Spiritual Seeker

Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. Goddamnit, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

- Tyler Durden

Distractions, divisions and depressions are some of the primary ways in which we are kept under control, living in fear and complacency. They are not only barriers to reclaiming our rightful power as people, but also barriers to our higher potential and spiritual evolution.

Distractions

Attention is the currency of the twenty-first century. It has been said that ‘energy flows where attention goes’. Attention is the most powerul form of energy available to people, and the way we direct our attention determines where the energy, capital and power of our society is focused. Organizations – whether they be corporations, governments, schools or institutions – hold most of the economic and political power in our society and derive their power from being able to harness diffuse energy (money, labour, raw materials, ideas, information) and focus it toward specific ends. Think about it: what is an organization other than a complex system of collecting, processing and directing energy? We as individuals can have this same power if we organize our attention. The only thing preventing us from doing so is distractions. Distractions come in many forms such as mass media (and television in particular), advertising, celebrities, gossip, popular entertainment, professional sports, crises, tragedies, wars, terrorist threats, and so on. They scatter our attention like a radio tuner jumping between frequencies trying to find a clear signal. They pull our awareness in many directions and divert it away from the meaningful issues which have a great impact on our lives toward meaningless dramas and trivia. When attention is scattered among many objects, its power is greatly diminished and remains shallow. Like a laser beam, attention derives its power from focus. Only when we learn to direct our attention toward a single object and hold it there for a sustained period of time will we be able to see and understand things deeply and make lasting changes where they are called for. The abilities we develop in meditation are not limited to the time spent in meditation but are essential for dealing with all kinds of situations both large and small.

Distractions keep us from being FOCUSED. Without focus, the power that ordinary people have is very limited. By holding our attention on our biggest challenges and opportunities one by one, we can harness enough energy to make a difference. Rather than being distracted by the latest financial scandal or environmental catastrophe, we must look closely at the global political economic system in detail, piece by piece, and keep watching and learning until we can see the patterns in events and discover the systems, rules and incentives that cause these outcomes to arise in the first place. What happens at any given moment in time matters much less than the patterns that repeat over time, yet we tend to make a big deal out of specific events – oil spills, terrorist attacks, major crimes and so on – for a little while until we lose interest and momentum and return to our distractions. In a certain sense, even elections are a form of distraction. Every couple of years, we get excited by the campaigns, the candidates, the attack ads, and hot issues, and we go out and vote and then forget about democracy until the next cycle rolls around. Elections do not solve problems; only sustained attention, creative thought and persistent hard work solves problems. The major problems we face today – massive wealth and income inequality, environmental degradation, depleting resources and civic apathy toward politics in general – are not situation-specific but deeply rooted chronic problems, and they will not be solved by a quick fix or a miracle solution. Each one will require the sustained attention of many people working in unison.

Divisions

The powers that be have trained us to emphasize the differences between groups rather than the aspects that we share in common. We hear all the time about the different groups of people in our world and how we have such a hard time getting along. We compare and contrast ourselves based on race, religion, nationality, gender, political ideology, social status, class and income level, to name just some of the major fault lines. We hear about the ‘clash of civilizations’ and are told to prepare for war lest we find ourselves attacked first. These divisions seem very real on the surface level (i.e. the sensory world) but are ultimately just masks for Being. They are nothing more than filters through which we see the world, historical directionalities of consciousness based on local space-time context. They make the world a colourful and interesting place but when taken to be irreconcilable boundary lines rather than other valid perspectives they become sources of tension and conflict. Looking even deeper, we are divided within our ourselves, with the body, heart and mind pursuing different and sometimes mutually incompatible goals. Ken Wilber has written about the nature of divisions and has much more to say than what is written here.

Divisions keep us from being UNITED. As a species we face many great challenges at this time in history, and we have little hope of rising to overcome these challenges unless we begin to work together in a cooperative fashion rather than tearing ourselves apart by ruthless competition. Energy spent fighting other people is energy that could be spent finding solutions to our common problems. One first step toward reclaiming our power is to stop playing the game of ‘us and them’ and hating the other. We must take the wisdom of Henry Hazlitt and look beyond the interests of one group to find what is best for all groups, and beyond the immediate concerns to the long-term interests.

Depressions

Our economic system feeds on depression. It relies on a mass of people chronically dissatisfied with their lives, who seek outside for some sort of savior, quick fix or miracle cure that will finally lift them up and give them the feelings of satisfaction and security they crave so much. People who have found true happiness and meaning have very few needs beyond the basic necessities of life, and generate not nearly enough aggregate demand to sustain the perpetual growth model of ever-rising corporate profits, stock prices and dividends. No, there must be a deep sense of depression and deficiency implanted into people in order to get them to work themselves to the bone to pay for their new cars, condos, clothes, computers, cameras, cellphones and other consumer commodities, assisted by easy access to credit of course. People are not only made to feel depressed about their personal situation but also the world situation. Manufactured wars, catastrophes, and sensational news stories brought to us by major media networks provide a never-ending parade of disasters which over time create a sense of futility and hopelessness. “It’s no use trying to change things; the world is messed up and always has been. Here, watch this sitcom and forget about it.” Ever notice that most of the stories on the evening news and in newspapers seem to be bad news stories? What a way to get people to disengage. Meanwhile we wage a war on drugs – a silly cowboy charade of good guys and bad guys – while being supplied with drugs through illicit channels (street drugs) and licit channels (prescription medications, alcohol, tobacco, coffee, fast food) which keeps us wired up and working hard and ensures a fresh supply of addicts and their inevitable counterparts, law enforcement officials and government programs.

Depressions keep us from being ENERGIZED. They lower our core vibrational frequency to a level that is associated with pain, hopelessness, stagnation, and a sense of futility. By allowing ourselves to remain depressed and dissatisfied we make it hard for anything positive and transformational to enter our awareness. The way out is to refuse to play the victim role. We cannot control everything that happens to us but we can always control our reaction to events and situations. We have the ability to pay attention, take perspectives, reframe situations and use them to become stronger, deeper, more fully developed human beings. It is up to us to make this choice, not once but over and over again until we lose all fear and see every experience as an opportunity to rise above our limitations and expand our world.

Stop being distracted and FOCUS.

Stop being divided and UNITE.

Stop being depressed and ENERGIZE.

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We need each of these qualities to be a fully realized human being. They are also essential skills to practice in everyday life.

Be fearless

Many people spend most of their days living in fear.  We fear losing our job, our health, our mate, our money, our status or reputation, our possessions, our identity, and most of all our life.  Some of these fears may be justified, but most of what people worry about never happens, or doesn’t turn out as bad as they imagine.  Fear constricts our minds, hearts and bodies and prevents us from fully experiencing each moment as it comes along.  It prevents us from welcoming experience without defence or resistence and allowing the full sensory impact to sink in.  Because of this constriction, fear closes us off from feelings that we are meant to have, and makes it difficult to learn the lessons we need to learn and grow through them into a more highly evolved being.  All fear ultimately derives from the idea that “there is something I have which I might lose”.  Realize that from the perspective of your true identity, which is infinite consciousness, there is nothing that can ever be gained or lost.  Consciousness does not keep score; it seeks only to know itself.  When you release your fears and open your heart, you create a welcoming space into which love from the universe can flow.  This then resonates on the physical and mental planes, bringing positive surprises and new developments which were previously held at bay by the constrictions of fear.  At the root, fearlessness means “Whatever is waiting for me, I can take it.  Whether it is painful or pleasurable, I will survive this experience and grow from it”.  Fearlessness is faith that the universe is looking out for you.

Love yourself

Look inside your own heart and ask: do you really love yourself?  Maybe you love certain aspects and behaviours but not others.  Loving yourself is not about picking and choosing qualities, actions and moments that you like and criticizing, complaining about or covering up the others.  The love must be unconditional and all-embracing.  When you lose your fear, you can take an honest and sober look at every angle of your life, and from a place of compassion and forgiveness, say “Yes I accept that too” to everything without restriction.  Loving yourself is a prerequisite to truly loving another person, and the relationship we have with ourselves is reflected in the kind of relationships we have with other people.  How will you be able to open up completely and allow someone else to enter your most intimate spaces if you are afraid of what they might find (or what you might find)?  There can be no secrets, nothing hidden or disowned if there is to be true deep love between two people.  You must embrace this unconditional love within yourself first if you want to feel it with another person.  This means allowing yourself to be fully yourself, which includes making mistakes, learning and growing, sometimes having anger or resistance, sometimes not behaving at your best, and sometimes needing help and support from others.  It takes strength of character to see and accept the bad or ugly parts of ourselves just as much as the good parts; a weak character only wants to hear the good news and cannot tolerate difficulty when it comes across it.  If you can see the full picture of who you are and say an unconditional “Yes” to the whole thing, then you can extend the same compassion to other people and forgive their shortcomings.  This is the path toward true love.

Be humble

Humility is about realizing that you are not the biggest or most important thing in the world.  Its opposite is narcissism, which is a false self-love to compensate for deeper feelings of fear and self-hatred.  Narcissism is like putting a ceiling on our personal development through the belief that everything and everyone around us is meant to serve our own personal needs and desires.  It seeks only constant pleasure and security, and blinds us to the subtler wisdom that sometimes we may need to experience things that can seem unsettling, painful, difficult or confusing in order to learn important lessons and reach a deeper level of development.  Being humble means recognizing that you as an individual body experiencing the world through your five-senses cannot know everything there is to know, and cannot penetrate the depths time and space to reach the places where valuable wisdom awaits you.  The narcissistic mind seeks to build a warehouse of information and knowledge about the world that it can use to manipulate reality to serve its own purposes.  Distrusting and fearful, it seeks ever more information, power and control over the forces of the universe to disarm potential threats and turn them into servants of its own agenda.  The narcissistic mind sees nothing more important that its own aggrandizement and survival, and tends to create imbalances which threaten the larger environment and ecosystem of which it is but a part.  Humility calls us to transcend our own narrow selfish needs in service of a greater wisdom and a greater good.  In order to do so, we must first see the futility of following familiar paths which we have laid out for ourselves, all of which result in dead-ends, and embark on a real journey of faith, trust, unknowing, love and acceptance in service of a higher will which we may not yet understand.  The beauty and grace of humility opens a door through which we can escape the narrow and well-worn paths of ego and enter into novel territory.  Ultimately, humility is a choice to be guided by the heart rather than the mind.

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Why are humans always seeking certainty and guarantees? Why do investors and executives seek to have guaranteed stable earnings? Why do governments want consistent spending outcomes that match their budgetary forecasts? Why do we expect our partners and politicians to always behave in a predictable manner that serves our interests? Why do we try and control the thoughts and behaviours of other people? What drives the current trend towards ‘concrete economic gains’ above all other values?

In a word: fear. Fear of the unknown, amidst a world that is perceived to be hostile and fiercely competitive, where all trust has been lost. In this world, people do not trust what they cannot see or touch. In such a world people devalue attention paid to soft, vaguely defined concepts such as love, equality, compassion, fairness, peace and balance and instead fall prey to harsher drives for material survival, turning to any source which promises to offer these concrete results. We move away from “I want what is best for everyone in the long run” to “I want what is best for me now”. This is a short-sighted and narrow-minded point of view that will ultimately erode the very social foundations and human values upon which our world is built. This mindset will pave the way toward an Orwellian police state where everybody is on 24-hour lockdown, the government monitors our every move, and people live in suspicion and spy on their neighbours.

In a world of uncertainty, distrust and fear, people narrow their interest to what they can immediately perceive, things that can be described as concrete, objective, verifiable. We owe it to ourselves to consider the fact that many of the best things in life are not ‘concrete’ or guaranteed, such as love, friendship, happiness, joy, time, quality of experience, and enjoyment. Relatedly, in the field of health there are many forms of energy which are hard to detect objectively and scientifically but nevertheless exist, such as those cultivated through meditation, reiki, acupuncture, yoga, qigong, and so on. Many of us believe: “If I can’t touch it, it doesn’t exist”, and focus on physical objects; others believe “If I can’t sense or perceive it, it doesn’t exist”, and focus on sensory objects, while others think “If I can’t imagine it, it doesn’t exist”, and focus on mental objects. All of these are self-imposed limited viewpoints.

We tend to overvalue concrete, tangible things relative to intangible things. We tend to overvalue short-term, immediate things relative to long-term things. Finally, we tend to overvalue things that benefit us personally relative to things that serve the public good. This arises from what Einstein described as an ‘optical delusion of consciousness’:

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.”

The conventional view is that we exist as a physical body, separated by time and space from other physical bodies. Hence we tend to value things that are in the sensory range of our own physical body and which contribute to the survival of that body more highly than things outside of our range of perception. This orientation of consciousness has harmful long-term social consequences since it reinforces self-serving behaviour at the expense of acts that benefit our collective growth and evolution. These beliefs can be very limiting by desensitizing the believer, making the detection of subtle energetic and spiritual realities which affect our world more difficult and less likely.

The ego mind wants to perceive and understand everything so that it can control everything. It is destabilized by things that it perceives are beyond its scope of understanding or beyond its control. Reason, while a useful tool for scientific research and inquiry, can also be a tool of the egoic, fearful mind. Reason has its limits, and the way to allow our consciousness to transcend those limits is through love, trust and faith. As Bill Hicks said: “The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one.” Fear, reason, and the desire for concrete certainty are all devices of ego. The way out is through love, faith and surrender.

So what is to be done? I’m not a big fan of most organized religion, but we must be careful when tossing it out entirely. When you give up religion and do not replace it with any kind of spiritual practice, what do you lose (besides the dogmas, guilt, feelings of sin, etc.)? You lose the sense of wonder and enchantment with the world. Places, people and objects lose their magical touch and become dead objects. Also, you lose the humility of living under a higher power, and you become prone to hubris and narcissism. You begin to think that you can control everything, that you are in control of everything and all knowledge is potentially accessible to your mind. The truth is, it’s not. The truth is we need wonder and humility to keep us sane, healthy and balanced.

One thing I notice about humans is that despite all of the lip service we pay to science and dispassionate reason, we crave surprises, mystery, wonder and excitement. We love to anticipate future possibilities. We love encountering things that are new, things that we have never known or experienced. If we didn’t, nobody would ever take risks by engaging in activities such as mountain climbing, extreme sports, amusement parks, and so on. We would also not spend very much time or money on art, music, theatre, or travelling. Proceeding to take part in an activity which we ourselves have planned, and to which we know the outcome, is very boring, yet when fear rules our mind, we do these things because they are safe and predictable. You need a certain strength of character, an unconditional confidence in your own capacity to respond to anything that comes your way, in order to invite true adventure, a true journey into the unknown.

Ours is a society that bases itself on an ever greater expansion of knowledge acquired, at least in principle, through observation, filtered by reason. How and why could there be value in “not knowing”? The universe has a grand plan, one that is wider, deeper, more subtle, intricate and complex than each of us can ever understand within our own individual context, our own vantage point in space-time. Thus there will always be some things we cannot understand, and that is ok – we need only accept them. As for events and experiences that await us in the future, we will not always be able to see, understand, or control them before they happen, and that is ok too. We each have a role to play in the unfolding of the story. It is the purpose of life to discover our role and grow into it, to play our part. We need only do the best we can in every situation that presents itself. We should look forward to the unknown twists and turns that await us, and anticipate the next chapter in the story with wonder, excitement and awe. This is what I mean by faith.

The need to always know the outcome of a situation before it happens

The need for guarantees, certainty, complete safety, full knowledge and understanding

The need to control everything, own everything, mark one’s territory and erect boundaries, borders and walls

The need to resolve all tensions, eliminate any mystery and wonder, and have everything ‘set in stone’, or ‘nailed down’

These are all products of a mind living in fear

These are symptoms of feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, weakness

These are not the actions of a courageous and strong heart

These are not the actions of someone who has an unconditional sense of his own worth and power

These are not the actions of someone who knows that he is capable of handling anything that comes along

Someone with an unconditional sense of worth and a courageous heart does not need to know everything

He does not need to control or own everything

He welcomes the unfolding reality as it comes, accepts what he sees, and acts as necessary

He cradles mystery, wonder and imagination as precious gifts, not to be resolved but only held and beheld

He is more interested in the questions than the answers

He knows he is ok, no matter what

His identity is not dependent on what happens to him

His identity is “I AM”

When all of our plans and schemes have left us wanting, when all the roads of ego have been found to be dead ends, there is no other option but to give up, to accept ego death, and surrender your will and heart to a higher power, a power which is larger than you, knows infinitely more than you, and reveals secrets and mysteries which the ego in its grasping cannot discover.

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