This is part 6 of a longer essay about spirituality, which I'm be posting here in installments.
I recommend reading the parts in order. Read Part 5 Here.
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From the previous essay:
The discipline needed for meditation is not trying to rein in our wild horses; it’s the relentless slicing of the rope to let the horses run off without us.
Then what? What’s left when you don’t take anything you’re thinking and feeling seriously? What’s left when you let go of everything?
It may seem like the answer would be nothing—or a sort of cold, inhuman blankness. You may be encouraged in this idea if you’ve heard spirituality described as “dying to the world,” or Buddhists refer to ultimate reality as “the void” or “emptiness.” Luckily, the idea of spirituality as a boring nothingness is wrong. As the poet Charles Simic wrote, “the world doesn’t end.” Something always happens. Thoughts and feelings keep arising. Life keeps unfolding. But with a spiritual practice, the way life unfolds and the quality of those thoughts and feelings shift in ways that are somehow both subtle and profound.
You may be wondering, “OK, how? How will my life change?” This is where the idea of the void comes in—where masters go silent. The details of your unique unfolding—the truth of who you are—can’t be told to you by anyone. It isn’t written in any book. Rather, spirituality is a blank book. You’re the writer. The master who tells you what to do or expect isn’t a master.
Even you don’t know exactly what you’ll write in your book. Not until you start writing. This is because any ideas you have about your unfolding arise from your habitual thinking. And the habitual thinking of almost every adult is so powerful and automatic that we apply it to anything we are introduced to—including spirituality.[1] We think we are already experts. We think we already know. If, for example, we are told that spirituality will lead us to love, we will immediately think we know what love is. We may imagine love involves sacrifice, or is tainted by sex, or must conform to any number of associations we have to the word, based on what our parents, partners, or Jordan Peterson have told us. Spirituality cultivates what the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki called “beginner’s mind.” It invites us to stop automatically telling our same old stories about reality.
Western culture offers us many stories about reality that are accepted as true by large numbers of people. We call these stories ideas, or sometimes explanations. They are offered to us by various persuasive sources, such as scientists, religious authorities, economists, politicians, or various influencers. But the source of many of our most widespread ideas are hard to pinpoint. The idea that there’s something noble about struggle, for example, just seems to be floating in the cultural atmosphere.[2]
If we modern Westerners look to our culture for guidance on how to live our lives, we must sort through a huge tangle of these various ideas. This is made much more challenging difficult not only because there are so many, but because so many of them contradict each other. Most people don’t consciously register they are doing this difficult work of sorting through swarms of often clashing ideas. But this sorting is nonetheless exhausting and nerve-wracking.
We are told, for example, to be nice, but also urged to get ahead and be successful. Sex, we are by turns led to believe, is healthy, fun, immoral, or political. We get the impression that making money is what it’s all about, but also that being rich makes you shallow. Our scientists tell us reality is ultimately uncaring, but that for some reason we should still care.[3] Western culture talks at us a lot, but it doesn’t talk coherently. If it were an orchestra, its music would be dissonant. This dissonant music is like the soundtrack of our lives. It rattles our souls.
It is also abstract. Even if you could come up with a list of consistent, guiding ideas from our culture, those ideas would be abstract. They couldn’t speak to your particular mind, heart, and circumstances. No nice idea, piece of advice, system of thought, book, science, religion, or philosophy knows about the unique person you are in the unique moment you’re in. And yet a unique person meeting a unique moment is the only thing our lives are made of. You, [Insert Your Name], are always meeting a moment. It’s all you ever do.
Spiritual wisdom keeps this truth front and center. Unlike Western culture, spirituality doesn’t offer you a list of abstract, contradictory ideas, no matter how nice some of those ideas sound. Instead, spirituality offers you a way to meet your moments. Far from being radically divorced from our lives, then, spirituality is more down-to-earth and immediate than anything else we’ve learned. Spirituality is right there with you. It’s Western culture that leaves us with a void where it really matters. Spirituality fills a void.
But how? And with what?
Next Up: The Adventure of You
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Footnotes
[1] Children are a different story. Every child is born a Zen master.
[2] No other species appears to agree with us humans about this idea. See my essay “Spirituality Is for the Birds” in this collection.
[3] Physicists tell us the universe is a mechanical collection of mathematical laws, and our biologists tell us life is a ruthless struggle for survival.
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