I AM ICARUS
The necessity of falling seems foreign to modern sensitivities. We expect to increase steadily in knowledge and awareness. There is no room for backsliding. When we do go through a setback, we do everything possible to recover quickly and get back on track. It goes against the heroism of our age to tolerate regression and incapacity…the spiritual life is incomplete if it is imagined only as a wondrous world of miracles and healings. As religious imagery shows in its terrifying deities, it also has its terrors and challenges. It demands that we let go finally of all supports and make our own fated descent into the mysteries that underlie all our surface activities…it is a mistake, in other words - and perhaps a fall into sentimentality - to expect spiritual depth to result in a placid life.
~Thomas Moore
The Soul’s Religion, pp 84-85
Spiritual depth isn’t to be found soaring high into the celestial realms but in the slow, hard descent into the deep, dark places of the earth.
My spiritual life, if you will permit me a moment of self-indulgent drama, is taking a new and exiting turn on the road. I am falling and coming apart as the ground rises up to meet me headlong. But my screams are turning into wild laughter. I am scared and yet no longer scared. I am thrilled and exhilarated and even a little bit intoxicated. Yet my cynical nature is rising up to warn me that I should be suspicious less I miss the point of the fall. I am falling but I have not yet fallen far or deep enough. I am still a newbie…a proverbial wide eyed babe in the woods and I have no clue who I am or what I am doing.
I am Icarus unbound and undone by youthful arrogance and naiveté. I heard the warnings of those wiser and more experienced and I chose to ignore them. Surely these didn’t apply to me? My fall began slowly almost 7 years ago when I discovered a statement made by Carl Jung that has since become my motto: “We don’t become enlightened by imagining beings of light but by making the darkness consciousness.” I am not an expert in Jungian thought or even in depth psychology but it has provided a much needed road map as I set out on this road to discover what it means to be “spiritual” and to lead a “spiritual life.” Up to this point I have been neither spiritual nor lived spiritually even though I would have argued differently had you dared to challenge me.
Recently I began sharing with others that I am suspicious of those who make declarations such as “I am not religious; I am spiritual.” In my estimation people who make this statement (and I have been one of them) have no real idea of what they just said. This criticism has met with much defensive rebuttal especially from people whom I have never pointed this barb at. After all I have been talking solely about the only experience I can evaluate frankly and that is mine. Perhaps their defensiveness indicates I hit a painful nerve and they too have been suspicious of their own motivations but lacked the honesty to bring these doubts into the open for others to see.
I am Icarus. When I was younger I confused spirituality with wanton escapist fantasies. I wanted to avoid the pain of living and the deeper pain of consciousness awareness. I put on my wings of wax and jumped off the nearest cliff seeking to soar higher and higher leaving the earth and my life behind. I was that person who wanted to go sit on a mountain top somewhere and make the world disappear. I wanted to join a monastery or an ashram and renounce the world in order to be more spiritual. I traveled all over the place visiting retreat centers and seeking out “spiritual masters” wherever they were…some were bona fide but many were charlatans and frauds who had their heads up their ass as much as I did. The worst were those who actually believed themselves to be enlightened or deeply spiritual. Their words and actions bordered on the felonious. At least those who turned it willfully into a money making enterprise were wise enough to know what they were about even as they were making a mockery of the spiritual life.
Since childhood I have suffered from depression, anxiety, low self esteem and general paranoia about life. I have sought to escape these experiences thinking that if I could just be free of them I would experience the truly miraculous and spiritual. The occasional elevated state of consciousness would reinforce this belief. I looked heavenward thinking that peace and transcendence can only be found somewhere “out there” even though I also knew that what I seek is already within me. Sometimes these beautiful elevated states of consciousness turned out to be nothing more than bouts of mania that comes with my disorder. During these times I did dangerous things and made very poor decisions nearly killing myself on more than one occasion.
I expected that by becoming “spiritual” I would some how become more serene. I would live a life of tranquility. I thought that by renouncing the things that world values I would be happy. Yet I was still expecting to be happy because of a reason. My reasons may not have been money, career, family or fancy cars and homes but it was still a reason none-the-less. It was happiness based on circumstance not despite the circumstance. Serenity comes from the facing of life as it presents itself to us and not being moved to despair or even to its opposite extreme…maniacal joy. Yet even truly, deeply spiritual people will encounter these experiences throughout their existence. The difference comes in their lack of attachment. Spiritual people let the experience be the experience. Life is what it is and they learn as they go.
It never occurred to me during those early days that spiritual and happy people don’t live in an exhaled, elevated state 24/7. They come down to earth on a daily basis. Sometimes they land softly and sometimes they crash hard and painfully. Spiritual living isn’t the absence of pain but the healthy embracing of it as part of the myriad experiences of life. Spiritual living isn’t necessarily the deliberate seeking of painful experience but the accepting of them as part of our life.
In the west we get spiritual teaching twisted around. We misunderstand the terminology and spiritual technology of the East not to mention missing the deeper truths of our own indigenous spiritualities. We abandon are old ways thinking that the new ways will be better…but they aren’t better….just different. It’s our understanding that messes things up. The popular literature that flies off the bookshelves are written most often by lay people for other lay people. It often misses the subtleties of the teaching they are exploring. Many of us mistake ourselves for teachers or someone with an important message when we should remain in silence and remain open. Ignorance is no excuse especially in the spiritual life.
With all the talk of “oneness” in our modern language we mistake that spirit and soul for being interchangeable. Yet one is a vessel for the other. This understanding is where the experience of at-one-ment (atonement) occurs. Spirit is the substance of the universe and it longs to soar to the highest realms. It wants to reach the heavens and caress the face of God. But the soul loves, even craves, the deep and dark places. It seeks the warmth and shelter of the earth. It is the labyrinth, the cave and the crypt. It calls us and warns us that before we can fly aloft we must first touch the ground. It sings to us our funeral song and reminds us that before we live we must first die. Before we can be born we must gestate and emerge from the womb of the mother.
Spiritual depth isn’t to be found soaring high into the celestial realms but in the slow hard descent into the deep, dark places of the earth. The guardians of the ancient mystery traditions knew this well. They understood death as a part of life. Osiris, Dionysus and even Orpheus proceeded into the underworld and encountered the ruler of those realms first before returning to the surface. Christianity in its original form is also a mystery tradition in its own right. Jesus travailed in life, then descended to hell (death…the underworld) and then rose triumphant from the grave and eventually ascended into heaven. We must go downward before we go upward; descend prior to ascending. From a Gnostic perspective Jesus made the darkness within him conscious then found himself transfigured as a being of light. His is a light made in the silence of the holy darkness.
When I am soaring and leave the world behind I am experiencing something spiritual but it doesn’t necessarily mean that I am being spiritual. In fact I tend to neglect life and neglect others when I am in throes of such experiences. I want the intoxicating freedom…I long for the escape and to never return to the doldrums of daily existence. But this is merely delusional. It is a schizophrenic spirituality that propels me dangerously toward a psychotic break with reality. It’s a break that will overwhelm me with the transpersonal that I am not prepared for and consume my ego inflating it instead of expanding it. I will be come a narcissistic and dangerous. This is a deeply neurotic spirituality.
This spirituality doesn’t hold the concerns of others in my heart. It makes little or no room for them it is devoid of compassion and true understanding. It is selfish and in this regards the exact opposite of spirituality. It is a deep brooding abuse of the spirit rooted in fantasies of what I want instead of what is needed or required of me.
We are earthbound beings with a touch of spiritual madness. My disorder is not a failing but a tool that keeps me ontologically grounded and honest. It keeps me aware of the grave, the womb and the labyrinth all of which are necessary as our times we soar high above. The earth keeps me connected and it reminds me of my interconnectedness to others and my need to seek deeper experiences of intimacy and deeper experiences of community. Most importantly by falling I stay engaged in life rather than wasting my time attempting to escape it.