Living with our own hearts, we found, was unbearable. Something was off, weirdly and genuinely amiss, that none of us could adequately name. To differing degrees, we were tortured souls, ill-at-ease in our own skin. We searched endlessly for the language to label the problem, for the words and the skills that form a solution. It's dismissive to call what we felt "ennui"--because we weren't just bored. It's incomplete to use psychology's term "dysthymia," because "long term, low grade depression" didn't address the ways "divine intelligences" were, in fact, involved. Religion's tendency to boil problems down to moral failures--resolvable by "trusting God more"--this had failed a great many before us, and was no more effective in our case. Still, some of us spent years praying, asking the advice of our priests. We find it still valuable, but for different reasons. We spent years talking to psychologists--and perhaps we were eventually told "you seem better" (the only problem being that we didn't feel better.) Some of us allowed psychiatrists to label our problems and treat them with drugs, only to find neither labels nor drugs to be a complete and magical remedy. Others sat in self-help groups, only to find that they fell short as both a solution and a source of community.
Even some of the good advice of the age failed us. It's said that after Zen master Joshu's first experience of an empty mind--his brief glimpse of the epitome of buddha mind--he "felt utterly ruined and homeless." We weren't sure we wanted the transformation the Logos had to offer, but we had to admit we were in the midst of experiences from which one does not return unchanged. Even as we realized there were aspects of the search for depth we could easily do without, we saw as well that bells were ringing that could not be un-rung. All of it we find frustratingly limited, yet for different reasons, still valuable. We supposed it was all in the nature of wisdom, as it transitioned from a precept to a tool for transformation. None of the advice of medicine or religion, and none of the proverbial self-help guidance can be wholly discarded, but neither does it seem fully to fit.
The great minds of our time have given short, sage advice. "Find the others," they said. All of the flailing around paid dividends. We mined happenstance for empathetic community. Poets warned us "nobodies" to keep it under our hat. They warned us of banishment. Jokes on them, we thought, we already feel exiled. We might as well huddle together for warmth. And as soon as there were two of us, we began to find words for the problem.
Quite basically, we felt trapped by our situation. The Wisdom of Solomon talks about fear being a "giving up of the helps that come from reason" and then it speaks about being "locked up in a prison not made of iron." While we've evolved a slightly more modern way to describe the problem--which utilizes modern psychology and the wisdom of all the world religions--the end result is the same. Our feeling of confinement and isolation is in perpetual need of address.
We had problems embracing basic reality. The Gospel of Matthew says "we played the flute for you, and you did not dance, we sang a dirge and you did not mourn." We spent time feeling numb, lacking empathy so severely it was disturbing even to ourselves. We were having all of the wrong responses to basic human situations.
We had problems embracing basic reality. The Gospel of Matthew says "we played the flute for you, and you did not dance, we sang a dirge and you did not mourn." We spent time feeling numb, lacking empathy so severely it was disturbing even to ourselves. We were having all of the wrong responses to basic human situations.
By Christianity we felt, for lack of a better word, conned. We experienced problems with Christian truth--places it became illogical--and it felt disingenuous to pretend the heaping piles of platitudes typically thrown at contradiction were either helpful emotionally, or productive of faith. We were told that we were made in God's image, and we did not experience ourselves that way. We were told that God was omnipotent, even as we were confronted with our own unresolved and unresolvable suffering. We were told that God was omnipresent, and yet we persistently faced the feeling of being divinely abandoned. Well meaning religious people told us God was omniscient, and we admitted, with frustration, that our knowledge was limited. There seemed to be something lacking in the God language--and we longed for better, more helpful words. Nobody knew what that looked like.
We had a sneaking suspicion that we, ourselves, were part of the problem--but we knew the limited help that self-flagellation had been in the past. We wanted to handle personal responsibility with a more careful eye toward all that's constructive and gentle.
Anxiety--by which we'd been absolutely tormented from the start--slowly became the most precise of indicators. It accompanied certain thoughts, and was absent from others. It was attached to certain feelings, but not others. It emerged when we behaved in certain ways, when we were in certain situations. As our thirst for serenity grew, our dispositions and behavior began to change, all at the increasingly gentle corralling of anxiety. As scripture says "though the Lord may give you the bread of affliction and the water of adversity, yet your teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your teacher." Knowing that the kingdom was within, we focused on the anxious tension at the center of our chests. "Or when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left," holy writ continues, "your ears shall hear a word behind you saying 'this is the way, walk in it.'"
Our problem dealt with divine intelligences--ones we trusted and ones we were hesitant about. But we couldn't force the universe to provide a solution. Our problem wasn't resolvable by "working harder to believe" or "wanting to get better"--it didn't respond to outright manipulation or more subtle game playing. We had to find a way to deal with an intelligent and unseen source, but not on the basis of effort or desire. This only brought to the surface our lack of trust, and the pervasiveness of our willfulness.
Silly as it seems, we had a problem with time. We found ourselves clinging to past emotions, or rehearsing future, theoretical interactions. Time went slowly when we wanted it to move fast, and fast when we wanted it to slow down. Our days were filled with blame, resentment, rationalization and compulsion. It was exhausting. What's worse, we saw that weariness as increasingly self-imposed. Vanity of vanities, we thought. All is vanity. In the now, we needed the resources for serene personal responsibility. Too many years had already passed without our seeking them.
Our predicament was one of communication and skillfulness. We were feeling called to change our relationship with resources the world took for granted. We were impelled to think, but not compulsively--then explain our solution to those who couldn't empathize with the problem. We had to work, but not willfully, and to lose none of the effectiveness and focus of those whose fuel is force. We groped for a way to begin, even as we intuited that something needed to end. This too was vanity, and a chasing after the wind.
And the problems grew only more complex from there. We learned we could bypass problems by crawling up into our minds. In crudest form, this creates the self, at its most flowery this "spiritual bypassing" uses religion to end-run around trauma. All such forms of abstraction, having shielded us from life's harshness once, became a problem so habitual we effectively denied it for years. But we cannot call good evil and evil good: we had to find a way to deal with the reach of sin. No one acts, desires, craves just for themselves. Only by facing our own flaws with honesty could we hope to correct the myriad social sins with which people as a whole were burdened. It was heavy work. But for reasons we will address, having seen the depths of human error, we could no longer do otherwise.
Particularly for those of us who play at spiritual games, there was another pitfall. We may have come at spirituality and made radical changes in our lives. Many of us had given up all of our possessions and multiple chunks of our lives. In and of it self, this was humbling, but worse yet was the fact that selfishness was not done with us. Perhaps we were gifted, along the way with great spiritual experiences. Each of us, to a degree, fell for the trap of thinking those revelations made us better than others. It was a malady common to all religions, called "Spiritual Materialism"--to use the the term coined by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. The term was Trungpa's; the flaw was ours. Indeed, he had spoken universal truth.
Slowly, and before we had seen the problem at its very bottom, we began to understand it. Religion said "be faithful," psychology said "be happy," psychiatry said "be healthy" and self-help said "be serene"--but efforts to be any of these things always fell short in the long-term. We could not "be" anything in particular when our acceptance of being itself was deficient.
The day of the Lord, it's said, isn't to be sought after. When it happens, it'll be like lightning, from one end of the sky to the other. The day of salvation, the acceptable time that St. Paul talked about, is vanity if it's too full of striving. When the thirst for the past and the future falls off, as he says, "now is the acceptable time, now is the day of salvation." For our part, we began, slowly, to experience brief intervals of "being in the now". They were accompanied by "Aha moments," realizations that began to change the game. Anxiety became a positive thing, when suddenly we realized it was actually "creative tension." We had to learn to "just be" and to interact with ourselves, the world, and God more skillfully. We could be "in the now" more often if we gave up our mental efforts to control emotions, situations and people. Not only did we begin to relax, we began to arrive at conclusions differently. It was a beginning of the heartfelt descent from intellect to intuition. Regarding realizations and intuition, serenity fled our attempts to describe or analyze it, even as we became more confident that examination was unneeded--wisdom, it seems, is part of the toolkit available to those who focus on the moment, and listen without agenda.
And then, like lightning, the problem appeared: Ego. Reality and God, others and ourselves, they're whole and entire and sufficient: the brokenness and broken-heartedness with which all creation groaned forced us to admit that ego was coloring our view. We readily admitted that we were powerless over self, that our lives had become unmanageable. We have only just begun to understand the prattling dishonesty of our own wagging tongues, the silence of all things when we shoulder the Cross. We long for the empty stillness filling the teacher's sacred heart, bouncing off the walls of the holy of holies.
We are students of the Logos; radical recollection is the door that opens within us. When our mouths were silent, the tension in our own chests cried out. Along with a great deal of unfaced trauma, we heard the silence of our being preach the scriptures. This moment is heaven and earth and a hell of our own making all at once. But we do not bear that purgatorial predicament alone. We live and move and have our being in the Spirit who ascends our own backbones. We have been thieves, mobs, weeping mothers and adopted sons. We gave our backs to those who beat us, looked, and saw our own faces. For our many sins we were lifted up. For the healing, we remain.
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