January 1, 2024
After surviving for 80 years with most of my faculties intact, perhaps I have earned the privilege of offering a few words of wisdom to those passing through this thing called life. Although it has sometimes been called a “vale of tears,” and it can certainly be that, it can also be a marvelous adventure and a wondrous mystery — filled with joy, beauty, and love.
Of course, there are many problems in our world, and we must try to deal with them as best we can. But every age has had its dire predictions and warnings of doom, yet we humans have always muddled through, and sometimes thrived.
The current estimate is that our universe has been around for about 14 billion years, and the human species has been on Earth for over 2 million of them. Further, the brain size of average human beings 300,000 years ago was about the same as ours, and people living 100,000 years ago probably had the same capacity to learn and develop as do we.
During that long expanse of time, before you and I were born, there were great disasters and incredible achievements in the human community, and it is likely this will be the case into the foreseeable future. One estimate is that this Earth will be around for another 5 or 6 billion years. So, although we often take our own individual lives to be the center of everything, a lot went on before our brief sojourns here, and a lot is likely to happen after our current lives end, both good and bad.
In this broad framework, there is only one pressing question we each face right now:
How will I live for the rest of my life?
Within that question there are a handful of more detailed questions:
How will I spend the time I have left?
What will be my primary intentions, plans, and goals?
What values will guide my choices and actions?
Who are the people I will choose to spend my time with?
I have been thinking about and wrestling with these questions in one way or another most of my adult life. Over the last 35 years I have been sharing what I have learned with others through books, essays, small workshops, and thousands of one-on-one discussions. Of great importance to me, I have continued to learn and grow through my friendships and interactions with others, and I am deeply grateful to all those with whom I have shared this journey called life.
Through all these years, one thing I have learned is that many, many people are longing for something more in their lives, more than they have yet found. A certain number think this involves more money, or fame, or creaturely satisfactions, but no one I have known has felt more fulfilled after getting more of those things. A certain amount of money and acceptance by those we spend our time with is important for most of us, but after a basic minimum has been achieved, more of the same does not bring greater happiness or fulfillment.
Dramatic proof of this is that, although we live in a place and time in which the majority live far beyond the level of material prosperity and comfort almost any culture has ever achieved, study after study finds today that more people in our culture are dissatisfied with their lives than in the past.
Feelings of alienation, loneliness, and emptiness abound. In an attempt to relieve these feelings, large numbers are turning to alcohol, prescription medications, illegal drugs, excessive shopping, shallow sex, busyness, and obsessive ambition. Others escape through endless hours focusing on TV, movies, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and internet gaming, pornography, or gambling. Still others project their hopes and ambitions for greatness onto sports stars and teams or famous people, trying to fulfill themselves vicariously through the fame and success of others.
One cause of this pervading dissatisfaction is the belief that freedom is being able to do whatever you want and get all the things you desire. But no matter how much these drives are fulfilled, it is never enough. Few realize that true freedom is not those things at all, but rather, as D.H. Lawrence put it:
“We are not free when we are doing just what we like. … We are only free when we are doing what the deepest self likes. And there is the getting down to the deepest self! It takes some diving.”
I have heard so many people say they are looking for something more than what the current cultural framework pushes them toward, getting more things and indulging whims and desires. But few know what they are really looking for, or how to find it.
What I have learned in my own journey, and from those I have come to know well in the last 35 years, is that we are all looking for deeper ways of living and being. We want to learn to “dive” into the deeper realms of who we are in our emotional and psychological depths, and we want to explore how to understand what life is truly about at the deepest emotional, philosophical, and spiritual levels.
These explorations have been at the heart of my own journey for many years, and helping others dive into these depths has been my main activity in our shared world.
Is That All There Is?
Carl Jung said “Life is a short pause between two mysteries.” The simple fact is, we do not know anything about who or what, if anything, we were before this current life began. Where did we come from? How did we just pop into existence as fully formed human beings? Science can trace the physical process, but what about our incredible abilities, our consciousness, our imagination, our love of music and art, our ability to love other people, our tendency toward compassion, our innate intuition, and our very individual tendencies? Science has many different speculations about these things, but none are demonstrable, and none actually resolve the mystery. The Christian mystic Thomas Traherne put it poetically:
These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith life begins,
Where have ye been?
Behind what curtain were ye hid from me so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?
When silent, I
So many thousand, thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a chaos lie.
The second great mystery is what will happen to this individual life form after we die. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have believed that there is “something” beyond this one individual life. But they have disagreed endlessly about what that “something” is. Most traditional and tribal cultures believed that spirits of those who had passed away were still present in some form, and the Chinese have always believed they had some kind of contact with their ancestors.
Egyptian culture is permeated by symbols and rituals having to do with the afterlife, and the ancient Greeks believed that souls left the body after death and continued to exist in some form.
For thousands of years, billions of people in India have believed in reincarnation, and scholars at the University of Virginia have amassed fascinating evidence that some modern reports of it are authentic. The Buddha carried the belief in reincarnation with him into Buddhism from his early training and emphatically said he had existed before his current life. He also said that his true identity was not his bodily form: “I am not this body, so I was never born and will never die.” He said that his true self was “deathless,” and that:
One who makes merit now rejoices in this life,
Rejoices in the next,
Rejoices in both worlds.
Following his teachings, most Buddhists have made reincarnation and a “deathless” aspect to their being a part of their beliefs for 2500 years.
In the large monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), a firm belief in the resurrection of those who have died has been accepted by the vast majority since they each began. The Hebrew Bible tells the story of the end of days, including the resurrection of the dead, in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The New Testament adds numerous references to what happens after death to the Christian tradition.
There are also traditions that envision this Earth as one of the stages in the progression of the individual soul toward its final fulfillment, with other dimensions of existence (both higher and lower), that are beyond normal human powers to see or know. Some version of this is held by those within many of the established traditions, and it is a central part of others, such as Spiritism, with millions of adherents in Brazil.
Each spiritual tradition has its own description of what happens after death, and they are different, but they all have in common the belief that there is “something” beyond this one life. Perhaps as many as 99% of all the people who have ever lived have held some form of belief in “something more.”
I do not know whether reincarnation, or salvation followed by an eternity in heaven, or ultimate liberation, or the soul’s passage through various stages, or a merger with the One, or moving into harmony with the Tao, or return to the ocean of Consciousness, or any other possibility is the final truth. Most people through the ages have had faith in one of these because they were raised to believe it. Many others have had a profound personal experience that convinced them beyond all doubt of the reality of a particular view.
Absent such an experience myself, I cannot describe what happens after death. But after studying numerous wisdom traditions and reading hundreds of individual accounts of profound experiences that affirmed a larger dimension, it seems to me foolish to be certain that the universal human conviction that there is “something more” is false. Instead, I tend to agree with an elderly friend who said, when he was close to death, “I don’t know what will happen when I die, but I look forward to discovering what it will be.”
Truths of the Blood
Carl Jung said in The Soul and Death,
“The nature of the psyche reaches into obscurities far beyond the scope of our understanding. It contains as many riddles as the universe with its galactic systems, before whose majestic configurations only a mind lacking in imagination can fail to admit its own insufficiency.”
In other words, we each know so little about the complexities of our own minds and hearts, about others, about the larger universe, and about how they are all connected, the wisest path is to be open and curious about the possible existence of broader horizons. Thus, Jung went on:
“If, therefore, from the needs of his own heart, or in accordance with the ancient lessons of human wisdom … anyone should draw the conclusion that the psyche, in its deepest reaches, participates in a form of existence beyond space and time, and thus partakes of what is inadequately and symbolically described as ‘eternity’ — then critical reason could counter with no other argument than non liquet (which is Latin for ‘it is not clear’).”
Then he asserted that those who choose to believe in the possibility of another dimension of existence “have the great advantage of conforming to a bias of his fellow humans which has existed from time immemorial, and is universal.” Furthermore:
“Anyone who does not draw this conclusion, whether from skepticism, lack of courage, inadequate psychological experience, or thoughtless ignorance … has instead the indubitable certainty of coming into conflict with the truths of the blood.”
Whether these “truths of the blood” arise from basic human nature, from our embeddedness in a wisdom tradition, from a personal experience, or from all three, deep truths are a profoundly important part of us. And if we deny these deep currents in ourselves, the consequences can be devastating:
“Deviation from the truths of the blood begets neurotic restlessness. … Restlessness begets meaninglessness, and the lack of meaning in life is a soul‑sickness whose full extent and full import our age has not yet begun to comprehend.”
This is Jung’s diagnosis for much of the loneliness, anxiety, and despair that besets modern humanity. He saw that more and more people were rejecting the guiding truths of the wisdom traditions, and consequently were finding themselves cut loose from meaning and from their own inner wisdom — with which the traditions helped them connect.
Other wisdom figures have said the same thing. The great psychologist Abraham Maslow said it this way:
“Without the transcendent and the transpersonal we get sick, or else hopeless and apathetic. We need something ‘bigger than we are’ to be awed by and to commit ourselves to.”
And Theodore Roszak:
“Until we find our way once more to the experience of transcendence, until we feel the life within us and the nature about us as sacred, there will seem to us no ‘realistic’ future other than more of the same narrow, limited view we now have — single vision and the artificial environment, forever and ever, amen.”
And Carl Jung said in another book:
“Only if we know that the thing that truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our attention on futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.”
Jung also made this dramatic observation:
“I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life … there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given their followers.”
Why, then, have so many in the modern world rejected the “truths of the blood,” especially since those who reject the possibility of “something more” do so without any evidence for such a belief?
And make no mistake: A worldview that rejects the possibility of a larger dimension, one that denies the existence of anything beyond the purely materialistic realm, is totally reliant on an act of faith. In fact, it requires more faith than the beliefs of any spiritual tradition.
Why? Because, although there is no proof for the views of any of the spiritual traditions, each is based on numerous personal accounts of experiences that strongly suggest broader possibilities. Further, some of these accounts are by individuals who seemed especially trustworthy to the people who knew them, such as Jesus, the Buddha, Teresa of Avila, Confucius, countless Hindu saints and sages through the centuries, and millions of ordinary human beings in every tradition. None of these accounts are proof, but each is a piece of evidence that there is “something more.”
On the other hand, a rejectionistic worldview is based on no evidence whatsoever, just an act of faith that materialism can account for the sum total of everything, including the most profound levels of love, intuition, imagination, values, all exchange of information, the ability to know things we cannot explain, service to the poor and downtrodden, the choice to give up worldly things for one’s beliefs, and even to risk one’s own life for a cause or a friend.
Shakespeare, that greatest of English-speaking writers, put the issue into his memorable poetic language through Hamlet’s voice:
To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:
Must give us pause indeed — because we cannot know what happens after death. As Shakespeare said, we are faced with:
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveler returns.
Therefore, it “puzzles the will.”
Finding Our Own Way
In puzzling over these questions for a long time, I have not had a revelatory experience like the great saints and sages, such as that reported by Jesus during his 40 days in the wilderness, the Buddha under the bodhi tree, St. Paul on the road to Damascus, Joan of Arc in her visions, or the experiences of thousands of other spiritual teachers in the world’s traditions that provided them with a better understanding of what lies beyond this life. In the absence of such an experience myself, the most rational path I can find is to study what those who have plumbed the deepest possibilities say they discovered.
One valuable guide for me is the Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, a Jewish psychiatrist in Italy before World War II who was arrested and placed in solitary confinement by Mussolini’s fascists. He used his time in prison in an unusual way: meditating and attempting to penetrate to the essence of who he really was. His meditations led to profound experiences, recorded in an article entitled “Freedom in Prison,” in which he describes what he saw and experienced.
Thus we learn that, sitting in a Nazi jail in solitary confinement, he experienced: “A sense of boundlessness, of no separation from all that is, a merging with the self of the whole.” He felt that: “Essential Reality is so far above all mental conceptions. It is inexpressible. It has to be lived.”
He also felt: “Joy inherent in Life Itself, in the Substance of Reality.” In describing who he discovered he actually was, the ultimate level of himself, he had a “realization of the Self, resting and standing in Itself … The selfless Self.”
Assagioli did not follow any one spiritual path but learned from many, and he was able to reconcile the endless arguments over the nature of the final reality for himself. He felt he had understood the connection between the views of the three paths he was most interested in, the connection between the “three attitudes of the supreme paradox: No Self (Buddhist), Merged into God (Mystic), Realization of the True Self (Vedanta).”
As I read Assagioli’s words, my strongest feeling is that, if he could experience what he describes while suffering great deprivations and not knowing if he would soon die at the hands of his captors, surely I can open more fully in that direction myself.
Another valuable guide has been R. M. Bucke, a prominent Canadian psychiatrist who experienced a profound state after talking with friends about the higher possibilities of life late one evening. As he was riding home in a carriage:
“I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life right now.”
He said he saw that “the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love,” and the whole experience left him with “a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe.”
He knew that what he had experienced to be true, for he “had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true.” Further, “that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost.”
Still, we are left with the issue of how any one of us outside his experience can know what it means, or if it is really true. The only answer I have about any experience I have heard or read is: I can’t know for sure, unless I experience the same thing myself.
We can all know, however, that millions of people have reported similar experiences over thousands of years. Concerning Bucke, we can know that the book he wrote following his experience, Cosmic Consciousness, has been affirmed and echoed by millions of readers over the 120 years since it was first published.
We can also know for certain that anyone who questions the validity of his report probably does so because they have never had such an experience themselves. Then they go much further, jumping to the conclusion that since they haven’t had the experience, it is not possible. They have no evidence his report is not true, only an assumption that it can’t be true. (Reminds me of the old story about a farmer who had never seen a camel but heard about an animal with large humps on its back — the farmer laughed and claimed that it had to be a horse that someone had rigged up to fool gullible people.)
Again, we cannot know for sure about the truth of any one report of a transcendent experience, but we can know about similar accounts that have been reported for thousands of years — if we simply take the time to read in the extensive literature. These reports come from every culture and every tradition. Some of the earliest are from ancient India, along with various techniques developed to help practitioners attain these higher states. From more than 2500 years ago, the Upanishads describe what experiencing the ultimate possibility is like:
Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings, vaster than the vast,
subtler than the most subtle,
unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat.
Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it, nor tongue utter it;
Only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure and silent,
merge with the formless truth.
She who finds it is free; she has found herself;
she has solved the great riddle; her heart forever is at peace.
There is more:
Whole, she enters the Whole.
Her personal self returns to its radiant, intimate, deathless source.
As rivers lose name and form when they disappear into the sea,
the sage leaves behind all traces when she disappears into the light.
Perceiving the truth, she becomes the truth;
she passes beyond all suffering, beyond death;
all the knots of her heart are loosed.
Very few people come to live in this state permanently. I certainly have not. But countless millions have experienced it for a brief time — as have I. I have tasted the nectar sufficiently to know that it is real, that it is there, waiting, open and available to anyone who is able to let go of what is keeping them from experiencing it fully.
In fact, all that is required is to completely release the things we are holding on to, all the things we crave that keep us stuck in our wantings, all desires for things we do not have but think we need. (I say “all that is required” with a sardonic smile, for I know just how hard letting go fully can be.)
Keep in mind, though, that it is not only the positive things we crave that keep us stuck. Disappointments, fear, and anger we acquired in early life from hurts and slights are often the hardest barriers to opening. But we must find a way to release those too.
We Humans Are Fallible
Many of us also get stuck in our judgements — about ourselves, about others, and about the world. Whatever your judgements are, I can assure you that some of them are wrong. (I have never met anyone who had a perfect understanding of themselves and others, although I have met several who thought they did. Upon close examination, it seemed clear their views were further from reality than most anyone else’s.)
The American psychologist and philosopher William James was one of the wisest persons who ever lived, and this is what he came to understand:
“One conclusion was forced upon my mind, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the right stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness.
“In the main these [extraordinary] experiences and those of the ordinary world keep discrete: yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in.”
If our everyday awareness is but one glimpse of reality, and there are others we are not aware of, then to believe that we understand ourselves, others, or the world is delusional. James preceded Sigmund Freud by a few years, but Freud came to the same conclusion about how little we know about ourselves, saying that our unconscious is a territory much more vast than the small citadel that makes up the conscious mind.
Given how little we really know, owning up to our limitations and the mistakes we have made because of our limited understanding is one of the best paths to wisdom. Carl Jung gave a name to one aspect of this process, calling it “owning your own shadow.” The modern Jungian scholar Donald Kalsched put the great possibility of this work vividly:
“When the banished parts of us return and we can hold them with compassion, a sense of the divine often enters our lives.”
Two thousand years earlier, Jesus made vividly clear the stakes for ignoring this work, and of the rewards from doing it. In the Gospel of Thomas he says:
“If you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is inside you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.”
It would be hard to find a better description of the necessity of working with one’s shadow, or the reward for those who do so. It is not easy, however, to “bring forth” what is deep inside you. In fact, it is very difficult, and often painful. What causes the pain? Kahlil Gibran said that the “pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your (current) understanding.”
The modern American philosopher Ken Wilber explained it this way:
“Concealed within unhappiness is the embryo of a special intelligence usually buried under the immense weight of social roles.
“A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities. Suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality, and forces us to become alive in a special sense — to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided.”
So, although it can be painful to expand beyond your current beliefs, it is necessary for growth and crucial for becoming strong. Kahlil Gibran again: “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls. The most massive characters are seared with scars.”
Everyone will not choose to do this work, but for those who do, there is a significant reward, as Viktor Frankl found:
“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will accept his suffering as his … single and unique task. … His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. … Suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning.”
As we are going through the process of coming to terms with our suffering and finding meaning, we make mistakes in our judgements. The world outside us is incredibly vast and complex, and so is the world inside us. When we do not understand what is going on, we tend to project our feelings onto others, so we see them as hostile, unfriendly, or angry. Because we really know so little, those who think they “know” are almost certainly deluding themselves. This is the reason that those who are the most certain are usually the ones who are farthest from the truth.
This suggests that one crucial step on the journey is to accept that you will make mistakes; some of us make many mistakes. But you will never make so many that you will not be able to find your way. I have talked with those who feel they have made so many mistakes, or such big ones, that there is no hope for them.
The truth, however, is that mistakes are valuable material to work with on our journeys. As Hans Reichenbach put it, “If error is corrected whenever it is recognized, the path of error is the path of truth.” In a similar vein, the 5th step in Alcoholics Anonymous involves admitting your mistakes.
In the Zen tradition, a respected master was asked how he came to be enlightened. His answer: “One mistake at a time.”
Another Zen master said that “life is just one continuous mistake, and the purpose of life is to learn from those mistakes.”
In the end, it does not matter how old you are, what limitations you feel you have, how many times you have failed, or how many mistakes you have made: It is always possible to open into moments of peace, joy, serenity, and love. I have read hundreds of accounts of those finding these things in the last moments of their lives.
As for advice for proceeding in the face of mistakes, Sun Bu’er said this:
Cut brambles long enough,
Sprout after sprout,
And the lotus will bloom of its own accord:
Already waiting in the clearing,
The single image of light.
The day you see this,
That day, you will become it.
Sun Bu’er was an amazing woman who became one of the Seven Perfected in Chinese Taoism, receiving the formal title “Perfected of Clarity and Tranquility and Deep Perfection Who Follows Virtue.” She wrote one of my favorite poems about the journey, in which the above lines are included. She is saying that all we have to do is keep recognizing our mistakes, keep cutting through them with determination, and the flower of our true being will burst free from all that you considered awful and unacceptable in yourself.
In a sense, then, your mistakes serve as compost for your growth and development, so just keep working on your mistakes and your shadow, and one day you will see the light in the clearing. Furthermore, when you have reached the point of being able to see it, you will have opened out into being a part of the light yourself.
When this happens, you will also be able to help others, for as one of the wisest of the Renaissance thinkers, Desiderius Erasmus, advised: “Give light, and the darkness will disappear of itself.”
When you have become the light, you will automatically be shining forth and lighting the way for others. In this vein, Carl Jung said: “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
How I Know
Insofar as I have any light to give, a central tenet is that there is a higher dimension to existence, and you can find a connection to it, whoever you are and whatever your problems might be. I know this not only through what I have learned from studying the lives and examples of others, but I know it because of hundreds — no, thousands — of moments in which I have experienced the boundaries of my normal, ego-encapsulated self dissolve, and felt myself opening into a larger world.
Another way to say this would be that numerous times I have felt myself expanding into previously unknown territory, into a way of being that was not ruled by the normal laws of time and space. At such times, I touched a dimension that connected me with the natural world around me, sometimes with the consciousness of others, and a few times with the timeless dimension that is beyond all words.
These moments have varied greatly in intensity, length, and clarity, but many of them seemed more real than my everyday reality. Crucially, what I experienced in those moments is so similar to reports I have read and heard by numerous wisdom figures and ordinary people alike that I have great confidence I was touching a dimension of reality that is real and true.
There is no disputing that the accounts I have read and heard from others vary significantly in their descriptions of the broader dimension, and they vary just as much concerning what might lie beyond this life. But all insist that how we live now, in this present life, will affect both the outcome of this life and what happens next. This is the message of each of the wisdom traditions. Further, the most consistent piece of wisdom they give is some version of the Golden Rule — which, at its heart, is simply the admonition to be considerate of other people.
Other common teachings of the wisdom traditions are compassion, love, and kindness. The great Jewish rabbi Abraham Heschel said: “A saint (is one) who does not know how it is possible not to love, not to help, not to be sensitive to the anxiety of others.”
For me, listening to this advice has resulted in one of my most valuable practices — to try to be loving, compassionate, and kind as often as I can, especially when it is hard. And it is definitely hard when others are not acting kindly toward me.
Another central teaching of the traditions is to make an effort to transcend self-centeredness. Although most traditions consider an ego life a normal part of the human condition, all of them counsel that too great a focus on one’s own ego fulfillment is self-defeating — for the ego is not the most important aspect of who we are. Following their guidance, one of my practices has been finding ways to focus on others, to look for ways to serve instead of spending all my time and attention on myself.
This is not easy, for we are born with a self-preservation instinct, and it is reinforced by the current materialistic culture most of us live in today. Ken Wilber describes how this plays out in us:
“I normally do not perceive my true identity because my awareness is clouded and obstructed by focusing my awareness on my individual self, my personal ego. My awareness is not open, relaxed, and Spirit-centered, it is closed, contracted, and self-centered. And precisely because I am identified with the self-contraction, to the exclusion of everything else, I can’t discover my true identity with the All.”
The practice here for me is to make a continuing effort to release my personal “wantings,” the desires that constantly swirl around what I think I want and need. This practice must be done over and over and over again, however, because each time I let go of something I want, it comes back — again and again. But urges and desires do eventually weaken with practice, and some have faded entirely over the years.
Intentions and Practices
Most of the people I have gotten to know well have a strong desire to find a way, as William James put it, to let “higher energies filter in.” In my own journey, two intentions have proven especially valuable in this quest, and are the best overall ways I know for making significant progress toward having a meaningful and fulfilling life:
1. Keep focusing on the firm intention to go as far as I can, to keep opening as fully as possible each day in searching for a connection to “something more.”
2. Continually make an effort to release all the things I have been holding on to — both positive cravings and negative feelings, beliefs, judgements, and attitudes.
Others have found that faith in a particular path is of great help, such as the remarkable medieval saint Catherine of Siena. Although she had been very sick and was in great physical pain, through faith and the continuing relinquishment of attachment to worldly things, she resided in this state much of the time:
“If only you could understand how I feel. All that I reveal is nothing compared to what I feel. My mind is so full of joy and happiness that I am amazed that my soul stays in my body. There is so much heat in my soul that this material fire here in front of us (she and her listeners were sitting in front of a fireplace), seems cool by comparison. And so much love for my fellow-men has blazed up in me, that I could face death for them cheerfully and with great joy in my heart.”
Even in Buddhism, which has a lesser emphasis on faith, no one starts on a Buddhist path without having faith that the Buddha had Awakened to a profound truth and that the path he described might take them to that desired state as well. In his book The Three Pillars of Zen, Roshi Phillip Kapleau presented clearly the importance of faith in Buddhism, and nearly all Buddhist schools embrace the expression of faith known as “taking refuge” — in the Buddha, the dharma (his teaching), and the sangha (the practicing community). According to the Buddha, only after a person has followed this path for a significant time will that person be able to test the truth of the teaching for themselves, and then come to their own full awakening.
Still another way opening happens for some is called Grace. A significant number who have done little inner work and have not been faithful to any particular religious path have had an experience that changed their lives and moved them in a spiritual direction. This has happened many times with those having Near-Death experiences — with most emerging on the other side as much kinder and more loving, and interested in spiritual issues that did not interest them before. This can happen with other dramatic events, as presented by modern researcher Steve Taylor in his fine book Extraordinary Awakenings: When Trauma Leads to Transformation.
There are also many who have a breakthrough experience with little or no trigger event they recognize, either traumatic or otherwise, such as that reported by Allan Smith, a 38-year-old scientist living in Oakland, California. He was at home one evening, had done nothing he was aware of to bring about the experience, yet something profound happened — and became one of the most important moments of his life. As he described it, he fell into a state in which:
“There was no separation between myself and the rest of the universe. In fact, to say that there was a universe, a self, or any ‘thing’ would be misleading … during the experience there was neither ‘subject’ nor ‘object.’ All words and discursive thinking had stopped, and there was no sense of an ‘observer’ to categorize what was ‘happening.’ In fact, there were no discrete events to ‘happen,’ just a timeless, unitary state of being.”
The state Allan experienced for a few moments, Bodhidharma, who is credited with bringing Buddhism to China, seemed to live in continuously — after many years of intense practice, followed by a full awakening. He says of that state:
“Only the wise know this mind, this mind called dharma-nature, this mind called liberation. Neither life nor death can restrain this mind. Nothing can. It’s also called … the Incomprehensible, the Sacred Self, the Immortal, the Great Sage. Its names vary but not its essence.”
There are many paths and many practices that will help you, if you choose, to open into higher possibilities. Besides those I have already mentioned, some of the most valuable for me have been:
Hiking in the mountains
Reading those who have gone further along the path than I have
Finding other people on the journey to be with
Traveling (Getting away from my everyday routines has been a great help, especially if I also make a sincere effort to open to new ways of feeling, seeing, and being. It helps to go to places that inspire — which is, of course, what millions of people through the ages have been doing by making a pilgrimage.)
The more traditional practices are always valuable and have been for me —
Meditation, Prayer, and Music
After being on this journey for a long time, and sharing it with hundreds of people, I can say with conviction that developing your own intentions and practices, and then following them sincerely as best you can (while not trying to be perfect), is a powerful way to discover that your life is becoming more meaningful, whole, and fulfilled.
Whatever path you follow and however it happens (through faith, grace, inner work, or intense spiritual practice), the Tao Te Ching describes how you will feel during moments of opening:
Returning to the source is serenity.
If you don’t realize the source,
you stumble in confusion and sorrow.
When you realize where you come from,
you naturally become tolerant, disinterested, amused,
kindhearted as a grandmother,
dignified as a king.
Immersed in the wonder of the Tao,
you can deal with whatever life brings,
and when death comes, you are ready.
After Much Study and Practice
In my own life, after studying the teachings of many wise men and women and the examples of their lives, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that their messages are quite diverse. This does not mean any of them were wrong. Instead, people are quite different from each other, cultures are dramatically different, and each of us can only know and experience a tiny portion of the whole. It is as if each of us can only look through a small window that views a vast landscape — each of us can only see the portion that is visible from our perspective.
Or to use a different metaphor, there is only one mountain, but there are many different trails to the top. The result is that we can learn much from others, but each of us must ultimately decide for ourselves the path we will take, the guidance we will follow, and what we will accept and believe.
The great psychologist William James explored the furthest dimensions extensively throughout his life, and wrote a masterful account in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. One of his conclusions was: “My present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades … into a subconscious more.” Anyone can discover this for themselves by simply focusing their attention on a moment in the past, a person they have known, a dream they have had, or a time of imagination.
If you focus on any one of thousands of things that are stored in your mind, you will begin to remember things that you were not conscious of before, and new thoughts will begin to arise. If you focus on a dream, an interaction, or a moment of imagination, and let new thoughts come, more and more will appear in your mind — many images, feelings, and ideas that you did not know were there, perhaps were not there before.
Where does this process end? A lot of people have had moments of sensing something they had no practical way of knowing; countless artists have had imaginal moments that gave them ideas for their work that could not have been anticipated; many scientists have had moments of inspiration that they could not explain but that led to fundamental breakthroughs in science; numerous generals and businesspeople have had the same kinds of moments in their areas of expertise; and millions of people have had dreams that gave them insights that they did not expect.
These kinds of experiences, with which history is filled, led James to conclude that we cannot define or draw any conclusions about what is in our own consciousness, and what is not. Ultimately it is “all shades and no boundaries.” There is so much in our subconscious that we are not aware of, until we focus on an area of interest, or until a dream or inspiration brings in something we have not thought of before. Thus, what seems to be a boundary at this moment will shift immediately as I shift my focus.
In James’ words: “Which part … is in my consciousness, which out? If I name what is out, it already has come in.” By focusing our attention in any direction we can bring in things we were not aware of the moment before. It is not hard to understand, then, that since the wisdom figures and mystics of history focused on opening into larger and larger dimensions of reality, the spiritual literature is full of accounts of their awarenesses expanding into realms most of us do not encounter in our daily lives. Some felt they glimpsed the whole of Reality itself.
If I wish to learn about physics, I study what the best physicists have discovered. When I wish to learn about life and living, I study those who have explored most fully what life is about and how to live meaningfully. In my journey, this has included many philosophers, psychologists, and scientists, but it has especially included those who seemed to have lived meaningful lives, those who were able to love others fully, be compassionate and kind, and approached the end of their lives with a sense of fulfillment and deep peace.
It is among spiritual figures that I have found the most numerous and powerful examples of fulfilled, meaningful, loving, compassionate lives. Although the traditions that have grown up around their teachings vary, their core messages are strikingly similar:
1, There is another dimension to existence beyond the purely material
2. How we live in this life affects our experience of this life, as well as whatever comes next
3. Try to live by the Golden Rule — be considerate of other people
4. Make an effort to be kind, loving, and compassionate
5. Base your decisions on a set of core values
6. Help others, especially those less fortunate than yourself
If the core messages of all the wisdom traditions and countless wisdom figures through the ages are so similar with regard to these points, why are so few of us trying to follow them today? Rumi, my favorite poet, joins in the common answer: We are “drunk on ourselves,” on our small ego selves. As long as you remain attached to your small self, you “lock yourself away in cloud after cloud of grief.”
The way out?
Little by little, wean yourself.
This is the gist of what I have to say.
From an embryo, whose nourishment comes in the blood,
move to an infant drinking milk,
to a child on solid food,
to a searcher after wisdom,
to a hunter of more invisible game.
And who are you, really?
You have the energy of the sun in you,
but you keep knotting it up,
at the base of your spine.
You’re some weird kind of gold,
that wants to stay in the furnace,
so you won’t have to be coins.
What can you do to get out of the furnace?
That moment you leap free of yourself, (your small, ego self)
Winter to you appears in the dazzling robes of spring.
All illnesses spring from the scavenging for delicacies.
All disappointments spring from your hunting for satisfactions.
If only you could stop — all imaginable joys
Would be rolled like pearls to your feet.
Of course, as the spiritual traditions have made clear for thousands of years — and psychology has explored in the last hundred or so — it is very hard to free yourself from basic desires and ego attachments. One short quote from the Tao Te Ching has helped me immensely, though:
I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.
Many people I have known have had trouble being compassionate with themselves, and I have come to recognize the power that can come from being compassionate toward yourself.
Another valuable piece of wisdom comes from a poem by Max Ehrmann he called “Desiderata.” A few lines:
Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.
The world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
Ehrman continues, concluding that however you conceive of what I have been calling “something more,” you can be at peace, and
whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Finally, for me, any examination of life’s meaning and fulfillment must end with love. And one of the most important single lines on love I have ever read is by St. John of the Cross:
“Where there is no love, put love, and there you will find love.”
This admonition is short, and seemingly simple, but putting love where there is hate, anger, fear, or indifference is exceedingly hard. One day, though, I realized that if I can put love into any situation, I will instantly be embedded in a field of love, no matter what other people are doing. Furthermore, everyone present will be encouraged to open into that field as well.
They might not do so, but that is not mine to control. Whatever they do, I can rest in the energy of love I am generating.
Is What I Am Saying True?
Wumen Huikai described the final possibility this way:
Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
In my moments of illumination, I have stepped beyond the threshold of time into the timeless dimension, when —
Who I am is absorbed in the beauty and wonder of all that is
What I am seems to be Consciousness itself
I become the mystery — I know only Being,
the simple reality of Existence
Perhaps you are wondering if all I have been saying is true. Rumi faced that question several hundred years ago. Listen to his answer:
Is what I say true? Say yes quickly,
if you know, if you’ve known it
from before the beginning of the universe.
For Your Reflection: Two questions
1. If you so choose, how might you go about opening more fully into the higher dimensions of yourself, of life, of reality?
2. How might you help others do so?