, seafaring treasure hunters gathered resources for the journey: a sturdy ship to navigate perilous waters, supplies for sustenance, fellow explorers who offered various skills, and tools to remain on course and steer clear of rocky shores—tools such as a compass, nautical charts, and maps of the stars.

As explorers in the spiritual world, we undertake a grand journey with the hope of finding the greatest treasure of all—one that fully satisfies our desire to know who we truly are. Like ancient mariners, we face perilous waters, but our rocky shores are of a different nature. Likewise, we must muster the appropriate tools to maintain our direction. So today, I'll talk about the art of navigation, and offer navigation tools to help seekers in their grand journey inward.

In June 2017, Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman published a book titled How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain. My teacher, Richard Rose, often said that science will ultimately vindicate spiritual discoveries. Science will probably never resolve all the mysteries, but to me, this book helps explain what's happening in our brain as we follow a spiritual path, and it illustrates the major changes that permanently occur in the brain during deep insights and Enlightenment. It also helps explain why enormously diverse spiritual paths unleash insights about ourselves and can ultimately lead to Enlightenment.

While I don't like the word "Enlightenment" due to all the marketing hype in spiritual circles, I'll use the word today because it states a goal—a goal that is truly the treasure we are pursuing.

Of course, as soon as I say anything about Enlightenment, it makes the pursuit into something grandiose. In fact, I often use the term "Grand Maul Enlightenment" because until not too long ago, I had some far-fetched idea that I'd be flopping around on the floor when Enlightenment finally struck. These are the crazy ideas and imaginations we can develop as we pump ourselves with too much spiritual knowledge from books, websites, and teachers.

According to the book, we are biologically predisposed to Enlightenment. I maintain that everyone has what he or she needs to do this—no one is lacking or incapable. Enlightenment is available to all. In fact, Enlightenment may be hardwired into our brains. It's like a light bulb waiting for you to turn on the switch and energize it. There's an everyday awareness in all of us that is intrinsic and impossible not to have. When were you ever not aware?

But I don't think it's particularly helpful to sell or impose a specific brand of Enlightenment. Ironically, I find that highly opinionated teachers tend to be the most impactful. Teachers usually gravitate to techniques that worked for them. However, when teachers impose specific techniques or insist on using litmus tests for Enlightenment, they undercut the students' options for exploring what is most effective for them.

There's no doubt about it—Enlightenment is highly personalized. And this is what I like about TAT. We can see a myriad of approaches and even descriptions of Enlightenment among the teachers, which truly depersonalizes it. So attempting to limit yourself to a narrow approach or comparing yourself to others are generally bad ideas.

I'll say a few words about beliefs. Our beliefs in Enlightenment captivate our heart and our imagination. My beliefs fueled my love of Truth. But eventually, this journey often turns out as the greatest bait-and-switch ever. In the end, our beliefs about Enlightenment may keep us anchored in the mind, and the mind is useful and creative but way too limited in relation to our True Nature. That said, seemingly through the creativity of the mind and our spiritual efforts, our identity may become rooted in something that is beyond the mind and much more authentic, something that fully transcends all beliefs. Kabir said: "just throw away all thoughts of imaginary things, and stand firm in that which you are."

By most (but not all) accounts, it requires effort to recognize our True Nature. Often, it's a matter of making it important enough in our lives. Life demands our attention. We need to find the ways and means each day to re-direct our attention to our spiritual lives. In that vein, to find the greatest treasure of all, I offer the following navigation tools that were helpful to me. These tools are oriented toward an overall attitude rather than specific tasks or approaches. And my greatest hope is that one or more will inspire you…

Spiritual Navigation Tools (in no particular order)

Love

• Love of Truth. For me, Richard M. Bucke's book Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind utterly took me by storm when I was in my early twenties. The book contains numerous personal stories of insight and Enlightenment, and these sparked my love for Truth.
• You might experience or project love onto a teacher if you are heart-oriented.
• You can love life if you really feel into the preciousness of it. I don't mean that it'll all be pleasant, but it's amazing to me how we as human beings are a miraculous transformer between heaven and earth.
• Too many of us don't turn love on ourselves (not to be confused with propping up the small "s" self by making "you" the center of the universe). We're sometimes too hard on ourselves. We divide ourselves by having ideas that we should thinking/feeling/doing something spiritual while another part of us judges the inadequacies of our efforts.
• We fear love. In Enlightenment, that fear falls away, and love becomes an unimaginable impersonal capital "L" Love that unconditionally accepts everything.

Curiosity and Desire

• We can turn our curiosity toward spiritual matters and discover something beyond the beliefs we've held onto all our life.
• We can have a deep desire to change our life by examining personal convictions and spiritual beliefs we hold most closely. Said another way, we can be open to the possibility that our beliefs are wrong.
• It's possible that a strong desire for a radical shift in perspective is conducive to protecting us when our worldview is shattered in Enlightenment.
• Our desire can manifest as an overall intention for life. In fact, we can start each day by giving words to that intention. Life will form a center of gravity around our intention.
• Many of us desire immortality. In Enlightenment, we largely lose the fear of death (what a relief!).

Friendship

• In his essay titled "Man," Richard Rose said: "There is no treasure so great as a true friend." He said: "In order to gauge that path, or even our very sanity, we need the eyes of a trusted friend. And when we find a path, out of a deep feeling of gratitude to friendship, we try to bend down and help another so that the chain of friendship may in itself be a type of immortality."
• We can find spiritual friends who are interested in exploring this great journey with us. In my life, the greatest spiritual teachers for me have been my TAT friends.
• You can find several essays on friendship and rapport in the essays section at SearchWithin.org.

Faith

• We can have implicit faith and trust in the teacher. That said, we should never cede our own authority to another person. So I advocate balance in this area.
• We can have faith in our self. We can have faith in our ability to find the Truth. Richard Rose said: "…you have to doubt everything but your ability. If you doubt your ability you won't try."
• We can trust life to give us what we need on the spiritual path.

Determination

• We can have a strategy in place that orients our life around Enlightenment. We should experiment and make it our own—we can become our own authority instead of relying too heavily on teachers as a crutch.
• We can carve out time in our lives and use whatever means necessary to find an authentic teacher, spend time alone in silence each day, and spend time in isolation or group retreats.
• We can be determined to remember to be aware during the day—to step out of the mind, if only for a minute or two during key opportunities throughout the day.
• The enemy of determination—hopelessness—is one of the biggest obstacles that most seekers face, so we must have the determination to keep going in the face of hopelessness. Again, this is where your spiritual friends can help.
• But we should recognize that we're human, and we'll make mistakes. It's okay to be flawed. In many cases, a deeply sincere seeker fails his or her way to Truth and surrenders.

Patience

• We can allow the path to unfold at its own pace (but let's not confuse this with coasting). We can find the edge between pushing too hard and just letting things happen on their own. Rose called it "running between the raindrops."
• In TAT, we often hear the importance of watching our mind. The process of redirecting our attention is like being an artist or a sculptor or any other skill that we become exceptional at—with time, the act of bending our attention back on itself gets easier and stronger the more we apply our self.
• We can have patience with our self and all our follies.

Acceptance and Gratitude

• We can accept circumstances presented to us at every moment (again, not to be confused with coasting).
• We can trust in this idea of acceptance. Rose said that "…once the commitment is made to find your [capital "T"] Truth at all costs, some interior or anterior self sets up protection. It may even set up the whole path." Of course, he also said that we shouldn't feel too secure, because uncertainty and despair seem to be part of the formula for finding the final breakthrough.
• Most of us fear life. In Enlightenment, we largely lose the fear of life by finding the edge between fighting like hell and not giving a damn, between having direction in life and giving up control. This is the real genius behind Rose's idea of Between-ness.
• We can have gratitude for everything in our life. If you think about it, all the good and the bad events have brought us to this moment, right here in this room.

Humility

• We can turn away from taking credit for all that is occurring around us. This means relinquishing the idea of trying to micromanage our outer life in the world and our inner life of thoughts and feelings.
• We can laugh at our self often (and make others laugh if your humor involves puns).
• Humility keeps us open to new discoveries. If we think we have everything figured out, we'll close off new discoveries about our self and life.

Self-honesty

• When we watch our mind, we can recognize how one part of us fools another part. We can see our rationalizations for not taking action and improper action.
• We can hear voices in us that want our attention, but these are often flawed and usually reveal themselves in the form of regret.
• The more clarity we develop, the more likely we'll be honest with our self.

In closing, I offer the following poem from Hafez, a 14th-century Islamic poet:

I ruminate on God
And my old self falls away.
Am I a Christian, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist, or a Jew?
I do not know for Truth has set fire to these words. Now they are nothing but ashes.
I ruminate on God
And my old self falls away.
Am I a man, a woman, an angel, or even a pure soul?
I do not know for Love has melted these words away.
Now I am free of all these images
That haunted my busy mind.

*

~ Thanks to Paul Constant, a former student of Richard Rose and active TAT member. Presented at the November 2017 TAT Gathering, at the Claymont Society Mansion in Charles Town, WV. Paul maintains a cornucopia of resources for the sincere seeker at SearchWithin.org.

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