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November Salon

Dec 17, 2003

As a big thank you form myss.com, Caroline has made the entire November Salon available to the Caroline Myss newsletter subscription.

WHY WE SABOTAGE OUR ENLIGHTENMENT: Part VII
INSPIRATION FOR THE JOURNEY

And now it’s time to wrap up our series on the reasons why we sabotage our enlightenment. I thought I would begin with a review of the subjects of the previous six Salons.

Parts I and II investigated the reasons why the spiritual journey requires that we ascend to a level in which we are capable of empowering the self-esteem of other individuals. Part III discussed our inability to endure enlightenment because we fear accepting whatever is given to us to endure without having first been handed a logical reason. Part IV traced the reasons why we fear our Shadow. Part V explained our fear of becoming a Healer; and Part VI, our fear of what becoming genuinely intuitive would mean.

Together these subjects provide insight into why we find the spiritual journey a demanding and sometimes overwhelming adventure. Those of you who think that only we mortals perceive it this way, however, may be surprised to learn that mystics have been warning people about the dangers of the journey for a long time. In his novel of spiritual searching, The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen described "the one danger of the mystical search: there was no way back without doing oneself harm. Many paths appear, but once the way is taken, it must be followed to the end." Matthiessen, who besides being a gifted writer and a fierce environmentalist is also a Zen monk, may have been unconsciously echoing the words of the Indian mystic Swami Muktananda, who wrote, "The mystical path is best not taken. But once begun, there is no turning back." They both knew what they were talking about because they’d been there themselves, and they know the path is not for the faint of heart. It’s as if they’re saying that it’s better not to experience true happiness, because then you’ll never be satisfied with anything short of the real thing. Once you taste the Truth, what if you never find it again? That’s the kind of fear that keeps many of us from ever setting out in the first place, or leads us to do so half-heartedly. We’re a little like that character from old-time radio, the pathologically timid door-to-door salesman who would knock on someone’s door and then mutter to himself, “I hope nobody’s to home, I hope, I hope.”

One of our fondest fantasies is that, as we progress along the spiritual path, the process will grow less difficult. Unfortunately, just the opposite is often true. Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk who also explored Eastern practices, wrote extensively about the periods of spiritual drought that occur on the path, which he called “aridities.” (Catholics just love words like that.) While meditation progresses, Merton said, "aridities grow more and more frequent and more and more difficult as time goes on." During these periods of drought, all the joy of the spiritual path seems to fade away and we feel thirsty for some contact from the Divine. As we saw in Sacred Contracts, the great mystics and spiritual masters were often in a constant state of uncertainty and self-discovery, longing to hear some definitive communication assuring them that they were on the right path. They may have enjoyed moments of great joy, but they also endured the dark night of the soul. So if these great mystics struggled to master themselves, where does that leave the rest of us?

It leaves us working at our spiritual progress day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Yes, miracles will happen in our lives. But more often than not we face the difficult challenge of growing in a stepwise fashion without the kind of flashy experiences that make good novels. There’s a wonderful saying attributed to Confucius, who was roughly contemporary with the Buddha and who, like the Buddha, lived to a ripe old age. “At 15, I set my heart on learning,” Confucius wrote. “At 30 I had planted my feet firmly on the ground. At 40, I was never led astray from my goal. At 50, I knew the will of heaven. At 60, I heard the bidding of heaven with a docile ear. At 70, I could do as my heart pleased, for what I desired no longer conflicted with the will of heaven.” Looking back at his life, he was able to see it as a path of continual growth; although he emphasized the positive aspects, he also implied that there were periods when he did not know the will of heaven, or when he heard it but didn’t like what he heard, and there were periods when his own desires conflicted with divine will. Not until he reached 70 did his will and heaven’s coincide. It reminds you of the words of St. Paul that we have to work out our salvation “in fear and trembling.” Doesn’t sound very New Age, does it?

But the spiritual reality is that even the most profoundly mystical paths begin with basic rules of conduct that we need to adhere to. They aren’t as exciting as having a Kundalini experience and merging with the Universe, but they’re essential to our growth. The classical path of yoga, for instance, doesn’t begin with invigorating physical exercises, breathing techniques, or meditations that bring you constant bliss. Instead it begins with a series of ethical do’s and don’ts that include not harming others, lying, stealing, sexual misconduct, and greed, while cultivating physical cleanliness, calmness, and submission to the will of God. Again, this kind of thing doesn’t follow the New Age clichés of doing whatever you please as long as you eat organic food and take retreats in exotic locales. You see, we think that mysticism is some kind of magic potion: You do a little meditation, say some prayers, take a few retreats, and suddenly you’re enlightened. But as we’ve been seeing for some time here, it doesn’t work that way. Most of the path is made up of a series of small gains, painful learning experiences, brief moments of insight, often followed by periods of backsliding. Here’s another way of saying the same thing, taken from the Jewish Talmud, which evokes a progression similar to Confucius’: “Study of the Torah leads to precision, precision to zeal, zeal to cleanliness, cleanliness to restraint, restraint to purity, purity to holiness, holiness to meekness, meekness to fear of sin, fear of sin to saintliness, saintliness to the holy spirit, and the holy spirit to life eternal.” That’s the kind of demanding sequence that scares most of us to death, or at least into wanting to take an easier path.

And that’s why it’s so important to do as Martin Luther King Jr. said and keep our eyes on the prize. One way to achieve this is to learn from the great mystics who had to struggle to keep their own eyes on the prize of spiritual truth. So I’ve asked Peter Occhiogrosso, the myss.com expert on world religions, to compile some of the world’s inspiring words of wisdom like the ones above to help us all keep focused as we struggle to avoid sabotaging our own enlightenment. You can print out these sayings, or write them on Post-It notes and stick them in strategic spots around you home or workplace to keep you inspired on a daily basis. Peter will also put the sayings in context and explain where they’re coming from. Let’s go:

In doing good, avoid fame. In doing evil, avoid punishment. Thus, by pursuing the middle way, you may preserve your body, fulfill your life, look after your parents, and live out your years.
Chuang-tzu, Inner Chapters

Chuang-tzu lived a few hundred years after Lao-tzu (the author of the Tao Te Ching) but espoused much the same philosophy. These lines from his most famous work have always fascinated me, because he seems to be saying that it’s not important whether you do good or evil, as long as you don’t call attention to yourself. What an outrageously subversive thing to say! But part of the wisdom in this saying is precisely that we can’t always figure things out in a logical way. Our idea of virtuousness may be self-righteous without taking into account the needs of other people around us. For Chuang-tzu, preserving your health and taking care of your parents are equally important. Following the middle way – between asceticism and self-indulgence – is more important than following complex religious dogmas. This calls to mind, for example, the tendencies of certain religions to put down the material realm in favor of some higher, more “spiritual” way of being. At one point in the history of Christianity, a sect known as the iconoclasts defaced religious images because they believed it was wrong to adore pictures of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. They went around smashing the faces off statues and mosaics and destroying icons and other paintings — an early form of witch hunt. Writing against this practice in the 8th century, a Greek theologian said:

Do not insult matter, for it is not without honor. Nothing is to be despised that God has made.
John of Damascus (675-749)

John raises a wonderful point that is more significant than the theological dispute, now long forgotten, between two sects of Christians. In a sense he’s showing the absurdity of all attacks on involvement in the physical world, because the material is an emanation of the Divine. Here is the same dilemma as stated by a modern philosopher who has studied Eastern Orthodox Christian mysticism:

Certain Oriental teachers warn us against giving too much attention to the things of the world. Certain of our Christian teachers also say this. But here error creeps in. One may give all one's attention to the outer world without harming oneself in any way. To tell the truth, we are called by the Creator to spend this kind of attention.
Jacob Needleman, Lost Christianity

Think about that for a minute. The Divine actually WANTS us to be absorbed in the material world — as long as we are fully conscious of what we’re doing. That’s what makes the role of the artist so profoundly spiritual. An artist focuses intently on the physical object being painted, sculpted, or photographed, and on the work of art itself, so as to become completely absorbed in it. It’s the opposite of saying that the physical world is some kind of evil distraction. If we enter deeply enough into it, we see the divinity at its core. This is the same kind of absorption that Western mystics talk about when they speak of being lost in contemplation of God, and what Buddhists mean by the disappearance of the ego during deep meditative trance. If we can retrain our eyes and mind the way artists do to see clearly what’s in front of us -- and what’s within us – we have already achieved a high level of spiritual realization without ever denigrating the physical world.

The age-old battle between body and soul, or matter and spirit, is one area where the New Age, for all its faults, has tried to strike a more holistic balance. Many of today’s spiritual teachers recognize the importance of the inner life of prayer and meditation while acknowledging the value of the body through massage, yoga, tai chi, aromatherapy and other methods of letting the body heal itself and work for our good, rather than seeing it as a source of evil. Indeed, as Eckhart Tolle points out, more evil comes from the mind than ever came from physical urges. As he puts it in his most recent book,

The thinking mind is a useful and powerful tool, but it is also very limiting when it takes over your life completely, when you don't realize that it is only a small aspect of the consciousness that you are. . . . Naming something as bad causes an emotional contraction within you. When you let it be, without naming it, enormous power is suddenly available to you.
Eckhart Tolle, Stillness Speaks

One pernicious trick the mind plays on us is to make us believe that the spiritual life is some kind of magical realm defined by mystical practices, and that if only we could figure out the tricks, we could be mystics, too. That’s the same misleading way we think about music or art or intuition as some kind of inspired magic that can only be done by a few gifted individuals. It may be true that great art is inspired or intuited, but we all have the capacity to gain access to that level of inspiration or intuition. Almost anyone can learn to draw, or sing, or be intuitive, if you have the right instruction and are willing to put in the time needed to learn these skills. The idea that spirituality is something you might actually have to work at in a rather clear-headed way seems to offend our cherished notion of it as dreamy mystical experience that happens out of the blue to the fortunate few.

For me, meditation is not a mystical experience. It is almost the opposite. It forces me to pare back daydreams, cut through rosy expectations and look carefully, often even painfully, at what is actually there in front of me and inside me.
Harvey Cox, Turning East

Maybe the most powerful mystical experience isn’t the result of meditation or chanting or divine visions but derives from the power that is generated by helping others. It may seem that serving people is one of those things that’s nice to do whenever you can, but not required, and yet the world’s wisdom holds otherwise. Not only is helping others a powerful force in its own right, but NOT to serve can be an active detriment to your own health and well being, as this saying from the Native American tradition makes clear:

See to it that whoever enters your house obtains something to eat, however little you may have. Such food will be a source of death to you if you withhold it.
Paul Radin, The Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian

Those are pretty strong words, but that’s just an indication of the power inherent in being of service. And that power is something that all the great mystics recognize, whatever tradition they may embrace. The followers of religions often like to emphasize the differences between them, as if they were salesmen trying to distinguish their product from a competitor. But the founders and mystics usually sound like they are all advertising the same product.

A man once asked the Prophet Muhammad what was the best thing in Islam, and he replied, “It is to feed the hungry and to give the greeting of peace both to those one knows and to those one does not know.”
Hadith of Bukhari

Muhammad didn’t say that the best thing about Islam is belief in one God, or praying five times a day, or fasting during Ramadan, but feeding the hungry — which sounds like a line out of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. The Prophet also once said that a Muslim was given Paradise because he removed a branch of thorns from the road that might have injured a subsequent traveler. In New Age terms, we might say that the reward is metaphorical, or that we don’t have to wait until we die to benefit from our own generosity. The Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh says that we “inter-are,” meaning that we don’t exist as independent units but as integral parts of the same vast organism. This “interbeing” was expressed in a Buddhist teaching popular in China, the Avatamsaka Sutra, where it was called Indra’s Net. According to this teaching, the human mind is the universe itself; it is identical with the Buddha and all other sentient beings, which are all one and the same.

Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra is a wonderful net that has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel at the net's every node, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that the process of reflection is infinite.

Since we are intimately connected to everyone else in the universe, then it follows that attending to the needs of anyone ultimately redounds to our benefit. The Sufi poet Rumi put this concept in more lyrical language:

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make any sense.

And as we head into the holiday season, that really says it all.

Caroline

To register for the Myss Salon

Seasons Greetings from Myss Fulfillment Center
During this holiday season we at myss.com would like to offer our loyal customers some help in your Holiday shopping needs. This year has been a blessing to us in developing awareness in all that the Divine has to offer.

We would like to show our appreciation to you with some holiday specials for your convenience.

Here’s the link to the Christmas Specials.

Checklist of Health Issues and Illness The purpose of the CHII is to allow you a fast and easy way to identify your own personal blocks and to allow you to work on removing these blocks should you care to do so. You will receive an individual profile that shows your score for each chakra as well as for three themes: vitality, relationships, and spirituality. You will be given specific ways to address issues for each chakra.

Personal Nutrition Provider The purpose of the PNP is to allow you a fast and easy way to identify your personal chemistry. You will receive an individual profile that shows you your score for each area and then a food plan with selected foods that support your well being on all levels: physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual. We sampled over 500 adults in the United States, both people who are familiar with Susan's work and people who know nothing about it. We will continue to work on researching the PNP based upon the information we receive from this web site. Your individual responses will, of course, be totally confidential and held in strictest confidence as with a counselor or doctor.

Caroline Myss - The Miraval Retreat

Spiritual Enchantment: Discovering Your Intuitive Resources
Date/Time:
January 15-18, 2004
Schedule:
Thursday, January 15th
6pm-9pm Opening Session
Friday, January 16th
9am - 12noon Session
Saturday, January 17th
9am - 12noon Session
Sunday, January 18th
Departures
Description:
Intuitive abilities are your first and most primal natural resource. In so many instances, the struggles and confusion people have within their lives are due to their efforts to repress their intuitive abilities, believing that they lack the "gift" of being intuitive. But intuitive sight is the most natural sense you have, and developing a rapport with this inner resource is the one experience that transforms the manner in which you will embrace the rest of your life. Many techniques have been developed to assist people in awakening their intuitive skills, but working effectively with any skill depends upon the quality of a person's self-esteem along with their ability to engage with life as an empowered, elegant spirit. In this retreat, becoming an "elegant spirit" and developing your interior voice is the focus, an experience that will hopefully be delightfully enchanting.
Holding this retreat at Miraval is very much a part of creating the enchantment of this workshop because it is such a rare gift to be able to pamper your body, relax your mind, and explore your spirit all in one. Last year's workshop was absolutely delightful, and certainly a major reason for this was that due to the intimate size and setting of Miraval, we "took it over" and had the entire spa to ourselves...which made the environment we shared even more incredible.
Finally, let me add that January is a perfect time for this retreat because there is something so nice about beginning the New Year with an experience that makes you feel good about who you are and the gift you bring to this world.
The workshop will be organized as follows:

exploring the nature of intuitive abilities
investigating the fear of becoming intuitive
how intuitive skills redirect your future
identifying your Sacred Contracts and archetypes
a bit about the mystical life....
~ Caroline Myss

To reserve your space for this event please call (800) 232-3969.