I Am Spiritual

And there lies the rub.

What does this statement really mean? It is a dualistic statement, a statement of separation. The spiritual is one half of the equation. The other half is matter. Another way of putting this duality is the masculine and feminine. The two belong together, the one infusing the other.

When I began my spiritual path, I focused on the spiritual. It was a looking “upwards” to higher consciousness and to the light. This was important and necessary, but then I was directed downwards, to the body, the unconscious, and the dark void or Unknown. This is where the treasure lies, the treasure of who and what we are. The ego goes along on this path. It is present with whatever we do. It wants to be free and get what there is to get for itself.

We tend to dwell a lot in the higher realms of the mind. We develop a lot of beliefs here and ideas about how things should be. But this is a virtual reality, which has nothing to do with reality. We may think we are special because of our hard work, and things are going well. We may develop beliefs that we are safe and nothing bad will happen to us because we are spiritual and we are a good person. This may be true but not necessarily. We really don’t know because we don’t know what the future holds. Or we may believe that our path, religion, or spiritual teaching is the only true one. This is a form of spiritual ego that is arrogant and entitled.

At some point on our path, the realization that there is no special treatment or safety will crash into this house of cards, and then we’re in the midst of a crisis. It’s not easy to become aware of this and realize that this ego has taken over much of our sincere intent to find freedom and the hard work in spiritual practice.

This belief or faith that we are safe and everything is going to be okay is woven in the fabric of our being. And this is good, of course. We can’t live our lives thinking or suspecting that bad things are going to happen. But if this belief or faith takes the shape that God or my spiritual path will save me and nothing bad will happen, such as illness, accidents, or difficult life circumstances, then we’re in for some potential big trouble.

This is where many people encounter a crisis in their faith in God or path when bad things do happen. This is a severe disillusionment that is like a trauma, where the steady ground that we thought we had under our feet is gone, and we are teetering on a gaping emptiness. This can be very scary and threatening.

But it is good that this happens; it must happen. It’s just one more illusion to shatter, among the many other illusions. It is a call to descend from the ivory tower of the mind and face reality.

My father was religious and I remember as a child doing a prayer at the dinner table to say thanks for our food. We didn’t go to church, other than a Christmas eve mass, so religious influence in my life was minimal. But soon the prayers stopped. My father, a Dutch man, fought in WWII against the Germans. He was an officer and was taken captive and imprisoned in a camp for a while until he escaped on a train. After this, he fought in Indonesia, where he was a special target being an officer.

Later in life when I was an adult, it was clear that my father had lost his faith. He told me he wondered how there could be a God with horrendous things happening in the world as he had seen in the wars. This question comes up for many of us, whether because of war or other difficult life experiences. This is how we may throw out the baby with the bath water. God hasn’t saved me, God allows terrible things to happen in the world, so that must mean God doesn’t exist or my spiritual path is useless.

We project ourselves onto God and create God in our image. We may see God, or awareness, as a parent or a benevolent being who looks after us and saves us (or is judgmental and punishing). This makes us into a child. And God becomes a being who has certain identities. Now we have made God into a dualistic phenomenon, a construct created by our minds, patterned after a human being.

I am struggling with this myself. My awakenings introduced me to the wonderful world of the heart and reality. But the awakenings also opened my unconscious deeper where early traumas lurked. And then I was diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening disease and got a challenging pneumonia after that. It has been a struggle to integrate these experiences.

I know that God or infinite awareness, or whatever you want to call that, is not in the business of saving me personally from challenging experiences. We evolve and learn through difficulties in our lives. But in spite of this, I have run into the entitlement of my ego consciousness. This shouldn’t be happening; I have worked so hard; I have always been healthy!

I have been angry about these experiences, but the anger has started to dissolve in the realization they have brought me. The illnesses have helped me to open up more, to surrender more to life. There is a greater acceptance of the many things that can happen to me in life. They are a call to descend deeper yet from the “spiritual high realms” to the body and the unconscious. To the void, the Unknown, where there are no constructs and the mind knows nothing.

Pockets of consciousness that were somewhat walled off from the rest of me have opened up. There is a specific consciousness, or identity, associated with being healthy. I have always been healthy and a can-do person. I am adventurous and have charged into life to do what I want. There is nothing wrong with this, but there is an identity that goes with it and this identity has now been shaken.

We have many identities. The identity of our profession, our work, hobbies, our popularity, abilities, personal characteristics, our religion or spiritual path. The identity of being a mother, partner, husband, brother, child, friend. The identity of being healthy, unhealthy, a victim, or a survivor. These identities are constructs; they have been constructed or created in the mind. They are labels and descriptors and they have beliefs associated with them. These are pockets of consciousness walled off from the vastness of our being. All identities, constructs, labels, and categories created by the mind throw up a barrier with the vast being we are, or infinite awareness. This is because the labels and descriptors involve thinking and language. Language is a system to talk about and describe the world and as such it is a separation. It is representational. It is not wat it describes. It doesn’t involve direct experience, such as walking in nature, listening to beautiful music, or being charged by a bear.

When we seek truth in life or what we are, when difficult things happen to us, these constructs begin to fall. And that includes the construct, or beliefs and ideas, we have about God or awareness and our relationship to it.

We will be introduced to a bigger and freer world, a world devoid of our thinking. We will then live more grounded in the body, in the ground of being. We will experience God more clearly, devoid of our mind creations. The statement “I am spiritual” loses meaning.

The shattering of the illusions we have about God is a very big one. It can be fatal, if we throw the baby out with the bath water. But if we can weather this storm, we will discover truth. The truth undistorted by beliefs and other mind constructs.