Theo suggested to me: It would be cool to read a 1-2 page doc talking about your relationship to your spiritual practice, and how you enjoy helping someone explore their relationship to spiritual practice
I sit on my windowsill to write about this question, but it’s not even a minute before I decide that this isn’t the right place, that I need to go to my meditation corner, sit down, adopt a more meditative attitude and just let myself feel. Do I take certain things too seriously? Perhaps. In that “question” I see a critical part of me that feels vulnerable when expressing affection for something, when attaching importance to something.
And the fact is, this question matters to me. It matters. And I feel drawn to respond to it from a place of care.
It matters. I care. Caring.
Caring about what? Caring. Just caring. It feels to me like an attitude or a stance in this world. It doesn’t need a specific object, right now. I feel into it and what I feel is love. Again, a love that doesn’t seem to be constrained to an object. It feels like a warm light, deep down in my chest, and I feel moved and tender as I notice it. My mind keeps looking for an object… what is it? what is it that is being loved? But this is not the “I love X” kind of love. Love is a force here that wants to act through me, that moves me. And I want to be animated by it, to open to it more and more.
The mind kicks in now, and it feels right to allow it: I have this view of humans as a very special kind of animal which has enormously developed this conceptual mind. There is no way a species could become so numerous without an amazing capacity to adapt. And, sadly, one of the mechanisms of adaptation has to do with surrendering individuality and animality to a will of a higher order. This will is, perhaps, not even the will of society or the group, but the “will”—if it can be called that—of the evolutionary force of life. What multiplies and expands prevails and takes over territories and cultures. Ideas, means of production and cultures evolve, grow and die in this way. And individuals are subsumed by them. Their flexible minds are socialized to survive in, and serve, this higher order being which is their group or society, or perhaps the “higher order beings” are the ideas or dynamics that govern such a group or society. And this socialization brutalizes the person’s being, sometimes pushing the soul to its limits, sometimes exiling it. The animal needs and impulses die under the weight of societal norms and roles. The innocence and the soul are relinquished, and at its best it can find expression within the strict boundaries provided by society. Our societies kill the nature within us and, in doing that, they attack and destroy the nature within which we live. Our will, desires and creativity are captivated by market economies which force-feed us information and products while demanding from us a staggering amount of work to produce more information and products. Our souls die within this hamster wheel while the world that surrounds us is poisoned.
Sometimes the heartbreak is hard to bear, and I notice the impulse to turn on the TV and sedate my soul a bit by watching something. Or to watch porn. Or to eat. Or to buy something on Amazon that I don’t really need. Or to use a dating app to find a new human to consume. The heartbreak, the disconnection, the discontent, the lack of purpose feed the capitalistic wheel, and the wheel produces heartbreak, disconnection, discontent, lack of purpose.
I don’t know what the way out is. Some say activism and revolution. I used to believe this. I still do, partly, but I am more uncertain now. What I know is that when I’m making a real mess, the first thing I need to do is to stop. Stop.
I stop, I breathe, I feel my body. The narrative I just developed feels very present and alive. I feel it in my forehead, my eyes and my cheekbones. In my throat and my chest. It feels true. It feels like reality. My truth, my reality. My group’s truth and reality? A truth and reality? One of many? It feels softer now, and I sit with it. It feels more translucent.
I was going to continue expressing that, to me, spiritual practice is about regaining my animality and my soul. About stepping, for a moment, out of that wheel. As an act of love towards myself, and as an act of love towards all. And that sounds true and beautiful to me, as a beautiful narrative. One of many, infinite narratives. I feel at the edge of something now. At the edge of a void, or on the shore of a quiet, silent lake. There is an intuition that words can’t do justice. Words convey truths just as much as they lie in the process. An intuition of something beyond all narratives, and an intuition of the infinitude of narratives. The word mystery comes to me. Mystery, silence, void. The image of a night sky.
If I’m truly honest, I have no fucking idea what is going on in this world. I have no idea about what’s happening to me. I don’t know who I am and what moves me. Reality has no ground. Bottomless. I’m forever falling through it. And while I do my mind builds narratives and worlds, like this one…
And the more I engage in what I call spiritual practice, the more I see narratives as narratives. Concepts as concepts. Ideas as ideas. The mind becomes more malleable, more pliable, less stuck. Freer. Freer to what? To serve something. To serve what?
I don’t know, perhaps it’s love.
How you enjoy helping someone explore their relationship to spiritual practice?
It feels very beautiful and tender. It feels like honoring something which goes well beyond me and them. It feels way beyond enjoyment, while sounding enormously enjoyable to me. The image that comes to my mind is of two children playing with some threads, threads which somehow represent “reality”, and they are pulling them apart, and trying to see beyond them, joyful and curious.
I don’t see a bigger gift than connection to self, others and nature. That’s the biggest gift I’ve received, and perhaps that’s the reason I want to give that to others. Although that phrasing doesn’t seem right. “Discovering something together” sounds more accurate. It feels joyful and intimate. It feels like a gift to myself, to the other and to all beings at the same time. The phrase “restoring connection” comes to my mind and resonates a lot. There is something about connection and there is something about mystery.