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

Vipassana Retreat: A Journey into Silence

I went on a ten day Vipassana, or Insight Meditation, retreat over Christmas, at the International Meditation Centre near Chippenham, in Wiltshire. I had some trepidation about going, not least because it was a silent retreat; aside from speaking to the course leaders, we were supposed to not speak for the entire duration. I wondered how I was going to cope, and with a schedule of 6 hours meditation a day, in addition to the Buddhist discourses and tuition time.

But any trepidation I felt was put at ease immediately I arrived and spotted the enchanting pagoda, all lit up like a giant Christmas tree, and I was greeted warmly by a lovely person who showed me around. I was given a quick lesson in the first meditation we would be doing by Roger, the course leader who would be instructing us over the next ten days, and handed over my mobile phone (this wasn't mandatory, but I felt in order to properly immerse myself in the retreat this was a vital step. And so it proved).

It was lonely at times, and it was interesting to see how the mind writhed and wriggled, looking for an external distraction from any kind of pain. I missed people. The combination of a difficult meditation and the adjustment to a heavy meditation schedule meant that my mind thrashed about like a really annoyed mongoose at a heavy metal gig. I got bored and dispirited. It was interesting (and also painful) to see what the mind brought up, both in dreams and also during the day.

And yet. I experienced great feelings of happiness too, along with a sense of profound sacredness; especially in the walk to the meditation hall at 4am in the darkness; in silence, apart from birdsong or the bells on the top of the pagoda tinkling softly. Sitting in silence in the meditation hall felt very special. I cried tears of sorrow and also tears of laughter. Our course leader, Roger, was a very open and gentle person and it felt humbling to be around him. I loved being woken by a gong in the morning, I loved the pagoda with its pretty lights and golden turrets (which looked a bit surreal in the English countryside). And I really enjoyed some of the discourses on Buddhism.

We learned two different types of meditation while we were there, the mindfulness of breathing (anapana) and insight meditation (vipassana, which means 'to see things as they really are'). The anapana really shows how difficult it is initially to calm the mind down. (It was far more difficult than the technique I had learned at the Triratna Buddhist Centre, but because it has given me a greater appreciation of the mind I have far more respect for it.)

The day before we left was talking day, and it felt as though I already knew a couple of people I had been smiling at across the canteen or meditation hall, and I realised just how much we can gauge from body language alone. My joints ached from spending around 5 hours a day sitting on the floor in meditation and listening to discourses, I felt like fleeing for the hills on a couple of occasions and I had an epic battle with myself to not take my phone back from the secure lock-up. And the last couple of days it was a huge battle to do any meditation at all, at times. But, here's the thing. Despite the difficulties, it was still a deeply enriching gift to myself that will stay with me for some time, an inner journey that gave me a sense of achievement and a feeling that the anapana meditation is going to be a great new friend. I would recommend a retreat like this to almost anyone as a way to go into yourself a little deeper. And who knows? Maybe if you have accrued enough good karma you may even become Enlightened.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sitting in silence, nestled in the embrace of the night sky I hear a blackbird sing- singing for the joy of it all. Singing for love. And it is as though I am hearing for the first time and tears fall, but they are no longer mine alone.

awesome hang drum performance in Goa

~ Hangdrum Performance By James Winstanley &Daniel James Waples,shot in Arambol, Goa, India by Suzi & Rakesh Kashyap, Shimla ~ The Hang Drum Project

Religious evolution: a short manifesto

Christianity:  “The kingdom of heaven is within you” (from the words of Jesus)

Islam:  “Those who know themselves know their Lord”

Judaism:  “He is in all, and all is in Him”

Confucianism: “Those who know their own nature, know heaven.

 ”Taoism:  “In the depths of the soul, one sees the Divine, the One

”Buddhism:  “Look within, you are the Buddha”

Hinduism:  “Atman [individual consciousness] and Brahman [universal consciousness] are one”

from the Shaman’s Journey:  Supernatural or Natural by Ede Frecska M.D. (printed in Inner Paths to Outer Space)

So many people can become fixated on the differences within religions, and I can understand why. Some of the main religions teach there can be only one path, and only one God, and that anyone worshipping a different path is ultimately misguided.  Oh, and that might mean that they up off to a rather hot destination when their end is nigh.  People are judged not for their good deeds, but rather, which religious box they have happened to tick.  And religious people are arguing for their very sense of purpose, for the ultimate truth, the heart of all existence everywhere.  If you have been brought up your entire life to believe only one truth, it becomes very hard to accept anything else.

The tragedy is perhaps that while people are busy arguing over who is right, and incorporating their arguments into their egos, they can forget the essence of the spiritual messages that cross all religions.  The messages are simplicity itself, with love at the heart of them all. Love, unity, laughter, compassion, gratitude, humbleness are words that immediately spring to mind. And a deeper connection can be found only by going within, by deepening our spiritual journey. The spiritual path can sometimes seem a lonely one.  Going within is a job that requires nothing outside of yourself and only you can get you there.  Yet anyone who has been on a spiritual path for a time will tell you the rewards far outweigh anything previously encountered.

Religion can be incorporated into peoples' lives for many different reasons and we are very much fallible creatures.  To believe in a God, or an afterlife, these are huge concepts.  We're going to want to protect deep beliefs such as these as much as possible, and if our beliefs are very narrow, fear-based, or very deeply ingrained, the idea of allowing a little flexibility into the equation can be damn near impossible.  And that is perhaps a real tragedy if people are unable to see anything beyond the confines of their beliefs.  Their restrictions can lead to a life perhaps lived akin to the people in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, seeing the shadows of people cast against the wall of the cave and believing that world to be the ultimate reality.

Some people want to wear their religions like a badge, quote a little from the Bible, attend Church and yet, even whilst acknowledging the beauty of their belief system, they may be unable to allow that beauty to do its transformational work on them.  In this way, they are perhaps still more concerned with status.  They are less self-aware than they need to be in order to develop.  But haven't we all been a little guilty of this?  I remember when I used to go to Buddhist meditation while simultaneously thinking myself just a little 'cool' for being there.  The ego can be slippery and elusive!  We can't eradicate it but we do need to be aware of it.  Because religious beliefs can be so powerful, it is often hard for people to disentangle their beliefs from their true identity.  We all want to be right.  And if we believe there can ultimately be only one path, everyone else potentially threatens our position.  And some religious teaching can be a little like brainwashing.  There is simply very little room for ambiguity, for allowing other religious to co-exist, peacefully, alongside. 

This all might be OK, if say, there were only several thousand people on this planet.  But we currently stand at just over 7 billion people.  And there are some pretty urgent issues that need our full attention.

So how to go forward?  We need to pare things down to basics.  To being Humanists first and foremost, being kind to fellow humans and animals and our planet which lovingly sustains us.  And being kind for its own sake, not for an imagined reward in a life hereafter, not for fear that a God might strike us down.  We need to develop an attitude of compassion and kindness.  Blind faith needs striking off the list.   We should be able to test our faith by allowing ourselves to have our own religious experiences, whether through meditation, prayer, fasting, walking in nature or just being kind to someone.  We need to allow everyone else their own beliefs, providing those beliefs do not harm any other lifeforms.  Co-existence simply has to be the way forward.  Life on this planet is starting to feel a bit crowded, and we need to collectively turn our attention towards more urgent questions, such as the problem of mankind's impact on this world.  We can't do that so effectively if we are too busy fighting to protect our beliefs.  We are currently having a pretty devastating impact on this planet -- it's huge.  From the threats to coral reefs, the amount of rubbish we produce, to GM crops or the amount of trees we needlessly chop down.  We often don't want to acknowledge the mess we're creating, and we can find all sorts of ways to distract ourselves, from fighting about pointless things, to going on a consumerist binge through vast, soulless, shopping malls.  Our ability to walk through life, blinkered to all the terrible things that are currently going on, shouldn't be underestimated.  But we all need to participate more in the care of this world.  Turning a blind eye simply isn't going to work as a long-term strategy.  We're threatening our own survival as a species through our current actions.

Initially, for all those who are spiritual or religious, we need to allow ourselves space to worship, to feel reverence, but to back off and allow others to feel perfectly entitled to the same whether for 'our' religion, or a differing one without feeling the need to become self-righteous (or to relegate their belief system as being 'less').  Respect for other religions is key.

We need to be able to let go and allow gentle scrutiny to replace blind faith; and allow ourselves to be able to laugh at our indignant and childlike, egos.  The more self-awareness we bring into the whole affair, the more we develop understanding and compassion for ourselves and others.  I imagine the most judgemental people are the ones who practise the least self-awareness and humility. 

Ultimately, perhaps, we also need to lighten up.  We can take ourselves so very seriously. How would we act if we truly knew the heart of all life was love and joy, that we are truly all One consciousness experiencing itself subjectively (as Bill Hicks used to say!), and that God is perhaps being revealed at all times through endless acts of creation.  And,that at any minute if we stop and listen for just a second, we might hear the song of God, softly woven into the fabric of the universe -- just waiting for us to notice.   

Spiritual Hunger -- healing the psyche in the modern world

How do we make meaning in modern life, and what happens to us when we don't?

There’s a book called ‘On the Nature of Spiritual Hunger’ that might be worth a look for anyone who has suffered from depression, or from finding a lack of meaning in their lives. This book it seems, determines that much of the cause for depression is linked with our lack of rituals, and our lack of connection with the Source, or with God. For me, I deeply believe this to be true.  I think we tend to fight problems mainly by treating the symptoms and not the cause, and this is certainly true of depression.  We are given pills, signed off work for a week or two, and then forgotten about.  We tend to bury our sadness’s deep within, and then continue our shallow rituals of work or drowning our sorrows until we become relatively ‘normal’ again.  But how much grief has been simply pushed under a layer or two of consciousness?  So many people are only aware of the material world around them, and as they see people they care about become ill or die, or they have problems themselves, it is all too-easy to become enveloped in deep suffering of the self, believing life to be a 'dog-eat-dog' existence and that in order to survive you need to develop a hard and impenetrable, shell.  Existence can become a well of sorrows which eventually might entomb the heart.  

Some people never seem to become fully healed after suffering a deep psychic wound.  A death of a parent is a good example.  How often do you see people deeply rocked by grief but then unable to move on?  It can take years sometimes before people can begin to patch up the deep and shattering wounds to their psyche.  And others never do.  We tend to consider this normal behaviour, but I think it is anything but.  I believe we have just become split from old ways of deep healing and spiritual nourishment, which may include rituals in which we can honour the dead, mourn, and then release our feelings, rather than holding onto them.  I believe if we are prepared to do the healing work properly that it needn't take us that long at all.  (A healer whose book I came across recently, Brandon Bays, is someone who holds this view and illustrates why in 'The Journey'. This is a practical guide to some powerful healing work.  Brandon believes that all grief can be healed in a very short amount of time, if the healing work is carried out correctly.  She also believes that grief can stay in the cells of the body if it isn't properly dealt with, where it can cause disease.)

This quote I came across illustrates this constant struggle of how to live a life well, from Paolo Coelho's summary of Carlos Castaneda's work:  "The world is unfathomable and mysterious, just as we all are. The art of the warrior consists of reconciling the terror of being a man with the wonder of being a man."  Modern life still contains much to be in awe of.  But the age we live in is rife with disconnection from ourselves, from each other and also the natural world.  Just taking some time to allow wonder back into our lives would in itself, be quite a powerful healing tool.  

The important thing is that we do need to quest for our own spiritual experiences ourselves.  It isn't enough to simply read about others' experiences.  We need to go within and listen to what the soul is trying to tell us -- the magic and mystery of life cannot be sated purely by reading books when often the beauty is beyond words.  We may find the soul often doesn't care a damn for our ego-led ambitions and perhaps a compromise may have to be reached.  But to ignore the signs of a restless soul I believe, is to fall into a pit of feelings of emptiness, or despair and sometimes, mental illness. The difficulty is often in allowing ourselves to shed years of conditioning in order that we take a risk.   

Letting go of old beliefs can't happen on blind faith and nor should it, and beginning to believe in something greater and a magic or mystery to life often won't happen without opening up a little to life first.  Breaking down the armour and learning to trust a little.  Allowing your soul full expression, rather than trying to neutralise pain through Prozac.  In order to touch the depths of who we really are, we have to allow the fullest expression of our experiences to inform and enrich us where possible.  This is not always easy work, but it is necessary for healing to begin.

If you find the world you live in has started to to cause you dissatisfaction, then perhaps it's time to take a bit of a leap of faith.  And if you could use a little encouragement and inspiration, perhaps this book might help.  It's called 'Tales of a Nomad' and (from Amazon): "is the story of Rita Golden Gelman, an ordinary woman who is living an extraordinary existence. At the age of forty-eight, on the verge of a divorce, Rita left an elegant life in L.A. to follow her dream of connecting with people in cultures all over the world. In 1986 she sold her possessions and became a nomad, living in a Zapotec village in Mexico, sleeping with sea lions on the Galapagos Islands, and residing everywhere from thatched huts to regal palaces. She has observed orangutans in the rain forest of Borneo, visited trance healers and dens of black magic, and cooked with women on fires all over the world. Rita’s example encourages us all to dust off our dreams and rediscover the joy, the exuberance, and the hidden spirit that so many of us bury when we become adults."  


She says:  “I move throughout the world without a plan, guided by instinct, connecting through trust, and constantly watching for serendipitous opportunities.” 


In other words, her whole life has become a leap of faith.  Perhaps if more of us were willing to dance with uncertainty, we might have a better relationship with life and death and everything in-between.

Yeasayer: Sunrise

Beautiful.  So much more energy than the album version.

Wisdom of the Elders, The Time is Now

from youtube