Sept. 29, 2019
Most of us, in our early and middle years, divide our energies between the various motivations mentioned in last week’s essay – avoiding discomfort, enjoying ourselves, focusing on family, seeking power and prestige, helping others, etc. This is quite normal, even healthy.
Something More
As we get older, however, all the great wisdom traditions say we are called to “something more.” How this “something more” is defined varies, but all the traditions say we are called to one or more further possibilities: to discover our True Self or Essence; to wake up with the Buddha and realize who we really are; to experience Nirvana; to find Salvation (“to be healed, made sound, made whole”); to put on the mantle of Christ; to enter the Kingdom of Heaven; to become one with the Clear Light; to enter the “deathless;” to be in harmony with the Tao; to become a person of “jen” (benevolence or humaneness as Confucius used it); to align with our Atman and recognize that this is to be at one with Brahman; to live from Love and make it the center of our being; to seek God; to align with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; to “know ourselves” and act courageously from that knowledge; to gain deep Wisdom; to know the ultimate Reality, and more.
Perhaps all these different words and phrases point to different things, but it is also possible they all refer to something that cannot be captured in words, and each word or phrase is but an attempt to point toward “something more” as seen from different angles. As best-selling writer Jack Kornfield says, “When Christian texts speak of losing the self in God, when Taoists and Hindus speak of merging with a True Self beyond all identity, when Buddhists speak of emptiness and of no self, they are referring to the underlying non-separation of life and the fertile ground of energy that gives rise to all forms of life.” Perhaps, then, all these different words and phrases point beyond themselves to something that is not so different; it might even be one reality—but as understood through many different intellects.
Whether the views of the major wisdom figures of history point toward the same ultimate vision or not, one thing is certain: All the traditions say we are called to possibilities beyond identification with the everyday ego self; we are called to realize who we really are. The names used are different – True Self, Buddha-nature, Christ Consciousness, No-self, Atman, and many others – but all the traditions say we are called to “something more” than the daily self with which we usually identify. We are called to transform the small self and recognize the Self beyond ego and form, beyond the phenomena of the world. This call is the deep longing many of us feel – until and unless transformation is complete. If, therefore, you feel an incompleteness, a longing you have not understood, perhaps this longing is to know “That” to which you are called, to finally know yourself as “who you really are.”
That to which we are called
Transformation, then, is to gradually, or suddenly (or gradually and then suddenly), discover this truth for yourself. The urge to know this Truth is the Holy Longing which Soren Kierkegaard called “passion for the infinite.” It is the desire Plato characterized as the longing to be reunited with our other half and to live in harmony with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. The Buddha called it “the Great Desire.” (The Buddha wasn’t against all desires—he was relentlessly driven for 6 years by a burning desire. He simply taught that there was only one truly important desire.) In the same vein, modern Advaita Vedanta teacher Nisargadatta says, “Desire is devotion … to the real, to the infinite, the eternal heart of being.” Therefore, he continued, “it is not desire that is wrong, but its narrowness and smallness.”
The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ends his poem “The Holy Longing” with words that make the power of this longing vivid. His image is that of a butterfly finally reaching the light:
insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
Ronald Rolheiser explores this longing from a Christian perspective in Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality, and Connie Zweig explores it from a Jungian perspective in her book, The Holy Longing. She also adds the subtitle, Spiritual Yearning and Its Shadow Side, which is important for anyone pursuing this search to keep in mind, for if we do not maintain careful consciousness as we move along this path, we are likely to fall into our various shadows along the way.
If we do fall, however, all is not lost. When we are able to regain our conscious awareness of what is going on, each fall becomes an opportunity for further progress on the way. In fact, thinking you are supposed to be perfect as you make this journey is not a help, but a hindrance. A Zen teacher was asked how he had made so much progress on his journey. He answered: “One mistake at a time.” Mistakes are not problems but “Grist for the Mill,” they are the way we learn and grow—if we can acknowledge them and then make good use of them.
This journey of transformation is not easy, of course. The wisdom traditions are filled with stories of those who underwent great hardship, suffered despair, felt they would never make it, and endured “dark nights of the soul.” But all the traditions say the prize is worth the effort; it is the “pearl with great price,” the only prize worth having and for which everything else should be forfeited. How do we proceed in finding it? The poet Rumi has a suggestion:
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.
Henry David Thoreau had a similar recommendation, saying that on this journey you will have to leave some things behind, but as you do, you “will pass an invisible boundary,” after which, “new, universal, laws will begin to establish themselves around and within” you, and you will begin “to live with the license of a higher order of beings.” There is a condition, however. You will have to give up some of the things you believed or thought you needed: “A man (or woman) is rich in proportion to the number of things which he (or she) can afford to let alone.” Carl Jung delivered the same message, saying we must “avoid fixing our attention on futilities” so as to discover the “essentials” that we are called to embody.
Lure of completeness
Some of what each of us might need to leave behind are ideas about ourselves, conclusions about what the world is like, even certainties about the nature of reality. We crave certainties, and yet they can easily become bars forming the walls of our personal prisons. At sixteen I thought I knew a lot. At twenty-five I thought I had it all figured out and was always arguing with people about what was true. At thirty-five I was more reflective but still fairly confident in my beliefs. The older I get, however, the more I realize how little I really understood when I was so confident in my beliefs. If I was so confident then, but now believe differently, perhaps my ideas will change yet again before this life is finished. As physicist David Bohm pointed out, in all of our theories there is a “lure of completeness,” the desire to think that now we have it all figured out. This is just as true in our personal and spiritual beliefs as it is in the sciences that Bohm was focused on at the time. So perhaps one lesson to learn is that of humility. As T. S. Eliot said in the Four Quartets:
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility
As you move through life, then, make every effort to let go of those things that are no longer carrying you toward your deep longing, your True Self, your ultimate fulfillment. One by one, let go of those things that keep you stuck in your old self, your old patterns, and as you do, you will become lighter, freer, and gradually open into a larger consciousness, a larger self. In the words of writer and scholar Ravi Ravindra, you will move from the “personality to the person, from the performing actor to the ruler of the inner chamber.” As we are able to do this, the journey might even become joyous, as evidenced by countless saints and sages proclaiming moments of delight, bliss, rapture, and ecstasy.
Reflection: Looking at the different ways listed in the first paragraph above that the wisdom traditions have described as the “something more” that life is ultimately about, which speak to you, call to you, seem to have the most energy for you in your life now?
Have a good week,
David