Ain't No Place for Sissies

It was Bettie Davis who coined the phrase “old age ain't no place for sissies.” As someone getting closer to that train stop, relatively speaking she's spot on. Absolutely speaking, I would say seeking God (or allowing God to seek you) tops the list. Too many think they want to find God, wake up, be Self-realized, when it's just ego trying to feel good about what it's doing for itself. (“Those who turn to God for comfort may find comfort, but I do not think they will find God.” — Mignon McLaughlin)

While the journey to God may be simple from a certain vantage point, it's not necessarily all that easy. Just take a look at the path Bernedette Roberts laid out that she went through (assumingly similar for many others also)... 

From Bernedette Roberts “The Christian Contemplative Journey”

Sure, there a some priceless experiences. But there are the dark nights, the voids, and all this ending in an annihilation. What ego—in his/her right, contracted mind—would want to go through this? Mine sure doesn't on some days; it would rather stream Netflix, play out lustful thoughts, and fear the Coronovirus.

I recently read a radically honest book by David Carse. He notes, 

“If you're going to do anything, do this. First, figure out whether this waking up, this enlightenment is really something you want. Do you really want to die? Do you really want for 'you' not to exist; and for living to continue, if it does, not as who you know and love as yourself but as a hollow husk with impersonal Consciousness blowing through it? If this is what you want (how can you possibly?) then you are talking about waking up from the false dream of individuality, and then you can proceed. Your thinking, your praying, your meditating, your asking questions at satsang, whatever you 'do,' will be with the realization that what you think you are is illusory, and with the intent of exploding, obliterating, that illusion called 'you.' Can you 'do' this? Of course not; 'you' is a dream character following its role in the dream. But who knows what that role calls for? If that role calls for this character to wake up, then it has to start somewhere, and the character may find itself engaging in things that will ultimately bring about its own death. Not physical death. These are disposable containers; look around, they're being recycled constantly. Rather, real death, as real as death gets. Death of the one who cares.”

Okay, you've got my attention! Carse continues,

“If you decide that what you really want is something other than this complete and ultimate 'waking up,' then bless you. Have a wonderful life; enjoy the incredible edible banquet of material and spiritual and psychological and New Age goodies that are out there. Grow and expand and change and develop and improve your life immeasurably; evolve and become more mature and deeper and wiser and more beautiful. Discover your higher self and your higher purpose and fulfill them. I mean this absolutely sincerely; and even, I notice, with a touch of delicious wistfulness from what's left of the david thing. This is not in any way some kind of second class status; there is no such thing. Take what the dream has to offer; that's what the dream's there for, to be enjoyed. Consciousness only enjoys it, only perceives it at all, through the dream characters, and there have to be some through which can be experienced enjoyment of the whole panoply of the spiritual marketplace. But in that case don't come here talking about waking up; that just doesn't make any sense at all.”

Fair enough. But the issue is once we get a taste or intuition of something more, we can never go back and be the same. It's as if you're selling yourself out for who you're really not. We may enjoy the finite rewards at times, but the restless heart will always endure until the search is over for the infinite. We will always have a felt sense of, what David Walsh calls, “the unspoken irritant of all our aspirations” in the background. 

As such, I'm willing to suffer and sacrifice myself for what is.

⁂

As a reminder to myself, Sister Wendy Beckett (from Spiritual Letters) offers this precious insight:

“Patience is far more profound and more all-embracing than it appears to be. To enter deeply into patience means accepting our lowliness and, equally, his power and will to transform us.

Reality is his message and patience leads straight to it. We seem to see our shabbiness and conclude we are getting absolutely nowhere. It may not be so at all. We long to push ahead, to ‘take it by violence’. But helplessness, accepting the ordinariness of our day is the divine means of purification: all this is painful. So my first word is patience. Affirm his power; wait in trust. And my second is to remind you that pure love is usually experienced as nothingness. If all is his, what is there left for self? So never seek to judge from how it ‘feels’. To go on and on and never see anything ‘happening’: what trust we need!”

We Can’t Explain God and Ourselves Away

The concept that the path is the goal and the goal is the path seems like an irreconcilable tautology. What are we trying to say here? It's definitely like saying the means is the ends and the ends is the means. In a spiritual practice, we can often throw the baby out with bathwater, and focus on the gifts without the repentance. In other words, we want the experience of God without ever obeying Him. Esoteric is prioritized before exoteric, when instead it should be proportional to each other.

Bernadette Roberts says, “Where people regard knowledge as a means and experience as an end, I regard experience as a means and knowledge as the end.” So while experience matters, it also matters what is experientially learned. She continues: “In other words, if the means (religion) is not proportionate to the end (Truth), or if the means did not already contain the goal or end to be realized, then religion cannot get us to the end and would be valueless as a means.” It would seem that we can't disconnect the mystic from their religion!

Some skeptics may argue that mystics always end up reiterating the same truths they began with. But we can't have spiritual experiences from a blank slate. Non-symbolic experiences have to be expressed through the symbols we embody prior to our realizations/revelations. We are always mediated in any experience.

Roberts says, “What is ironic about this complaint is that he [the skeptic] does the same thing. What he starts out believing about religion and mystical experience he ends up believing, his conclusions are no different than his premises. Should one's premises be wrong or false, of course, then his conclusions could never be right—it would be logically impossible. So everything depends on the premises you start with because it dictates what you will, or can, end up with.”

So here again, first principles matter—as our experiences only confirm them! Besides, you will never experience God directly as Cause (only Effect), because God is beyond experience. So while we're on this side of the grave, we can only work with what He gifted to us.

If you've traveled in neo-advaita circles, as well as some Buddhist camps, you'll hear about nonduality. The realization that subject and object collapses and all is not-two. But this may be more of a concept than a reality. I've never been comfortable with people expressing their nondual realizations, as if everything can be explained away — including a God, a world, and themselves. Just watch this who's on first performative dance known as the “advaita shuffle” (As a side note: I like Tony Parsons as a person from what I can tell, it's just the approach I find problematic.) This approach just takes the easy way out, that in long run won't make things easier for anyone trying to include and discern all aspects of reality.

Roberts says, “The fact of our natural oneness with God neither makes us God nor robs us of a Godgiven individuality. We are like dependent babes in the womb, dependent yet separate.”

If we look at the dualities of subject and object, absolute and relative, God and man, Atman and Brahman, transcendence and immanence, whole and part; then we then have to ask “If all these dualities are negated, how could we possibly end up with "one" – one anything? Negate these dualities and nothing remains to be called "nondual".” 

Negate all dualities, and you are pretty much left with nothing. But last time I checked, there is definitely a something rather than a nothing. Our chosen realities cannot really be independent of our discriminating individuality. Any union is a fusion of God’s attributes, but not a union with God that our identities become fused. Reality exists, and we participate in awareness of this as persons.