Thoughts on Spiritual Practice

In some fundamental ways we are sick due to historical forces we as individuals have no control over. We don't know how to locate ourselves healthily into larger frameworks. Those of us who seek to follow a spiritual path try many ways, we read Holy books and perform spiritual practices handed down from the ancients though these things don't quite fit us because we have so many choices. Still, those practices and philosophies are useful as guides and should be always used as reference points when feasible—but we lack the fundamental stability to really do much with these paths.

We need simple spiritual paths based on elegant fundamentals. This is why the more basic forms of Buddhism are attractive to many aware (hip) people in our culture. For me, the teachings of Eckhart Tolle are prime examples of elegant fundamental thinking because he emphasizes simplicity, i.e. “the now”. The Presence that comes from being in the now is, for our generation of humans living in the craziness of the modern world, God.

Actually the situation we face is not as simple as Tolle implies but his fundamental insight is crucial to any sort of practice, and he doesn't lay out a big agenda for us precisely because our minds would take his idea structure and run with it; he knows full well how addicted we are to “ideas”. This focus on thoughts, ideas, "solutions" fuel our tendency towards mental spinning which because we lack grounding literally in the soil (this includes place, family, community etc.) this feature is the hallmark of our era. All the classics of spirituality were written or taught in cultures that were stable, except for odd periods of instability. Family, tribe, and location were fundamental not incidental. Most people have always been raised within a common mythological framework that developed and changed very slowly gradually adapting to new situations or, when major wars and dislocations occurred there was a quick blending and period of syncretism and a new myth developed out of the old fragmented myths. Today we are in a period of time when the period of dislocation seems permanent so that no stable sustaining myth or ethical sensibility can be established everything seems temporary and in a state of flux. In the past the split between self, society and the Earth was not there so people did not have to “choose” what to do or what to believe even in times of instability. People were used to acting within a context of codes of honor. Today there are no standards that have the power to hold us and it is not our fault.

Beyond practicing a simple practice we can understand clearly and perhaps experimenting with other practices, what do we do to heal the illness? How do we heal the damage we all feel (if we are honest) inside? While practicing being Present we have to create a framework for that practice since we are usually not present. That framework is where we can perform our spiritual practice.

There is no real separation between oneself and the world whether we are speaking of people or the physical world around us or all the inner and outer worlds that we can imagine. There is no real separation but, as a practical matter of living in a time-bound existence, we make certain demarcations. Still, the basic issues of ones psychic makeup are reflected in the rest of nature and society. Thus ones relationship with spouse/partner, children/parents, friends, institutions, societies, is part of one continuum. Therefore our relationship with the world should be based on the same principles as our inner practices and vice versa.

The political “situation” is not something that is apart from us but the medium of our interchange with the world as our body is the medium of our own self-awareness. By “political” I mean the world that exists beyond ourselves and those we are intimate with (those whom we are intimate share both personal and political qualities). It includes such things as economics, business, culture, public associations of all kinds. While there are certain spiritual principles that we are discovering or seeking to discover in the internal spiritual world there are certain principles that operate in our political world and that we call “ethics”. Without an ethical structure of some kind spirituality is barren and ultimately withers and the same can be said of the opposite—both ethics and spirituality ought to be practiced together.

Intimate relations are where we confront our boundary issues. The point of intimate relations is to practice the connection between self and not self (I and Thou by Martin Buber discusses a very solid basis for ethics in seeing all relations as essentially intimate). Our intimate circles particularly sexual partners and family provide us with some of the basic grounding structures we lack that I mentioned above, i.e., connection with a place, lineage, tribe, and mythical framework, in short a sense of belongingness that is absent from our larger associations.