Confessions of a Wayward Anti-Saint
O Lord, of those who love you as
The Lord of love, ever present in
All, and those who seek you as the
Nameless, Formless Reality, which
Way is sure and swift, love or
Knowledge?
The Bhagavad-Gita
I believe that I am one of those unfortunate people who often mistakes information for knowledge. I have an incredible memory at times and can remember many of the books I have read, lectures I have attended and documentaries I have seen. I can catalogue information and retrieve it seemingly out of thin air.
It seems that almost every conversation I participate in I have something to say or have heard of such and such a book or scholar. In fact I do this so often that I have become aware of my own boorishness and am striving to “sit on my hands” more often so as to allow space for others to discuss. Striving to be a more generous listener and put myself whole heartedly in the presence of the other is proving to be difficult. But as I often discover when listening attentively to someone I learn something new even if the material seems “old hat” to me.
Early on in my spiritual experiments a beloved mentor of mine warned me about mixing paths. It wasn’t that one path was necessarily more superior to another but each has its own vernacular and methods. While the end result might be the same the paths chosen often take different routes to the destination. Eclecticism can be useful but sometimes it is akin to starting a journey only to retrace your steps to the front door, checking to make sure it is locked, and then set off in a different direction.
The problem lies in never allowing me to trust the particular path or its teachers. I seem to get lost in the vast jungle of information and am always seeking something new and better rather than hunkering down and giving something a go to see what happens.
What I have discovered is that up to this point my life has been a sort of spinning of my wheels. I am like a dog chasing my own tail. Along the way I have collected a lot of information. I have two junior college degrees, read philosophy at University and even pursued an abortive attempt at an advanced degree in Coptic. In the end I have done nothing more than collect information…data really…and have been unable to put it to good use.
I have been writing a lot lately about being spiritual and how I don’t even consider myself to be spiritual. How sadly true this is. Spirituality is not found in books in fact it often impedes it. I have known this for years but have been so deeply entrenched in my habits that I have refused to do anything about it. Subconsciously it was safer to read and collect information about spiritual subjects than it was to experience it.
My recent move to Denver…the recent uprooting of my previous life has put me face to face with this spiritual problem and for the first time in many years I am facing demons I arrogantly thought exorcised. I feel rather dramatically like the psalmist who lies on his bed at night thrashing under the oppressive trials of life while pouring his heart out to a God who he hopes is there and hopes is listening. “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret.” I love drama.
Last night I experienced an overwhelming anxiety attack while sleeping. It came upon me in the very wee hours. I awoke to find myself fretting about my health, which for all appearances is good, and the cold clammy sweat of anxiety washed over me. There was a cloying pain in my chest and I started to convince myself that I was having a heart attack. I got out of bed to get a drink of water and to splash cold water on my face and nearly passed out I was so dizzy and so nervous and by that time in a full scale panic. I collapsed on my bed a complete wreck. I curled up in the fetal position and began muttering childhood prayers to help combat the fear. I whimpered like a small boy who is certain there are monsters lurking under his bed and hiding in his closet. There are definitely no “atheists in fox holes.”
I felt completely alone in the dark…alone and frightened. Sidran was sleeping at her place and calling her would have been futile. When she is out she doesn’t wake up for the phone. Not that there would have been anything she could have done for me. Calling her would have only succeeded in disturbing her sleep and upsetting her over her concern about me. So I just decided to ride it out. This isn’t the first time this has happened. But it is the first time in several years. It is rather disconcerting.
Where is this fear coming from? After years of quasi-certitude about life why now? Out of the blue it seems I am realizing my smallness when compared to everything around me. I am nothing…yet something. I have consciousness and that seems real. I do believe in God…at least I am joyfully agnostic while the sun is up. At night that is a different matter. If I am in the grips of anxiety I neatly retreat into the darker superstitious beliefs of a small boy. “If I die before I wake...” I prefer to hedge all bets.
I hold on this notion that my life does have meaning. But is it a meaning that is given by an all powerful, all loving creator God or is the meaning only to be found in what I can eke out of life? These questions are what drew me to the existentialists during my early years in college. I read Sartre’s “Nausea” several times and devoured the works of Camus.
But this way of looking at life left me feeling dry and empty. I longed to have a firm belief in something spiritual…something that I could verify experientially. That led me to Buddhism and eventually to Dharmadatu, a mediation center near Green Lake in Seattle. I was 20 years old and supposedly a junior in college.
Meditation helped with the anxiety and it still does today. But after 20 years of meditation practice I am still a rank amateur and now I am dealing with the added disappointment of realizing that all of these years of meditating are for naught. It certainly has not had the transformative effect on my life I had hoped.
I don’t believe for a minute that it is the meditation practice that is awry…it is clearly me. Now I wish to figure out what to do about it.
There seems to be some agreement among the teachers of the spiritual philosophies and religions that I have studied that there are two basic paths to God; the path of knowledge (not the collection of information) and the path of love. The path of knowledge approaches God from the abstract. It focuses on the formless, infinite reality beyond the comprehension of our normal consciousness. Those traveling this way seek to immerse themselves in this formless ocean. The path of love approaches God directly from a more personal approach. The path of love is God as lover and the soul as beloved. God is no longer abstract but personal. While the path of love does not ignore the vast ineffable and infinite nature of God it does cleave to what it can experience in a personal one on one relationship with divinity.
Up until this point I have mistakenly thought myself to be on the path of knowledge. But hindsight shows me that all I have done is collect information and theories and masqueraded it as knowledge. I eschewed the path of love considering it to be inferior to knowledge. I mistakenly accused the lovers as having anthropomorphized God and creating mental idols of God. I thought it to be creating God in the image of humanity rather then humanity in the image of its creator.
I still believe this to be true of most mainstream religions today, especially where the Evangelical Christian Right is concerned as well as the polite forms of middle class religion. But the path of love deserves another look…a more intense, penetrating look. The Bhagavad-Gita suggests that the path of love is the most direct route to God although in the end we discover that both Knowledge and Love ultimately end up being the same thing.
If I needed another nail for the intellectual coffin that I have built for my spiritual life thus far all I need to do is go back over my journals and blog posts over the past couple of years. I did this recently in an attempt to see if I had any consistent set of beliefs. Instead I found myself to be all over the place. One moment I write like a Catholic and the next like an evangelical. Then Buddhism creeps in and my minimal understanding of other paths that I have a passing “on the surface” familiarity with and one set of ideas seemingly collides with another canceling themselves out when logic and reason are applied.
For the sake of my sanity I need to abandon any attempts at creating a theology I can embrace. There are a few “beliefs” that seem to be consistent and held together by a gossamer strand of metaphysical nonsense. But for the most part I am not certain they are much help to me in my pursuit of spiritual understanding. My current pet beliefs that we are born human animals and must evolve into human beings and my insistence on the importance of the divine feminine in our spiritual evolution seem largely academic to me. I am not certain what they will do for me in practical application.
The problem is prying my nose out of my books. This task is of similar difficulty as prying a beloved security blanket from the clutches of a child. There is going to be fighting. I am going to kick, scream, throw a tantrum and generally fuss about until I finally accept the inevitable and give into it. I am never one to go quietly into any gentle night.
I have a difficult time disengaging my intellectual need for collecting data. I am always curious about what others think and what they believe. I also don’t want to believe just anything. It is my nature to question and peer into reality. I can’t seem to approach life any other way. Churches seem filled to the brim with people who just believe what they are conditioned to believe or just don’t bother to give it much thought. The later just attend because that is “what you do” on Sunday or perhaps for just the social club aspect that church can provide. I have even met a few atheists underneath the steeples who attend for a variety of non-spiritual reasons namely because a parent or spouse drug them by the ear and they come to avoid the inevitable conflict that dissention among the ranks creates.
There are side effects to thinking. It can be destructive as well as uplifting. Sometime in the past few months my more expansive, innovative notions about God seemed to have been dislodged by a more provincial God prone to punishing transgressions. Intellectually I reject this…in fact I can’t even bring myself to believe it and haven’t in years. Something has caused this change in my heart. I suspect the groundless in my new life has a role to play. At any rate my spiritual life is rather unsophisticated. Being well educated and well read does not necessarily translate into sophistication. I am as provincial as the God I conceive.
So I think I get it…education does not equal knowledge at least in the spiritual sense. I am boxing up my books and leaving out only a couple from which I tend to draw some insight and comfort. From here I want to see if I can change my mode of operation.
I am drawn to the words of the Buddha when he was asked about the existence of God. “There is a god; there is no god. The problem of your enlightenment is the same.” It is difficult to take God out of the equation for me. I am so programmed to think in terms of deity that I feel quite lost not thinking about him and…yes, I admit it…I feel a large amount of guilt associated with not thinking about God. It is traumatic to my inner catholic and it seems as if I am wandering into a vast expanse of atheism or at least unrequited agnosticism. That scares me a bit.
Yet mystics teach that self-knowledge is the portal to God. We need to understand ourselves down to our deepest ontological roots before we can have any knowledge of God. But I have to remind myself that I need to take another path. The path of knowledge is making me soul sick. Now it is time to pursue the path of love and see if this will produce any choice fruit.
I have in previous posts listed qualities that I have deemed to be spiritual. Compassion, empathy, mercy, love and justice all seem to be the qualities that all truly spiritual people posses. My present path has not helped me hone those.
It even seems to me that truly spiritual people don’t label themselves as spiritual. They may not even know they are being spiritual. I, on the other hand, am painfully conscious of such labels.
I have just read over what I have written here and see that this is further proof that I have a rather strong self-indulgent side and that is pretty much the tone of this whole post. I wonder if it is possible to rid myself of this self-indulgence? I wonder if I can live life much lighter? When I first arrived in Salem in November 1999 I was starting to.
It is rather apparent to me that I am making this whole “spiritual journey” thing and the living of life way more difficult and way more complicated than it needs to be. I have burdened myself with a heavy boat anchor around my neck and it is starting to drag me under. It’s time to cut it off and swim free of my troubles.
Okay…enough whining for now…