Exploring eighteen fundamental principles to living the Spiritual Life

Dear Serge. I am starting out on my spiritual path. But I am finding it difficult. I have a demanding job that takes a lot of my energy and doesn’t allow me to take time off and visit ashrams or go to spiritual retreats or workshops. I also feel more attracted to spirituality as a whole as opposed to any particular religious tradition. There are so many questions I need to ask, but I don’t know where to go for support and guidance.

Can you advise me please? PAUL

SERGE.  As a matter of fact, Paul, I can, as I have been teaching a ‘Do-it-at-Home Spiritual Training Program’ for people exactly like yourself, where you may embark on your Sacred Path, without  ever needing to leave your armchair! How it works is that we talk together twice a month ( or once a fortnight), and more if you wish, for an hour on  ‘SKYPE’, during which time we explore all the issues pertaining to your quest, and we work with whatever material you wish to bring up. After each session, I will give you particular ‘homework’ to do.

For example, I may suggest you practice a particular kind of meditation, study a certain sacred text from a particular tradition, or  read more poetry, listen to certain pieces of sacred music, practice going about your day from a space of loving kindness, or write a short essay, etc!  In this way, you will be given a spiritual direction and be increasingly supported to take ever greater responsibility for your own unfolding. We will also have an e-mailing relationship and you may email me questions which I will do my best to answer.

Please note, Paul, that the Spirituality that I embrace, centers around recognizing the importance of the following eighteen points. If interested, it is important you read them carefully to see if what I offer, corresponds to what you feel you need. Here are my points:

1. There are many paths to God and each of us, according to our culture and soul inclination, needs to find a way that works for us.
2. We may discover our Spirituality without necessarily being a member of any particular Religion.
3. Divinity is both transcendent and immanent, and thus exists both beyond all things, while at the same time is present within all things.
4. If we wish to grow our Spirituality, it requires dedication, discipline, sincerity and the willingness to ‘work on ourselves’ in different ways and at different levels, as according to the kinds of issues and challenges we may face at any particular time.
5. While becoming more Spiritual may  initially start off with the need to use Spirituality to ‘feel better’ about ourselves - that is, to prop up our wounded egos - the deeper aim is ultimately to  go beyond our egos and enter more into  trans-egoic (beyond ego) states of being! This deeper aim will only be put into practice much later, when we are ready for it.
6. This does not mean, however, that we need to deny or seek to transcend our ‘personal egoic self’ – that is, the us that wants to be successful, do well, be liked, etc. Rather, the name of the approach I advocate is an integrative one - about our trying to ‘bring down’ a higher energy into our personal self, so that more and more, this aspect of ourselves will be ‘lifted up’.  Thus,  our ‘personal us’  is continually being moved in the direction of wishing  only to do that which is aligned to what our  higher  or ‘Impersonal’ Self desires. Put another way, we all have two main ‘us-es’ (the personal and the impersonal) and the name of the game is for them both to merge and support each other. Just as the Impersonal us must not be used to drown out our personal needs, so similarly, our egoic self must not hijack our spirituality and try to use  sacred energy to serve its own ‘seperative/egoic agendas’!
7. Spiritual work will always include psychological work. (For example, if we are angry with, and have ‘unfinished business’ with, our own personal father, it will most probably affect how we see and relate to, our idea of God, and therefore, if we are to come closer to the divine, it may require working at healing our relationship with our personal father!)
8. The aim of being spiritual is not to feel high but to be free.  Therefore, going through periods of ‘feeling unhappy’ may not necessarily mean we are off track.
9. Spirituality also has its dark face and if we are sincerely on our path, we need to be willing, at times, to confront that dark face, if it chooses to erupt into our lives in some particular form or other!
10. Becoming more Spiritual and being more fully human, are to be seen as one and the same thing. Therefore, if we wish for some yardstick to try to ‘measure’ our Spiritual growth, it will be by how human we are becoming. I regard it as much more  important that we be able to act wisely, be courageous  or relate kindly to difficult people and be  able to open our hearts to our world, than, say, achieve  some fantastic yogic posture, develop some ‘great psychic ability’  or quote some long sacred text by heart!
11. It is important that we discover an appropriate code of Ethics for ourselves, and do our best to live by that code. (e.g. Buddha’s Noble Way or the Ten Commandments, etc).
12. It is important that we honor the pace we are going and neither try to run before we can walk - that is, not try to embrace states of consciousness we are not yet ready for ( a practice known as ‘spiritual by-passing’)- nor remain overlong at levels that we are now ready to transcend and leave behind.
13. Being Spiritual today is no longer, as in the past, a solitary activity.  As we enter the 21st century, we are entering collective states of consciousness, which means that as a species, we are seeking to ‘evolve together’. As part of the larger whole, therefore, each of us are challenged to embrace that ‘I’ within us that is slowly becoming a ‘We’!
14. Our personal development, therefore, needs to be aligned to human-collective and world need. Our Spirituality will open up for us much more quickly as we attempt to live more and more as the solution to the problems of our world (as opposed to still being part of those problems.)
15. It is therefore important that we seek to ‘make a difference’, and so practice difference-making as best we can. We do not need to wait until we are perfect before being able to be of assistance to our planet. Each of us has his or her unique ‘Service Work’ to do, in those particular areas of life which our souls have drawn us to concern ourselves with.
16. There are two forms of Spiritual Practice that always need practicing, both of which are equally important. The first is engaging in practices (e.g., meditation, yoga) which are not of themselves ‘Spiritual’, but which are designed to put us in states conducive to our spiritual self opening up.  The second is practicing expressing the fruits of that work, by seeking to relate to ourselves, our fellow human beings, our society and our planet, in increasingly conscious, loving, kind, supportive and intelligent ways.
17. The great challenge for each of us is to walk our talk and discover a way of living conducive to allowing what is truest and best about us to surface. There is a strong link between our living ‘holistically’ and being Spiritual. Our spirituality needs to be well anchored in the world and not only may we not need to abandon our everyday work in order to grow our soul life, but it may be a powerful medium through which it emerges. (For example, if all the good financial advisors went to live in the Himalayas, it would mean the world of finance would remain solely in the hands of the sharks!)
18. Thus, the fabric of our everyday daily life, with all its many difficulties and challenges (paying the mortgage, dealing with problematic relationships, etc) is the medium for our spiritual development.  Put simply, most of us need to find ourselves, not by abandoning our world, but by trying to live in it as gracefully and as abundantly as we can.  We cannot be effectively spiritual unless we are well embodied in life. The art is to discover how to ‘Be in the world but not of it.’

If these eighteen points mean something to you, this program may be useful to you. For all further details, see my Spiritual Training Course.  If not, good luck, Paul.

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To be Spiritual, do we need to make an effort or let go 'efforting'?

Dear Serge, I am on my spiritual journey and one of the things that mystifies me is why some teachers advocate the need for us to make a lot of effort if we want to get anywhere, while others tell us to give up all our ‘efforting’, saying it comes from our ego, and will get us nowhere. So what do I do? How can I get anywhere spiritually if I don’t put any effort in? I am confused.
Please advise me.

Serge
I sympathise very much with your dilemma. And I think you have touched on something very important. At one time in my life, I studied with a teacher who advocated both approaches. To some of his students he would say ‘Put more effort in’, to others he would suggest they give up trying so hard. Initially, I found this confusing, until eventually I got to see that different kinds of inner work seem to be required of us at different times, depending on a) what kind of person we are, b) what kind of path we are on (is our journey more ‘outer’- more about ‘ action in the world’ - or more ‘inner’ and mystical), and c) where we are on it at any time.

Do you remember Nina Simone ‘s song about everything having its season? Well, that is very pertinent to the spiritual life. I think the whole art is about our knowing what is most appropriate for us at any particular time. Put simply, sometimes we really need to try very hard and make a big effort. (For example: studying sacred texts so we understand them, disciplining ourselves to meditate when we’d prefer to watch T.V., really working at being more objective, really making sure we relate kindly to others when we don’t feel like it, etc). All this takes conscious effort and intention and I think is very necessary.

Sometimes, however, our spiritual work needs to be about stopping this kind of effort and simply allowing ourselves to ‘Be’ more, letting ourselves be more receptive . This is in order that we may take in or absorb what our earlier efforts may have evoked for us.

Basically, I think that if we are first starting out on our spiritual journey, a lot of doing and ‘efforting’ on our part is necessary, no matter what path we are on or whether we are more mystically or more pragmatically inclined. The same holds true, I think, for anything new that we are trying to get off the ground. Without a powerful initiating force, nothing happens. From a spiritual perspective, making an effort shows we are sincere in our intention.

What it does is it invokes or calls the spiritual forces closer to us to help and support us. As one teacher put it: if we only take two steps forward, spirit can only take one step towards us and we will not meet. If we take three steps forward, spirit will take four towards us and there is more chance of an encounter. But if we take four or even five steps towards God, God will take six or seven towards us and there will be a joyful encounter.

However, if we only effort, at some stage along the way, we will encounter limitation because certain important transformations simply cannot happen this way, not least because we are less open to receiving the fruits of what our efforts are essentially directed towards. We can see how this is so, for example, in a relationship. For example, if I just effort all the time, then I don’t really allow myself to enjoy my partner properly and savour the space that both of us create together.

I won’t allow the more receptive or feminine side of me, to come alive. In other words, if all I do is give, give , give, then I don’t allow my partner a space to give to me, I don’t allow a space of mutual sharing and blending; As such, I may be an insufficient ‘space’ for a deeper love to come alive between us.

I discovered the virtue of ‘letting be’ many years ago when I went out to India, to spend time with a Master who was very much of the school of ‘Let go, let God. Give up the search’. I, at the time, was overly imbalanced on the side of doing, in part, I think, because I didn’t trust life enough to believe that anything could happen unless I was always trying to make it happen. Anyhow, being with this wonderful man gave me a great lesson in the virtue of not doing. I had arrived at the ashram laden with books intending to make every minute count as I was taking so much time off my teaching and psychotherapy work. ’I’ll get some good thinking and writing done while I’m here, I’ll make this time off worthwhile, ’ I thought to myself.

What I didn’t reckon for was the power of this man’s energy field or presence to shatter my ‘good intentions’. In my first encounter with him, I was told that I was much too active and never gave myself space or time for my depths to surface.’ The you that thinks so much is the you that doesn’t allow you to transform. You know nothing about surrender and so you are shallow’, was the gist of what he said to me. It was painful to hear this but I knew it was true.

The next few months were a revelation of that truth. My active mind, or the mind that Buddhists call our ‘monkey’ mind and see as standing in the way of our deeper mind that is linked with our heart, became absolutely ‘zapped.’ Despite my ego fighting against what was happening, I was unable to ‘do’ anything. I couldn’t even think coherently! I certainly couldn’t meditate. So I just ‘hung out’. All my books that had cost me a fortune in overweight luggage, remained unopened. I went through a process that I subsequently realised is central to all deep spiritual work, and that was one of emptying or purifying myself, something that can actually only happen when a certain kind of effort is absent.

It wasn’t as if there was no struggle involved, for there was. But it was of a different nature; it was the struggle of trying to stay awake to all the crazy thoughts and burning up that I was going through, as I tried to get more and more out of my own way in order to allow myself to be opened up by spirit

In terms of inner progress, this was probably the most purposeful few months I have ever spent. I saw clearly how all my old-style efforting needed to change, how it was really a kind of diversion to prevent me really having to look deeply into myself. I saw how, after all these years, I was at last becoming a little naked and starting to be a tiny bit more human!

But, and this is an important point, I don’t think I would have been ready to have done this ‘surrendering work’ had I not first done my share of initial efforting in the way I did it. For example, if, on first embarking on my path, which I did in my early twenties, I had gone straight to this ashram, I think it would have been counter-productive, for there would not have been enough structure in me to give up. I would simply have surrendered to my own unconscious chaos and emotional turmoil. It was because I had worked through the worst of my fears and neuroses, with the result that I now had a much more solid sense of self, that I was now more ready to surrender it.

Paradoxically, we need a well- enough functioning ego structure first, before it is safe to begin dismantling our identification with it. Being spiritual, we must understand, is not just about becoming ‘egoless’. The gradual diminishing of ego must happen at the right time. When we are ready. (Many serial killers and paedophiles, for example, are people who don’t yet have enough ego – they have insufficient structure; That’s their problem.) It was also interesting to observe that everyone in this Master’s ashram had been on the path for some time and were not beginners.

As I understand it, then, spiritual work includes effort, and it needs surrender of it as in ‘Thy will, O Lord, be done.’ This surrender is important if we are to align ourselves to a deeper spiritual power or a deeper spiritual love. And it needs to be intentional. The distortions come if we only always embrace one polarity and not the other, or if we choose to focus more on one end of the spectrum when it is necessary that we be embracing the other.

What I am discovering now with many of my students and with myself that as we very gradually mature, both polarities become increasingly integrated within each other. At present, for example, I am writing a book and for this I need the discipline to sit down and write when I’d prefer to loaf around . However, once having ‘got into it’, I need to be able to surrender to spirit so the deeper part of me can also be ‘invited into’ the creative equation. Less and less now do I distinguish between doing and being.

I think, if we wish to live a balanced life - and for me this is essential if we are to be more fully human - that we are challenged to embrace both polarities until eventually they begin increasingly to converge inside us as we learn to ‘Do our Being’ and ‘Be our Doing’ together.