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Spiritual Development

Where are we going on this spiritual trip? Is it just more heavy luggage in a journey already replete with burdens?

Have we once again given up our ability to judge for ourselves, turning away from the problems and complications of life with some predigested "truth"?

So we're looking for something. This means we can see a dissatisfaction, an unacceptable situation, an unacceptable experience. We may feel an emptiness in the way things are, a desire to make things better, a desire to improve ourselves. And what do we imagine as a solution to this dissatisfaction?

We may look to certain people as models : We hear of someone who is so "spiritually developed" that when he sits in meditation, a light is visible glowing forth from him. Or of another who has such "spiritual powers" that a large pin stuck in a cheek causes no pain.

Are you that developed? And is this really the something extra you want from life? Is this what "higher development" is aimed at? Does your deepest problem come because your aura isn't the right colour?

Let's get back to earth. Here we are. Each day our time and energy flow onwards. Does it feel smooth, comfortable, acceptable? Is it sometimes rough going, painful, unacceptable? Is the flow more like a whirlpool than a brook?

If we inspect our life situation more deeply than by merely noting each separate instant of consciousness by itself, we begin to see inter-relations and patterns. Some of these involve great pain. Many show how we repeatedly resist the ongoing flow of reality, or, at least, attempt to channel it according to desires which are constantly arising.

We can appreciate this capacity to gain insight into our various ways of living in the world, and continue seeing more and more deeply how we are going through life. Or, we may find ourselves getting entangled in our thinking about how we are going through life; perhaps our mind will take a philosophical bent and come up with the cavalier idea that it's all illusion, all maya. But all we need is a little deep pain to have us recover our senses.

Back with our senses, what we experience is not this or that conception of how reality really ought to be, but the particulars of our situation as humans in this time and space. When we arise in the morning, we feel hunger in our bellies. When we feel good-willed love from others, we feel a new, special energy. When we see another in distress, we know that sadness, or wonder what it must really feel like. When we are tired, we want to rest. When our environment is beautiful, we are at peace. (Salvador Dali once said that the soul is a state of the landscape.)

The most spiritual life is the most mundane. (Put in a Buddhist way, nirvana is samsara.) The role of spiritual development is in the active liberation of our limited energies from all those pain-producing, self-constricting and inter-personally poisonous channels it is repeatedly flowing into.

We can get on with this liberation without becoming passive through fear of acting. And without beclouding any of our mind's natural crisp clarity.

When we truly allow every bit of reality to show itself to us, we allow in not only what we feel is good, or proper, or "spiritually developed", but anything and everything. Then we can learn from life in all its fullness. We appreciate the idea that our eyes and our heart will be present at all times (I Kings 9:3).

When we become open to learn from life in all its fullness, we are alive to learning more and more deeply how our lives and how our relationships in the world are coming along. We are travelling on, becoming intimately aware of how life works. This is how we carry on. "A man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions" wrote Boswell in 1762.

The Far Shore: Vipassana, The Practice of Insight, pp. 21-22. C 1980,1996,2001,2009 by Mitchell Ginsberg. Excerpted with permission of the author. In quoting please acknowledge source. Please come back soon and visit my Home Page and Selections page, as I will updating and adding to them as time permits.

Please come back soon and visit my Home Page and Selections page, as I will updating and adding to them as time permits.

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C 2009