What a question. What turns me on? Well, being on a spiritual path is about the process of trying to turn on our humanity, isn’t it - trying to ignite the spiritual light or the divine spark inside us so we can become more fully human.
But I think what especially touches me at this moment – probably because I have just taught a retreat on this topic – is the idea of engaging with life as a mystery, that is, trying to be open to the core ‘is-ness’ lying at the heart of all things or coming to sense the many deeper meanings that lie hidden inside what is simple and ordinary. If we can reach into the heart of life or be a space to enable life’s heart to reach deeply into us, there is so much richness to be gleaned from every moment. And if we allow this richness to enter us, we will feel fulfilled and it may be that we will feel less motivated to engage in many of the activities that we used to do in the past to try and fill us. From this place, it becomes easier to live in a simpler and less complicated way.
For life is a huge mystery. We must accept that we know very little about it, and perhaps we need to think what it might also mean to live more out of a space of asking deeper questions, such as: who are we really, and what is our purpose for being here? Have we had other lives? How are we to best live this life? Who or what is God and what is our relationship to God? What happens before we are born and after we die?
If we can engage with these mysteries, not so much with our intellects (as the great questions of life can never be understood rationally), but more with our hearts and souls, this will gradually allow little intimations of the truth to trickle through to us.
I recognise, however, that doing this can be difficult. Many of us are scared of what we don’t know. We want certainty and don’t like to be in the dark about things. So instead of engaging with the depths of life, we can tend to turn away from it by trying to reduce it to superficialities, endeavouring to fit our experiences into neat little boxes and compartments in the illusion that it will make us feel safe. Actually, it doesn’t. It just reduces us as well!
This inclination can also prevail in our spiritual lives. Some of us don’t want to inquire. We want to have it all set in stone; we want to have man and God all tied up in a neat, safe package. And so we become a Fundamentalist where we are not required to use our imagination or question anything - only obey. If Jesus or Mohammed or any other ‘great Master’ was supposed (we can never prove it, of course) to have made certain pronouncements as to how we should live and be, then that must be it! No questions asked. Anyone who disagrees with us must be wrong!
This for me is also a limited way to live, for it means we are closed off to anything and everything that doesn’t concur with ‘ the truth as we believe it to be.’ I think once we stop asking questions, and succumb to the illusion that ‘we know’, that we stop evolving. We become the proverbial ‘grown-up’: the person who has stopped growing!
In actuality, we are rather like icebergs. Tiny little pieces of us bob visibly on the surface – this being the part of ourselves we are conscious of - while the vaster part of us, the part we don’t know or the mystery part – lies hidden and submerged. And for me the fun is getting to know more of this submerged us, discovering how to bring more of what is unconscious in us up into the light of day. For Joseph Campbell, the great Mythologist, this constituted the core of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. And what is hidden, we remind ourselves, is not only what I’ll call our ‘dark shadow’ – comprising the parts of ourselves we don’t want to know that we possess, that is, the unacceptable parts (which we often like to project onto others and scapegoat them for possessing), but also our ‘light shadow’, our wonderful, loving, fantastic spiritual sides that have also not yet emerged into consciousness.
One of the reasons, then, why life may not have enough meaning for some of us, is because we turn away from the mystery of our dark side. Like Nazruddin, the Sufi trickster, searching on his hands and knees for his lost front-door key under the street-lamp just because there happened to be light there (although it was a mile away from his home that had no lamp outside it), we omit to look in the place where the real keys to the mystery of our lives are to be found, namely, in the parts of our psyche that are, as yet, unlit! Put another way, we only deem it necessary to earn our outer living and so we neglect our inner life and close off to it, preferring to identify with certain external, visible images of who we believe we are: husband, wife, mother, brother, computer programmer, member of a particular race or class, right or left wing, supporter of Manchester United, etc. We live through concepts, not symbolically. We are under the illusion that our ideas about who we are are who we really are. In actuality, they are what cover over the real mystery of who we are.
If, however, we choose to live out of a space of greater awareness, we become much more open to life as it essentially is. In becoming more conscious of its deeper meaning, we are given new insights as to our true nature. Indeed, the more we give ourselves space to explore our inner worlds, the less we may need to travel the whole world in order to know life, for we are becoming more able to recognise the oneness of all things mirrored in every particular.
This expanded space, however, can only open up in us if we desire it, if we work at it, if we meditate regularly and commit to developing a quiet mind and an open and loving heart. It is these factors that allow us to reach more deeply into life and to begin unlocking its secrets.
I stress again: the inquiry is never an intellectual process. It is always an issue of allowing our own essence to communicate with life’s essence and thus be receptive to the clues that life is always giving us. When I did my Shamanic training, for example, I was taught to be silent and to allow the cloud formations to speak to me and tell me about myself. In my analytic training, I learned to listen with the intelligence in my heart to the symbols in my dreams. Because over the years I have tried to be open to the magic and mystery of life, I no longer believe that things just happen randomly and without meaning. So if something painful takes place – say we have some kind of crisis - a serious illness, a financial loss, the death of someone dear to us – it is important that we be receptive to what life may be trying to say to us.
I try to bring this approach into my private practice. Clients sometimes come to me asking me to fix their marriage or fix their depression. I reply that I am not in the fixing business. Instead of trying to get rid of their unpleasant symptoms, I suggest that they try to engage with them and find out what they may be trying to communicate. I remember a very sensitive man once came to see me who had had continual back pain for six years and very little energy. Nothing he did helped. He was desperate. ’I used to be such an alive person’, he told me. I asked him what his profession was. He said he was a stockbroker and hated it. He had been an artist but then had met his wife to be. ’She wanted me to earn more money’, he told me:
‘So I gave up that side of my life’.
‘Perhaps deep down, your soul is very unhappy about that decision,’ I said, ‘and may be trying to tell you something. Perhaps, it is very natural that you are experiencing those symptoms because you are not listening to the wisdom of your body!’ His eyes filled with tears.
‘Yes. Yes. I hate my life in the city. It’s not me’.
I didn’t see him any more. A year later, he rang me and said ‘I’ve done it. I am back to being an artist again. My wife is understanding and the moment I made the decision, my back pain left me and I have all my old energy back.’
Another client came to see me who had recently become impotent. He was an intelligent and not unspiritual man. I asked him to listen to what his ‘softness’ was trying to tell him and not to pathologise it. In desperation he did what I asked and at our next session, he came up with this interesting explanation. ‘I see my life is totally out of balance. Everything I do is hard. I am a hard-nosed business man. I play tennis hard. I am hard on my family. Perhaps my impotence is the voice of my repressed feminine side or of my soft side trying to get through to me, in the only place that I will sit up and listen, to tell me how much I am repressing it.’
‘Perhaps you are right’ I said, ‘So what about if you gave more space for softness in your life. Say, learn Tai Chi. Meditate. Be gentler with those you love. Give yourself space to dream. Read poetry!’ He began to do this and gradually his so-called affliction (which was really the voice of his soul) left him.
If we make the choice to live life more symbolically and less literally, it becomes more possible to move beyond such concepts as success/failure or right/wrong, that often lead to what is now termed ‘Status Anxiety’ and can be such a source of unhappiness. Let me give an example from my own life. Some years ago, I went through a period when everything began to go wrong for me at every level. My good luck deserted me. Girl-friends left. My work shrank. Publishers declined me. No one seemed to want me. Even more painful, I experienced a loss of connection with my spirituality. (And this happened after many years of being pretty successful.)
A lot of friends said: ‘Serge. You must work on your prosperity again. This is bad what is happening for you!’
I didn’t actually think so. If we engage with life as a mystery, all these categories become irrelevant. I realised something deeper must be going on and I tried to engage in recognising what this might be. And what I saw to my horror was that I had been riding high for a long time and that my success had gone to my head and actually I was not progressing internally. Not only was I not walking my talk but in no way was I actually being that loving person I was suggesting other people be! My ego inflation was very subtly taking me over. And my life was simply reflecting this, the whole withdrawal of support allowing me to see that this stage needed to come to an end and that a radical shift was required on my part. I saw I needed to ‘die’ much more to my egoic nature. So from a deeper perspective, it was ‘good’ – although of course, painful - that all this was happening for me, for it allowed me to go that much deeper and thus be able to make the required shift.
More recently, I became engaged in the mystery of Betrayal. A very dear friend did something to me which I felt was unforgivable and I felt huge resentment towards him, until I realised that the gift he was offering me was the possibility of again stretching myself into whole new realms so that I might ‘get off’ my attachment to my self-righteousness and learn what it really meant to forgive! Again, it was difficult but eventually I managed it. Just! After that experience, I came a little closer to understanding what Mephistopheles meant when he told Dr Faustus that ‘I am for ever evil who does forever good!’
As all these stories show, the soul part of us or our deeper spirituality wants to shake up our ego and play games with the ways they like to ‘plot’ our lives for us. Our souls could not really care one iota for our comfort.
Embracing the mystery of life also involves us opening to the mystery of beauty and love and joy and exploring how we can be a space for all the many wonderful, sacred qualities inside our hearts to germinate. Again, if we can discover how to participate in this process more consciously, we can live with much more love and joy and with far less rigidity. For example, in the arena of intimate relationships, if we can be more compassionately aware of the mystery of our partner (as opposed to holding them in a fixed sense of who we conceive them to be) we give them much more space to be who they really are and thus gradually to unfurl their truth for us. This in turn allows more fresh air to enter the relationship and hence it is far less likely to go stale. (Many relationships fail precisely because this does not happen!)
The more we choose to live with loving awareness, the easier it becomes to embrace life’s mystery and to realise that we are not mere skin-bound ego entities, but beautiful and wise, multi-dimensional beings. As the psychologist Jean Huston once said. ‘We are all Stradivariuses raised to believe we are plastic fiddles’. One of our great challenges is to allow ourselves to experience the truth of her words.
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