Modern Man Under a Spell: Spirituality in the Material Age

It began as a feeling of uneasiness that something was off. Way off.  I was 25 and beginning to feel compelled to read more and more spiritual books, turning my back on the world of fiction which I’d loved.  For the next ten years, through ups and downs and riding some bumpy terrain, it was the spiritual books (and occasional experiences) that pulled me through.  A sense that we are more than just a bunch of random atoms that have somehow cleverly learned how to work together to form a human being - that somehow we are supposed to have evolved over the years from a bloody fish.  That if there is no God, there is certainly a positive and loving force that holds us all.  That we are all connected.  A spiritual epiphany was to follow, when reading the second of Neal Donald Walsh’s trilogy ‘Conversations With God’.  I suddenly realised, with tears streaming down my face, that I’d come home.  A friend who I told about this, said he thought there was one book out there for each of us, one book alone that could speak to our souls.  (I have now added two more books to this list, however!)

All this was in the backdrop.  I thought I had to do the same as everyone else, keep the day job and then do all this searching in my spare time.  But now, as though waking from a dream, I’m realising that we don’t have to dance to another’s tune, even if that ‘other’ is a huge, slick, consumer-driven, society.  We can quietly slip off the beaten path and find our own way.

I look around me, and feel a huge sense that mankind has really lost his way.  I am confined to a house made of bricks on a street lined with lights that prevents me from marvelling at the stars at night before I go to sleep.  This house keeps me from much interaction with neighbours.  It’s a cage that has not been successful in trying to tame me.  It tries to lull me into thinking thoughts concerning stability, permanence, to lull me away from the true nature of existence.

Inside this house there lies a thing called a television, a big, black, commanding, monolith standing in the corner of the living room.  We switch it on to amuse ourselves, watching fictionalised accounts of how we should live, or the ‘news’ whereby we are told what to think.  Television tells us in no uncertain terms “life outside, BAD!  Scary!  Stay indoors.  (As I write this, because of the Boston bombings in the US, people of Boston are currently being advised to do just that.) Bill Hicks, that brilliant comedian who is now sadly no longer with us, had a cool take on this.  What if we had a positive news story for a change?  Wouldn’t it be great if you turned on your TV and saw a newscaster say this: 

"Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration – that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There's no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves.

Here's Tom with the weather!"

Because what Bill knew, is what Buddha knew on an experiential level (heck Bill might have known it on an experiential level too, he took enough mushrooms, apparently!) and what all the great gurus have been trying to tell us for years.  “We are all one”.  Simple.  We all think we are individual because our consciousness has been funneled into our bodies, thus giving us the illusion of separation – but it is just that, an illusion.  The vast sea of consciousness is collective.  Allegedly.  (Incidentally it makes for interesting reading, checking out the etymology of the word guru on wikipedia, if you feel so inclined:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru)

But we get it drilled into us from a young age that safety, permanence, mortgages, job security, all these things are important.  So we swap actually living our lives for this illusion of safety.  What is a life well lived?  It is YOUR life so only you can know.  As Jeff Brown (author of Ascending with Both Feet on the Ground among other books) would say, ‘don’t hand your tools to anyone else’.  So many people are just surviving – many have little choice.  You may have had to listen to well-meaning parents or guardians when growing up, but they probably simply tried to hammer into you the story they were told by their parents, or what they have learned through fear of life. 

“Take the safe job.” 

“Life is hard.” 

“Don’t take a risk.”

“What’s that you say?  You hate your job? EVERYONE but for the very lucky, hate their jobs!  That’s just the way life is!” 

Every time you hear that barrel load of crap, you just run for the hills, OK?  It’s all rubbish.  It is based on a fear-based system, in which we are taught to believe it’s a dog-eat-dog world and everything you do had better be self-serving coz their ain’t no-one else going to help you. 

“Toughen up!  Only the strong survive!”

Bullshit.

All of this is simply what they were told, and they are unthinkingly passing this on, believing it to be true.  The weak are often the most difficult to be around, or the most cruel, because it is harder sometimes to be openhearted that it is to close your heart.  We think closing our hearts makes us strong.  It doesn’t.  It just makes our world more lonely.  Expansion is key.  Opening up, taking risks.  Allowing your heart to embrace compassion.  Yes, it is painful, but not so bad when you know this world is but one aspect of existence.  Life can be hard, yes. But we can find ourselves in much greater emotional pain if we don’t try to follow what our hearts and souls are trying to communicate to us.

And here’s another gem:  Did you ever hear how what we all need is a “good war, so that young men will be able to get out all their anger in a ‘healthy’ way and it will pull us together as a country?!”  I grew up with batshit logic like that!  If you too grew up with similar and felt it was crazy, then at least you’re not alone.  As the Indian spiritual philosopher, Jiddu Krishnamurti said: 

“It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

And is our society sick?  As I write this, we are bulldozing  vast swathes of rainforest to make dams to create electricity – literally killing the lungs of our planet.  We have crimes of hatred for different skin colour, or simply for supporting a different football team.  We cram our children’s brains with facts, but do nothing to prepare them fully for developing their own psyches in an increasingly fractured world.   

Many of us go out to work in a firm we couldn’t care less about.  We knee-jerk react en masse to news stories, stories which allow us to feel a sense of justification to be angry at others instead of taking a look at our own ego-based issues and problems.  We never go within to find any answers, even though that is the first place we all should go.  We create genetically modified food - why, when nature is so abundant? (1) 

We spray our crops with poison and wonder why we all get sick – we even put some industrial ingredients in our food (2)

We spend weekends listlessly milling about in vast shopping malls, great big churches dedicated to the empty pleasures of consumerism, buying stuff which in a couple of weeks will have been forgotten about.  We kill animals – huge amounts of them (according to Viva.org.uk in 2011 we slaughtered over 958 million in the UK alone), for food when the vast majority of us could very well easily eat only a vegetarian diet.  And we don’t kill them without often inflicting great suffering.

And, as I write this, our country is a bit strapped for cash, and so it is trying to claw it back -- not from the rich (which would be more humane and logical) but from the disabled (or so it seems). (3)

We try to anaesthetize ourselves from an internal pain we can’t quite find the reason for, and huge amounts of us take antidepressants because Western medicine doesn’t have a clue about what to do when your head feels a bit broken inside apart from ticking boxes and putting you into a category.  And we drink.  Oh how we can drink here in England!  As a nation of barely functioning alcoholics, we're doing really well.  What is it we're doing?  Sleepwalking our way through the part of existence we should be enjoying, the bit when we're not working.  Why?

What then, is missing?  So many don’t know.  They don’t know that’s what they’re missing is our birthright, a divine connection with God, with Mother Earth, with Nature (because yes, we really can communicate with Nature herself, with animals and other creatures, too).  And often we are overlooking our own souls, smothering their voices, believing we have to conform to rules which stifle our hearts.

Many turn to God out of desperation.  Life has kicked the hell out of them and they are willing to surrender to anything at that point.  Don’t be those people.  Surrender only to a path to God that resonates with your heart.  That cool guru, Osho had this to say:

“My work is hard because the first thing is that I would like you to be uprooted from your misery, then only can my work start. This is a prerequisite, an absolutely necessary requisite. It cannot be avoided. It cannot be put aside, it has to be fulfilled. First you have to become a little happier, you have to learn to be a little more love-full, joyful; your life has to have the color of a little happiness.

Then go into the search for truth and you will be moving in the right direction, because then no lie can ever deceive you. You are no more interested in lies, because you are no more interested in consolation and comfort. Now you are ready to know the naked truth as it is. And to be a seeker of truth is the greatest thing in life. Okay!”

The sheer magic of things like the fact we are alive, of the fact that scientists still can’t tell us how consciousness works, of marvelling at the sights of nature, all of these are often forgotten as we trudge along in a collective fog, often pharmaceutically induced.  Just trying to get through another day.  Just... trying.

And so, perhaps after many years of feeling comfortable yet dull, of not taking risks, of perhaps feeling like we have lost a bit of our own souls somewhere down the line because our joy is missing -- of not attempting to develop our own characters or simply even just becoming aware of our full potential, we go and cark it. :)

Does this sound like a life worth living to you?

This passes for normality on a planet teeming with mystery, spinning around a sun in a galaxy with 200 to 400 billion stars, a galaxy that is one of perhaps 100 or 200 billion (maybe more).  To me what passes for society is a real waste of a huge exploration into human consciousness. 

I want to go within and I want to find my tribe of other people doing the same. I want to take risks, to allow my own intuition to be my guide.     And I want the freedom to be able to travel where I please, to dwell under the stars if I so wish, but definitely not to stay put in one house until the day I die.  I want people to be able to live a nomadic existence without stigma. 

To me, so many of life’s problems would melt away if we all turned, en masse, to a more spiritual way of life.  Sitting together of an evening and really talking.  Allowing someone you love to reveal their pain, and you, in turn, revealing yours.  To gently hold a sacred space for that pain to be let out.  And to allow both men and women to cry, because crying is such a beautiful release and we shouldn’t deny anyone that.  To sit together and sing songs or share poems that speak to the soul. To give thanks towards something greater than ourselves and feel a sense of awe of the sheer magic of existence.

We can start by simply paying attention to our souls.  Carl Jung, that ‘modern day shaman’ and behemoth of a psychoanalyst, spent years in search of his which culminated in his astonishing work, The Red Book.  If he spent years in search of his, that alone should be good reason to keep hold of yours and pay attention to it if it’s not happy – and, if it isn’t, be prepared to have to do whatever needs doing to go in search of it, even at the risk of total ridicule.  The payoff for that is much greater than we can ever know, it’s a real step towards healing.  This is YOUR life you are weaving – your song to contribute to this strange, collective and beautiful madness.  So sing it.  And switch the TV off!  

 Sources:

(1)   http://todayyesterdayandtomorrow.wordpress.com/genetically-modified-food/heres-names/monsanto/

(2)  http://www.collective-evolution.com/2011/12/04/did-you-know-many-mystery-ingredients-in-fast-foods-are-often-industrial-chemicals/

(3)  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/braindamaged-amputee-fit-for-work-says-atos-8547539.html?origin=internalSearch

The New-Age Movement & 'the Secret': transforming the darkness within

I am friends with many New-Age people on one particular social networking site (as I adopt many 'New-Age' beliefs myself).  One woman in particular adopted a bit of a schizophrenic approach to her accounts.  Every day she updated her status with positive soundbites.  Then one day she erupted, spattering her facebook page with something altogether darker, and finishing her vitriolic outpourings with ‘if you all don’t like it you can ‘f*ck off, this is me!’  It transpired she had held two separate accounts, one to encompass the light side of her personality and one to encompass the 'normal' side, which she had long been using to contact her real-life friends.  The people she’d befriended on either side had no idea about this until the day she decided to merge both accounts under her New-Age persona.  What she’d done was really to repress her natural human responses and try to airbrush them from her life.  By allowing only one side of herself to be present to various different people at any given time, she wasn’t being honest about who she was, and finally, she exploded.

This is something I’ve noticed some New-Agers want to do, try to airbrush out the darker side of their humanity -- otherwise known as the shadow in Jungian psychoanalysis which is the denied aspect of the self.  But why?  These people often have the best intentions and want to write about positive human emotion.  They believe thoughts to be powerful entities in their own right, therefore allowing in chinks of darkness makes them wary. In addition, they may have had awakening experiences in which they felt overwhelming joy, love and interconnectedness. 

But chances are, they’re still human beings who occasionally want to tell the world to ‘f*ck off’. You can have a flash of brilliant insight about humanity and being positive, but there will still involve some level of effort to see through on a daily basis; if you've not got to grips with your own demons there is work to be done!   And we certainly can’t do that vicariously, from simply reading about someone else who is transformed.  Both Byron Katie and Neale Donald Walsch underwent incredibly challenging times before they were able to experience a sense spiritual epiphany that allowed them to transform their negativity.  Their difficult years were the beginnings of the work they needed to do in their psyches in order to allow the transformation to take place.  Peace Pilgrim was able to turn pretty much most of her waking life into constant prayer, but it took her 12 years of discipline before this practise came easily to her.  


We can’t proclaim ourselves transformed until we fully know what our weak spots are.  Darkness is as integral to the human experience as light in this context. I believe that it's the attitude towards whatever lands in our paths that is important. When we first step on the spiritual path, it's only natural and arguably, necessary, to feel doubt. In this way, our path can often oscillate between becoming more awakened and then scurrying back towards the darkness for a bit while we try and figure it all out. Sometimes this process is necessary; far better for us to be able to finally embrace our path having worked through our doubts and our shadow-side.  


The Secret
‘ The Secret’, by Rhonda Byrne is the first New-Age book I've come across so far that I felt didn't quite get the emphasis right.  The key of the Secret is, apparently, to believing you already have what you want so the law of attraction will ensure the universe will serve it up.  If we desperately long for something,  the universe will oblige by bringing us the experience of desperate longing.  Whilst on some level it may be true that our thoughts might bring about *some* of our experiences, we can’t say for certain that they are responsible for everything that happens to us.  Athletes will attest to the power of positive thinking and creative visualisation.   Sometimes we might find we’re entrenched in old, habitual ways of thinking which aren’t accurate or serving us in a useful way.  But it’s knowing how to utilise our minds in a more healthy way while not allowing ourselves to get carried away in fantasy.

This book appears to say that, by following our goals, regardless of what they are, the universe will spring into action to assist us. I have ethical issues with this.  I think synchronicities do play a part in life when we're on the right path that is individual to all of us, not just when something shiny takes our fancy.  The focus in this book has done away with spiritual focus and cut to the shiny results, feeding into a materialistic culture.  


The Power of Positive Thinking
I do understand that a lot of people believe that 'thoughts are powerful entities in their own right (and I tend to believe this too).  So then it might become tempting to think if we just focus on what we want, or happy thoughts that will suffice in terms of spiritual development. The New-Age movement is still in its infancy, and so I guess there are going to be areas ripe for misunderstanding or misreading.  There is a book I’ve been meaning to read by David Tacey, called Jung and the New Age which sounds like a hugely interesting critique of the New Age phenomenon, and looks at the reasons the psychoanalyst, Carl Jung has been (apparently) so widely misappropriated by the movement, looking at innacuracies in the reading of his work. 


What I can say from my observations so far, is that people involved in the New Age movement have to be careful when choosing what to believe, and how they read certain texts (like everyone really!).  It's all-too easy to get swept up in a tide of well-meaning positivity, but it can lead to an almost fanatical belief based on very little of substance.  It just means when stepping a foot onto the path of deepening your spirituality, you should be as aware of your own failings as possible, and be willing to be honest about them.  I'm sure my New-Age friend has since found a middle path between her outburst and her 'whiter-than-white' persona, and probably learned something about her own nature along the way.


There is a wealth of beautiful information out there amongst New-Age reading (including Byron Katie, and Neale Donald Walsch, as well as the ACIM books).  I personally believe that we are all one, and that there is a very beautiful presence, or force, or God, that is able to guide us if we let it.  For most of us, there is work to be done.  Work to find out who we are and then live out our lives at the highest level of our potential. We all have unique gifts which we can bring to each other and to the world. The work involves staying very much heart-centred, making decisions from a place of love, kindness, gratitude.  Then our non-attachment will perhaps attract the right things into our lives!  (These might not be a huge paycheck or a shiny new car though, but they will be whatever it is our soul needs on its path at that moment.)  


Plenty of books out there will help you on your spiritual path, but it's vital that you find ways to stay true to yourself as much as possible; if you feel you've become lost you may need to disconnect from the world around for a time.  The answers will come.