spiritual practice

a path to here

I recommended someone read Eastern Body, Western Mind because he was interested in the theory behind my Reiki practice. He liked the down-to-earth, non fuzzy-wuzzy language that he found in the book. Too often discussions of ki, prajna, chakras etc. break down because the initiated (the people who are used to these strange words and therefore ‘understand’ them) have no way of explaining alien concepts with everyday words. This book fills a hole.

Except ‘rainbow bridge’.

What the hell is a rainbow bridge? I can only guess. Maybe…the path (or bridge) to wholeness, which in the author’s experience comes through freeing and integrating the energy of each chakra. (The colours of the chakras when put together would look like a rainbow, I guess.)

This got me thinking. The path to wholeness. That means that where I am now is not whole (probably true), but that to become whole I have to go somewhere else. The people reading this have probably already clocked that it’s not through owning things that we will find this wholeness, so what other places do we look for it? Where are you looking?

Somewhere else. We can take external trips somewhere else (buy or get rid of some things, travel, change your job, start or end a relationship) or internal trips to somewhere else (get saved, get enlightened, get your chakras healed). But what does this change?

Suggestion:
As long as you are trying to be whole by going somewhere else, you will never find wholeness where you actually are.

I’m roughly the same person I was five years ago, only I don’t hate myself for it now. That’s the only important thing that’s changed. Yes it’s true that my mental and emotional bodies are a little clearer thanks to a couple of things you might call spiritual practices, but that’s not the significant difference. What matters is that I can live with myself in my imperfection-riddled state of being, buy myself a beer, and say to myself that where I am right now, that’s okay.

So I wouldn’t call it the path to wholeness anymore. I haven’t gone anywhere but further inside. It’s the path of wholeness.

It brings me back to the leathery old AJ Muste quote:

There’s no way to peace. Peace is the way.

how to be a genuine spiritual fake

Somewhere during the course of yesterday, which was full of frustrated efforts to program the blog, and last night, which was complete with bizarre dreams of old school friends and having to copy out Old English from a textbook, I realised that I am not as happy as I thought I was.

a shack in Op Khan Canyon, Thailand

The way I see it is that this realisation is good, because it means greater honesty, and less trying to create something that is unreal.

One of my defining personality characteristics is that I am happy. I smile a lot, am cheerful, and enjoy making other people happy. How much effort do I waste trying to ensure this happiness never dries-up?

spiritual veneer

It’s like veneer. We use veneer to cover-up cheap wood and make it look better. We don’t want people to see what’s underneath. We think the wood inside is not worth looking at and so try to keep it hidden. Happiness is the veneer of spiritual fakes.

Spiritual practices like prayer, meditation or worship work to polish the veneer. What we really need is to crack it off first, peel it away, and let the real wood inside breathe for a while. It will not look healthy, because it has been trapped inside a tight jacket of external constraints for so long. It will probably look pale and weak because it has never known the enlivening power of the air it needed to breathe.

While you are polishing your veneer, you just get more and more shiny, and the only way to get at what is real is to stop lying and stop your spiritual trying. Quit this kind of religion today.

After we have become honest with who we really are, unimpressive, moody, the oil of a quiet spiritual practice will slowly stain the wood of our real inner selves. As the real wood feeds on the oil and fresh air, it grows strong.

How do we make this happen? I would be the first to put my hands up and admit to being completely incapable of such a thing. Grace is needed.

But one thing is clear: the deeper I go in the journey to undivided living, the more I can rest in my own unhappiness–the more I am comfortable without my veneer.